Time Done Been Won't Be No More

TIME DONE BEEN WONT BE NO MORE (But See That My Grave Is Kept Clean)

SEE IT AS A TREASURE CHEST or, more aptly, a Pandora’s box unleashing into the world not evil or hardships or death but ruminations and lamentations and commentaries upon them, fading picture postmarks mailed from a world that was already growing remote in 1952. That was the year Harry Smith released his Anthology of American Folk Music, and it must have been something to see: eighty-four songs on six LP records, two discs each for the three volumes, each volume with a title: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. All in an elaborate, metal-hinged album accompanied by Smith’s surreal liner notes in a homemade booklet festooned with occult and arcane symbols.

The LP format was new in 1952. No longer was a record restricted to one song per side. Now each side could contain a series of songs, and the producer could play with them, arrange them in any order he chose. This was a revolutionary concept, and Harry Smith made the most of it.

The Anthology is a case of the sum being greater than its parts, and Smith achieved this because he heard sounds not just as themselves, but in relationship to other sounds, and set out to make a sort of aural hologram. Perfectly ordinary voices, even pleasant voices singing pleasant songs, are interred side by side with brief three-minute vignettes of darkness that light will not defray, horror that is only heightened by its contrast with the ordinary, so that some of the voices sound like screeches and mumbles and whispers leaked through mad-house walls, while the normal world continues without a misstep or altered heartbeat.

His thinking, in the sequencing of the Anthology, is so strange as to be almost beyond comprehension, but there’s a clue on the cover of the original liner notes. A drawing shows the hand of God tuning a dulcimer to the Celestial Monochord, tuning it to a Heavenly harmony that unites Air, Fire, Water, And Earth. His plan was to tie together the four volumes of the Anthology in a similar fashion, but only three were released in ‘52. (the fourth, which Smith apparently meant to represent Earth, was put out last year by Revenant Records.)

There wasn’t much of a market for folk music in 1952, other than prettified versions of songs like “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Goodnight Irene”, sweetened and made palatable enough for Your Hit Parade. To a generation of ears attuned to Perry Como and Patti Page, the Anthology’s old hardscrabble songs full of loss and death must have sounded totally alien, rantings and ravings and exhortations from another dimension.

Although the bulk of the songs was recorded only twenty-five or so years earlier (between 1927 and 1932), they seemed to be coming out of a world far more remote than that. This was not easy-listening music, it was not soothing Muzak played in the background as you lived your life. This was darker stuff. There was something there, crouched down out of sight, but you had to squint to see it. You had to meet these songs halfway, and the halfway point was not always a pleasant place to be. Sometimes it was alien, too: A coal mine in West Virginia; a plank road that began nowhere and led circuitously back to the same place; a claustrophobic block in the French Quarter that existed nowhere save in the geography of Richard Rabbit brown’s James Alley Blues; an old railroad camp (where Bob Dylan would find a verse he’d later use, like scrap lumber replevied to shore up “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”); an unreal geography in a cold, sourceless sepia light.

Stage props abound, jarring and dissimilar as symbols slid from the surface of a Dali painting: Kassie’s watch, Dock Boggs’s red rocking chair, the folding bed Furry Lewis’s woman welcomed him to. It seems to be the setting for a thousand tales told long ago or tales not yet created.

Almost all this music came from the South, but it was a South folks figured themselves well shed of. There was something almost shameful about it. The South was trying to turn a face to the future, to catch up with the rest of the country in its pursuit of the American Dream. Post war prosperity had hit, rock n’ roll was on the horizon, people wanted gleaming appliances in every kitchen and fish-finned cars in every garage. People wanted what was new, and this stuff was decidedly not new. It was primitive and unsophisticated, and folks would just as soon not hear it. It was the idiot child chained to the bedpost, the great-uncle who went to Texas and was hanged as a horse thief.

Which is all to say that the country was not waiting with bated breath for Harry Smith’s Anthology. What is amazing is that enough copies fell into just the right hands. Hands that were maybe already tuning guitars or that would be compelled to pick up guitars by the sheer magnetism of the music these records contained— enough of the right hands to sow the seeds for the ‘60s folk revival and subsequent ones (or you could say that it never went away, just dropped off the Hit Parade). The present alt-country Americana movement and bands like Wilco still owe a debt to Harry Smith, which magazines like No Depression freely acknowledge. The whole Greenwich Village-Cambridge-San Francisco scene derived from it as did clubs like Gerde’s Folk City, the Bitter End, the Troubadour and a panoply of performers as diverse as Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Buffy Saint-Marie: The whole thing being chronicled in Sing Out! and Broadside magazines in a heady movement that in retrospect seems forever poised before the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam, a time when it seemed perfectly logical to believe that a song could change the world.

Van Ronk said, The Anthology was our Bible. We all knew every word of it, including the songs we hated. They say that in the nineteenth-century British Parliament, when a member would begin to quote a classical author in Latin, the entire house would rise in a body and finish the quote along with them. It was like that.

And then there was Dylan. It is not such a stretch to postulate that without Harry Smith, Dylan the folk singer would never have been. He certainly would have been different. Part of the legend he has propagated about his early years is that he once played piano in Bobby Vee’s band. Vee was a minor teen idol around 1960, and there is an aching void between Bobby Vee and Harry Smith. So Dylan might only have been a variation on Bobby Vee or a white Little Richard, whom he used to emulate with his high school rock band.

It is unclear where Dylan first heard the Anthology. It is probably in the late 50s, when he was a student at the University of Minnesota and playing gigs at a folk club in Dinkytown, a raffish and bohemian district in Minneapolis. What is clear is that he heard it and took it to heart. (That’s where the wealth of folk music was, he later said. It’s all poetry, every single one of those songs.) His first album, released in 1962, contains his take on Blind Lemon Jefferson’s See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, from volume three of the Anthology, and one of his earliest songs, Hard Times in New York Town, is a virtual rewrite of the Bently Boys’ Down on Penny’s Farm, from the second volume.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong in this. From Robert Johnson to John Hurt to Furry Lewis, these old images and calls and responses roll down the years like echoes, like memories. Folk music and the blues have been constantly borrowed back and forth, reshuffled lines, put them in new surroundings, as if there is a vast supply of lines and metaphors and archetypes that serve as pieces that can always be assembled into new puzzles.

Popular culture critic Griel Marcus wrote an entire book to prove that the Anthology was the invisible substructure to The Basement Tapes, the fabled sessions that Dylan and The Band recorded in Woodstock in 1967, and the case he makes is more than persuasive.

But in the long haul none of this changes what Smith did, and from a perspective of time it seems scarcely to matter. None of this Dylan, The Band, John Cohen’s New Lost City Ramblers, the folk movement, the fact that the Anthology resurrected the careers of musicians presumed long dead sums up Smith’s accomplishment. In the end, the Anthology stands on its own as an eerie, prescient, and elusive piece of work, as if it had neither antecedent nor forebear.

Sometimes the Anthology is a historical document. Sometimes it is a subjective comment on itself. Sometimes it’s a mirror reflecting life back at you, casting a normal reflection, but then you move, and it’s a warped fun-house glass that sends back the comic or grotesque or both. Occasionally it’s even a scryer’s crystal that lets you see further into the human condition than you wanted to see.

In an essay on the Anthology called Smith’s Memory Theater, Robert Cantwell wrote, Listen to I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground again and again. Learn to play the banjo, and sing it yourself over and over again, study every printed version, give up your career and maybe your family, and you will not fathom it.

Harry Smith was an American Original, as bizarre and one of a kind as the songs he struggled to preserve, and he seemed to veer back and forth between madness and a kind of incomprehensible genius.

The diverging path Smith followed all his life was staked out early. He was born in Oregon in 1923 to theosophical parents who dabbled in Freemasonry and the occult. His father once gave him an entire blacksmith shop as a birthday present, ordered Smith to learn alchemy and begin transmuting base metals into gold. Smith seems to have spent a number of years trying to accomplish this, but he was impoverished all his life so it’s apparent he never did.

He said on several occasions that there was a strong possibility that he had been fathered by Aleister Crowley, an infamous black magic occultist who could, it was said, conjure demons and cast spells, but Smith was a mysterious, a man who was no stranger to masks and playing roles, and everything he ever said about himself had a quality of ambiguity to it.

Most of Smith’s life was spent on the move, in pursuit of art. Smith’s definition of art seems to be whatever he wanted it to be, and some of his obsessions were abstract to say the least: string figures, making hand-painted films that were by all accounts exquisite, recording sounds on tape (including the music of Native American dances), ceremonial Easter eggs, paper airplanes — the list goes on.

Smith told a story about spending three days with Maybelle Carter, photographing a collection of patchwork quilts that she had, trying again to correlate color and sound, searching through Carter Family songs and quilts, trying to group the particular song with its matching quilt. One can only conjecture what Carter thought Smith was doing.

Smith was a sometime panhandler who was proud of his ability to live by his wits. He was a mesmerizing talker who managed to draw others into his visions, but he wasn’t all talk. He was an intelligent man with a broad field of knowledge, some of it admittedly peculiar, and his mind seemed to make intuitive leaps, A to D without stopping at B and C, and he always knew what he was going on about even when he couldn’t communicate it to others.

Smith lived always in a sort of impoverished Bohemia, first in the North Beach poets’ area of San Francisco, then in Greenwich Village, then in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. When the Beatnik movement arrived, it seemed to have been conceived exclusively with Smith in mind. For years he dwelt on its fringes. Allen Ginsberg put him up for a while, and Smith did the art for a volume of Ginsberg’s poetry.

Essentially, though, he lived wherever he could get a roof over his head, preferably one large enough to cover the vast collection of things he was amassing. John Cohen interviewed him for a 1968 issue of Sing Out!

Here’s what Cohen saw when he came through the door:

The closet is filled with dresses from the Florida Seminole Indians. One corner of the room, marked with KEEP OUT signs, is filled with Ukrainian Easter eggs; on the bureau are stacks of mounted string figures; behind them is a movie camera alongside portfolios of his paintings and graphic work. In another corner is a clay model of a landscape which was recreated from a dream, piles of beautiful quilts and other weavings, as well as a collection of paper airplanes from the streets of New York. Small file cabinets of index cards are distributed between the pages of research books. Each book becomes more exotic by its juxtaposition with other such books, Mayan codices beside Eskimo anthropology studies under a collection of Peyote ceremonial paintings, etc., etc.

He once lost a huge part of his collection when he was evicted from a New York hotel; the landlord simply had it hauled away. But Smith had shifting interests, and he had grown adept at starting over.

All this time he had also been collecting phonograph records, anything that struck him as odd or different. These were mostly rural and what were then called race records. At one time he claimed to have owned a hundred thousand of them. He had always been obsessed with sound, but he said that his primary interest in recording was the technology of it; he was staggered by the idea that you could take what had always been an oral tradition and market it out of a Sears and Roebuck.

Always broke, Smith contracted with Moses Asch of Folkways Records to unload part of his collection. Then the deal was amended. A record assembled from his 78s would be issued, and Smith himself would compile it. It would turn out to be his major work of art.

As Cantwell wrote, Smith was creating a sort of memory theater, a mnemonic library, a primitive thinking machine that would, in Smith’s words, program the mind.

The idea of a memory theater is one that fascinated Elizabethan England: an arena containing the entire cosmos of knowledge categorized by its cabalistic, astrological, and alchemical symbols, where scholars could enter at will and rummage through or pore over manuscripts. Smith never quite got away from alchemy.

In the beginning it sounds like most generic folk collections: Appalachian reworkings of English ballads, some reels and dance tunes, songs about house carpenters, errant wives, wagoner’s lads. Performers like Uncle Eck Dunford, Buell Kazee. But entering Smith’s world is like progressing down a carnival midway past the kiddie rides and Ferris wheels until you notice that the sideshows have grown stranger and stranger, that the barker’s spiel has turned ambiguous, and that his features are stamped with sinister intent.

Deeper in the Anthology, things have changed. The songs are no longer child ballads or rustic reels or cautionary fables, and they are no longer distanced or detached but have become modal ballads that inextricably link singer and song. We have entered a realm where the words mean more than what they say because the performance is part of what is being said. The teller can no longer separate himself from the tale; they have merged to form something larger than both.

Some of the songs start out as if they were going to be straightforward renderings of actual events, then progress to ironic asides on these events, then to biographical tidbits about the singer himself. Furry Lewis’s 1927 recording of Kassie Blues is one example. Originally released as Part one and Part Two and encompassing both sides of a 78 rpm record, it begins with an account of Kassie Jones, the fabled brave engineer. Then abruptly we’re out of Jones’s world and into Furry’s, caught up in Furry’s troubles with the law for bootlegging, with the woman who, when the police chase him to her door, bids him to her bed; then a jumpshot forward to Jones’s children crying on a doorstep, comforted by a mother who assures them that the imminent pension is compensation enough for a father killed on the Southern Line.

In Part Two the guitar is more driving and urgent, and we’re back with Jones, in his last minutes. The train’s water is low, Jones’s watch is slow, and he’s bound for an appointment with a passenger train in a mythic non-future. All this tied together by a refrain that is sort of bluesman’s ethos that has little to do with either a real or fictitious Casey/Kassie Jones. It’s Furry, not Jones, who says of himself:

I get it written on the back of my shirt

I’m a natural-born easeman don’t have to work.

In the third volume, titled simply songs, we are in the dark heart of Smith’s concept. At first the songs seem to have no connection with one another and are as disparate as the singers who sing them: Mississippi John Hurt, Rabbit Brown, the Carter Family, Dock Boggs. (Boggs’s voice here sounds so dissociated it seems to be coming not just from some other time but from outside time itself, from beyond the pale, a voice half-filtered through a mouthful of graveyard dirt.) The music, especially the flailing banjos of Boggs and Macon, has a wild energy that is at once hedonistic and nihilistic so that the singer seems to be propelling himself headlong into oblivion, casting aside all the things you accumulate in life so that in the end there is nothing left but the energy itself. Kill yourself! Macon yells in Way Down the Plank Road, and you don’t know if he’s talking to the audience or himself, but it scarcely seems to matter: Heaven’s been abandoned, and Hell’s too far away to worry about yet, and all that matters is rolling down the line.

The cumulative effect of the tracks reminds you of an old newspaper blown down an alley in the French Quarter, revealing first one headline then another, documenting a world that is at best uncaring, at worst absolutely malevolent. Bad things happen within these pages, grainy black-and-white images flicker past and are gone. Children starve or freeze or are murdered, lovers betray and kill each other or remain faithful and die anyway, trains seem always to crash instead of reaching their destinations, assassinated presidents are in coffins taking their rest, the Titanic hits the iceberg (Wasn’t it sad when that great ship went down? the singer asks sardonically). When farms fail in three successive songs, Smith seems to be making some gleeful point.

You marvel about the ability to laugh in death’s face, to make jokes about starvation and joblessness and sadistic bosses and the chain gang, yet time and again you hear in these voices and words a dark stoicism. Perhaps only Uncle Dave Macon could have written a song about hard times and named it Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train. Maybe that’s a Southern trait; more likely it’s a just human one.

The most dissonant note is struck by the song Smith chose to place next to last, Ken Maynard’s rendering of The Lone Star Trail, a stilted and clumsy pastoral that reminds you of the sound track to a bad 1940s Western, with Maynard singing nasally of rolling prairies and lowing cattle and smiling ranch foremen and the sweetest girl in the world. Placed anywhere else it could be an almost pleasant reverie, but taken in the context of what has gone before all those murders and dislocations and gone lovers and prison sentences, all underpinned with those sliding blues guitars it’s as out of place as a court jester at a funeral, and the ear is unprepared for such a sentimental vision of life. Perhaps Smith saw it as a joke; more likely he meant it to serve as a sort of pause, a screen saver, a time to consider the tale you have been told about a lost America, a kind of bookmark to set all this apart from the final song.

This is Henry Thomas’s “Fishing Blues”, set to panpipes that sound older than America, older than anything. The sound is liberating, freewheeling, with an undercurrent of mystery not communicated by the words. On the surface it’s just a song about getting a line and bait and a pole and going down to the fishing hole and catching a catfish, bringing it home, and frying it up. Baits and lines and poles normally have a sexual symbolism in blues; the fish is a sometime signifier for female sexuality. But there’s nothing overt in the song, no innuendo in Thomas’s voice, which makes the song stranger still. You notice not what is present but what is absent, Smith was well aware that the fish also represented spirituality, and it acquires this meaning only in the context that Smith has placed it in.

After repeated listenings you realize that Smith’s genius was not only in selection but in placement, and that he had made a collage or crazy quilt of music in which everything matters, an impressionistic painting where every brushstroke counts.

In 1988 Smith became Shaman-in-Residence at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and longtime friend Rani Singh began the enormous task of gathering together the Harry Smith Archives, assembling his legacy, and sifting through the complicated and unlikely life Smith had led. A grant from the Grateful Dead’s Rex Foundation allowed Smith to live the last few years of his life in a productive and, for Smith, relatively stable manner.

After the Anthology was reissued on CD, Smith received a Grammy in 1991 for lifetime achievement. Smith would die later that year, but ascending the steps to the stage in a tuxedo must have seemed to him a transcendent moment.

I’m glad to say that my dreams came true, he told the audience. I lived to see the world changed through music.

He was eulogized at his memorial by the likes of Dave Van Ronk and Ed Sanders of the Fugs, but the memorial that will always be around is the Anthology itself. Smith had set out to document the past, but in the end it seems not a replica but the living past itself.

YOU WOULDN’T STEAL THIS RECORD, Greil Marcus wrote famously in a review, establishing once and for all the criteria by which greatness is judged. A great record is one you’d steal if you couldn’t get it any other way.

People steal David Johansen and the Harry Smiths. In less than a year I’ve lost eight or ten copies. I’ll take the jewel box down from the shelf, and it’s empty. It was there a week ago. I’ll loan a copy to a friend, and another friend will take it from him. Either the disc contains some marvelous new encoding that causes it to vanish after an arbitrary number of plays, or once they hear it, people just have to possess this record.

It was at the University of Minnesota that I first heard about the Johansen record. A professor of American literature was talking about Harry Smith and his folk anthology. You’ve got to hear this album by David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, the professor said.

This seemed something of a non sequitur. I thought of the New York Dolls. I thought of Buster Poindexter. I don’t think so, I said.

But he wouldn’t have it. He was a convert, a true believer. He was washed in the blood. He drove us across Minneapolis to a record shop called the Electric Foetus.

Got that new David Johansen? he asked a clerk.

Right over there, the clerk said, pointing, as if an unknown record on an unknown label was as common as locating a loaf of bread in a convenience store. The professor paid for the record and handed it to me, a faintly superior expression on his face as if he knew something I didn’t.

He did.

From the first notes of the first song it was apparent this wasn’t a mere tribute album. I recalled Elvis Presley being quoted as saying: I don’t sound like nobody. There was an almost eerie connection to Rabbit Brown, whose song “James Alley Blues” is covered, but Johansen didn’t sound like nobody either.

They sit regarding you from a black-and-white photo on the cover of their first album, The New York Dolls, with expressions that vary from simpers to cold stares. The five young men seated on the sofa are dressed in what looks like thrift-shop hooker garb, and they are pancaked and rouged and lipsticked, the square root of decadence. David Johansen is the one in the middle: huge, dark bouffant and platform shoes, mouth a painted Cupid’s bow.

Over all, the photograph is a sneer, an upraised middle finger that says, I don’t give a goddamn what you think. They’re going the Stones one better, not androgynous like Bowie or effeminate like Elton John but into some whole new territory. All in all they look just the way David Johansen says he wanted them to look: sixteen and bored shitless.

This is all geared to shock, or at least it was in 1973, when the album was released. The Dolls need to be taken in the context of 1973: the Eagles are flying over Hotel California, Bruce Springsteen was gearing himself up to be the future of rock n’ roll, his Time and Newsweek covers already on the horizon. The Dolls even shocked New York a little, very briefly. New York is notoriously hard to shock.

The music on the album is the aural equivalent of the cover, defiant and clarifying, an inside joke that says, There’s something happening here, and we don’t care if you know what it is or not. Flailing guitars and drums and an out-of-step bass kick in at ninety miles an hour and then accelerate in little two-minute concertos that sound like the early Stones bereft of all restraints and social concerns and literary pretensions. They sound like elevated trains and car collisions in which folks perish the neon cacophony of New York at night, the world ending not with a whimper but in a bedlam of rending crashes.

Johansen says the idea of the Dolls was to take music away from the recording studios and give it back to the kids, to make a sort of homemade music that anyone could do. That’s a valid idea; a kid can’t go out to the garage with three chords and a guitar and come up with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band or Smiley Smile. The New York Dolls put it within reach, and at the same time added the kick of rebellion that has fueled rock since the days of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.

For a giddy moment in the early 70s, the New York Dolls were at the cutting edge of rock music. Pursued by record companies and lionized by the Gotham underground and the rock critic literati simultaneously, Johansen and the Dolls seemed on the verge of stardom. They even fell in with a London fashion designer named Malcolm McLauren. He wanted to take them to England and outfit them in red patent leather. When the project fell through, McLauren returned to his native land and invented the Sex Pistols.

The Dolls recorded two albums. Neither sold very well, but they altered forever the idea of what a rock band could look and sound like. The Dolls were gone as suddenly as if they’d self-combusted. They left the field to imitators like Kiss, who refined the idea of dressing up and went on to make millions.

Johansen resurfaced as a solo singer-songwriter in the early 80s. His songwriting had improved, and his gruff post-Dylan voice stood out from the other folkies, but these records didn’t do much either, though they did manage to build on the cult audience of fans and critics he’d carried away from the Dolls. Then he reinvented himself once again. This time the mask was that of Buster Poindexter, a pompadoured lounge singer performing with a swing band. Though Johansen had never followed trends, just his own interests and obsessions, this time they coincided with popular taste. Buster Poindexter struck a chord with the audience somehow, and the persona lives on to this day, when, almost by popular demand, Johansen resurrects Buster at clubs or private parties.

You have to eat, Johansen says dismissively of Buster, but the sound he came up with, a sort of blues-Latin-swing combination, predated the swing revival of the 90s and the work of musicians like Brian Setzer by almost a decade.

When Allan Pepper, owner of the Bottom Line, the legendary New York club, was preparing to celebrate the club’s twenty-fifth anniversary, he asked Johansen to perform. But he wanted someone other than Buster Poindexter.

AI had been reading some books about Harry Smith, Johansen says. And I’d gone back and listened to the Anthology, and this four-volume collection from Shanachie called Times Ain’t Like They Used to Be. Depression-era stuff, really rural. And I got interested in this kind of stuff all over again.

Music has always been a part of Johansen’s life, one of the earliest things he remembers. His father was a lover of opera, and he heard a lot of that, but early on, Johansen formed an attachment to old acoustic blues, later widening his appreciation to take in the electric-urban recordings of Muddy Waters and B.B. King and Sonny Boy Williamson. Around the age of fifteen he taught himself harmonica and guitar (I’m still almost as good now as I was then, he says today), which may seem a little unusual for a kid raised in New York City, but the usual has never been what Johansen does.

So for the Bottom Line gig he put together a band with this sort of music in mind: Guitarists Brian Koonin and Larry Saltzman together with bassist Kermit Driscoll and drummer Joey Baron. He had his blues band. Johansen professes to see not much of a stretch between them and the New York Dolls. The Dolls were a blues band, he insists. We just massacred the form. The bass player couldn’t breathe and play at the same time. He’d take these big breaths and hold them and shoot out all these notes. Then he’d have to stop playing to breathe. It just happens that we can do both at the same time.

The show at the Bottom Line was supposed to be a onetime thing, but everything fell together. A write-up in the New York Times caused a lot of interest in the band, and besides, Johansen says, it was a lot of fun.

Norman Chesky, who had known Johansen from his Poindexter days and who owns Chesky records, a label known mainly for the intense quality of its recordings and for the mixture of ethnic, blues, and jazz releases, wanted to make a record with him.

During a three-day session at New York’s St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, the band, now calling themselves the Harry Smiths, recorded twenty-five songs. Thirteen of them made it onto the album.

The result was nothing short of a revelation. The record sounds at once timeless and state-of-the-art, like an Alan Lomax field recording made on some black sharecropper’s front porch using marvelous equipment that did not yet exist. Johansen chose some of the songs from Smith’s Anthology and others of the same somber shading.

I just did songs I like, Johansen says. It’s a pretty dark record, usually someone expires in each of the songs.

The album was well reviewed everywhere from Entertainment Weekly to Rolling Stone to audiophile magazines like Hi-Fi News, and ultimately the British music publication Mojo would select it as one of the ten best blues albums of the year.

The general tone of the reviews was that a cross-dressing New York Doll had reinvented himself as a lounge singer and then again as an eighty-year-old bluesman, but Johansen is complicated and intelligent, and the truth is not quite that simple. A couple of the songs are staples from the Buster Poindexter days, and one of them, Sonny Boy Williamson’s Don’t Start Me Talking, turned up on the Dolls’ second album. Johansen has always been a marvelous actor, from his Doll days up through the films he’s appeared in (such as 20 °Cigarettes and Scrooged), but there the seams fade and edges blur, and it is difficult to tell the actor from the man, the singer from the song, and that is the quality that the old alchemist Harry Smith was fascinated with.

You could see it as simply a matter of role-playing, of alternating one mask for another. But there’s never the impression of the Manhattan skyline double-imaged onto a landscape of Mississippi Delta farmland.

The songs on David Johansen and the Harry Smiths are not note-for-note recreations, as the New Lost City Ramblers were wont to do, nor are they old songs reworded and modernized, made more accessible by the use of contemporary arrangements and the hewing off of rough edges, as Bill Morrissey did on his album of Mississippi Hon Hurt songs, or Dave Alvin did on his Public Domain.

He seems to work in the way some of the singers on the Anthology do: Not interpreting the song or reinventing it but inhabiting it.

His take on Oh Death is like a cold, damp wind blowing off the river Styx. More chilling than the Ralph Stanley version on the current O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, it evokes the 1927 Dock Boggs performance, then edges it with a deeper shade of black. The voice sounds at an absolute remove from hope or life, and salvation is not even a consideration. Johansen sounds as if he has hellhounds on his trail and the Grim Reaper peering through the bedroom window, bone fingers already reaching to close his eyes and wire his jaws shut.

When asked about this quality, Johansen mentions darkness and light. Without dwelling on the darkness he was in (this was a guy, after all, who lived the life of a rock star) or the light he sees now, he says, You can be in the darkness and come into the light. But even though you’re in the light, you know the darkness is still out there.

Johansen played some gigs in London earlier this year, just a bluesman sitting on a stool and cradling a guitar with a harmonica brace hung around his neck. It was a far cry from the way he looked in the early days. He had grown a beard, and he was wearing a plain, dark suit. He warned New York Dolls fans to stay away; nevertheless, old Dolls covers like Don’t Start Me Talking got the most applause. But in London as well as New York, audiences seem perfectly comfortable with Johansen as a sort of method actor of the blues, and Mojo magazine said they had just seen a man who would go down in the books as being as artistically honest and creatively daring as the deceased bluesmen he now honors.

Like the tricksters and masked marvels and shapeshifters that populate the Anthology, both Harry Smith and David Johansen have an affinity for morphing roles and presenting an ever-changing façade to the world and, like the songs themselves, an aversion to being categorized or pinned down. They also share the music, for that is the glue that binds them together.

Time done been won’t be no more, Furry Lewis warns in his version of See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, not only singing it but prefacing it with an imperative: Listen, he sings, as if he wants you to remember it, listen. Time done been won’t be no more.

But in a sense, if a moment of time is the world we inhabit in that moment, it is the world that matters and not the clock that measures it.

In the end Johansen’s music seems to be saying that the world doesn’t change, only the guises it goes under, only the masks it wears. Appearance is nothing. The essentials remain. Love is still love, and loss is still loss. Death was ever death and will remain so. The dark is as black as it ever was, and the light is what you struggle toward, and that seems to matter as much to David Johansen as it did to Rabbit Brown or Harry Smith.

I BELIEVE I’LL BUY ME A GRAVEYARD OF MY OWN

WHEN FURRY LEWIS WAS REDISCOVERED in Memphis in 1959 by Sam Charters, nothing much happened. The folk revival, when scholars and musicologists and collectors of worn 78 records on strange labels like Black Patti and Okeh would prowl Mississippi back roads looking for the old men who long ago recorded the music that was strange as the labels, did not come along until the early 60’s. When it did, bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt and Son House and Furry Lewis found themselves on the road again, playing to new audiences at the Newport Folk Festival and the East Coast coffeehouse circuit. Those old country-blues songs that had been dismissed, almost forgotten, were popular again.

Furry was born Walter Lewis in that fabled, near-mythic birthplace, and graveyard, of the blues, Greenwood, Mississippi. Just when is a matter of conjecture; Lewis was prone to altering his past history to suit the needs of the moment (he asserted that he invented the bottleneck style of guitar-playing that Robert Johnson used and that he was a protégé of W.C. Handy). The consensus is that he was born in 1893.

He didn’t tarry long in Greenwood. His family moved to Memphis when he was seven years old. Before he was out of school, he was playing with folks who would one day be hailed as Beale Street legends Will Shade, the Memphis Jug Band, and Handy, the man credited with igniting the first blues craze.

Furry was soon touring Arkansas and Mississippi with the medicine shows that were prevalent in the rural South of that time. By his teens, he was playing the jukes with Memphis Minnie and Blind Lemon Jefferson. He claimed to have learned the rudiments of guitar as a child from a street musician known to him only as Blind Joe. The rest he learned on his own, writing original songs in a tablet, and recasting ragtime pieces and popular songs with lines from the stockpile of interchangeable blues poetry that has been dipped into by everyone from Jimmie Rodgers to Bob Dylan.

In the late 1920’s, Furry recorded twenty-three songs. Thus, Furry was squarely part of the 1927-29 historical musical outpouring that was probably the richest period in American recording. Men like Ralph Peer were scouring the South for talent, but no one had yet figured out what would sell and what wouldn’t. The playing field was momentarily level and everyone had a shot, black bluesmen from the Delta and white string bands from the Carolinas, Georgia, and West Virginia. At least until the Great Depression hit and the record business nearly stopped, and then many musicians went back to doing what they were doing before.

What Furry had been doing before, aside from making music, was working for the city of Memphis. Despite losing a leg in a railroad accident in 1917 (doctors had replaced it with a wooden stump), Lewis got employment in 1922 as a street sweeper, a job he would hold off and on for the next forty-four years.

Those twenty-three recorded songs formed the strongest part of Furry’s musical legacy. Mostly based on the twelve-bar blues pattern and played in open tunings, his songs featured familiar blues motifs that bobbed in and out like debris in turbulent waters, railroads and highways, cops and authority, empty beds, women who cling too tightly or won’t hold on at all and all shot through with sardonic humor and violence that lies around the next bend in the road.

“I believe I’ll buy me a graveyard of my own”, he sings in Furry’s Blues, his tone confiding, as if he’s passing on hard-won knowledge, “I’m gonna kill everybody that have done me wrong.”

Impending violence fuels his songs. Frustration and anger seethe just under the surface and there is a feeling that things could go south at a moment’s notice. “If you want to go to Nashville men and they ain’t got no fare”, he sings, “Cut your good girl’s throat and the judge will send you there”.

When things get too heavy, there’s dark humor: “I went down to the I.C. train, laid my head on the I.C. tracks,” he sings in Cannon Ball Blues. “Seen the I.C. comin’, Lord, and I snatched it back.”

Furry’s masterpiece is Kassie Jones, a long, imaginative reworking of the traditional song about the death of engineer Casey Jones in a 1900 train wreck in Canton, Mississippi. But Furry makes it his own, literally. The song begins typically enough with an account of Casey as a folk hero, but takes a trip to the surreal when Furry himself emerges as a character: Chased to his woman’s gate by the police, welcomed to her folding bed, then on the road again, his name on the back of his shirt, “he’s a natural-born Eastman don’t have to work.”

Driven by Furry’s hypnotic percussive bass strings, the song sounds like something Sam Phillips would have recorded at Sun Studio thirty years later.

In the 1970’s, age had enfeebled his musicianship to the point that he was forced to get by on the tricks and showmanship of his medicine-show days, but, paradoxically, a brief fame touched him. In 1975, he opened in Memphis for the Rolling Stones, and in 1976 Joni Mitchell wrote Furry Sings the Blues about him. He even appeared in a movie that stars Burt Reynolds, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings.

Furry had attended John Hurt’s funeral in Greenwood, and most of the other country bluesmen were in the ground, too. By the time of his death in 1981, he had outlived most of his contemporaries. The strife and hard times Furry had written about were still around but they were being addressed by a different kind of music. The blues had gone Big City, and the acoustic country blues were practiced mostly by purists and academicians.

Maybe Furry himself said it best, in his reworking of St. Louis Blues, Time done been/Won’t be no more.

THE BANJO MAN

WHEN EMISSARIES OF THE BBC showed up at the Ryman Auditorium in 1946 to record performances by country musicians no doubt to allow perplexed Londoners back home to hear what the rustic folks in the colonies considered entertainment. One of the first musicians they spotlighted was the Dixie Dewdrop. That would be Uncle Dave Macon, David Harrison Macon from Rutherford County, Tennessee, already seventy-six years old in 1946 and as unlikely a superstar as country music has ever seen.

But no one at the Opry was surprised. How could they not have chosen him? Who could compare to Uncle Dave? Macon in full-tilt abandon was like a natural force unleashed, and when he got unwound and release arrived it would be like watching destruction from the eye of a hurricane. He buckdanced and flashed his gold-toothed grin and twirled his banjo like a baton, brought it to his shoulder with the neck pointed at the audience and sprayed notes like a musical Gatling gun. His stamping and percussive rapping on his instrument rendered the idea of a rhythm section laughable: You couldn’t duplicate this pandemonium, any effort would be the palest echo of the seemingly infinite energy he expended. Uncle Dave must have been hard on banjos.

He had arrived at the Ryman by a circuitous route, and in his quieter moments of reflection, late at night and winding down and alone in the Nashville Hotel where he finished out his days, he must have pondered the string of coincidences and singularities that had moved his life in so peculiar a direction.

Macon traveled a path that was to become familiar to the rural musicians who made it to the recording studios in the late 1920’s their names are legion. But that path is now lost, it was unique to its time and place and simply does not exist anymore, no one will travel it again.

The Macons were a prosperous family before the Civil War. They owned upward of two thousand acres and various businesses, including distilleries and sawmills. But the cards fell wrong for prosperous farmers in the South, and by the time David Harrison Macon was born in 1870, things weren’t looking so optimistic. Yankee Reconstruction had its foot on the region’s neck and was pushing hard. Dave’s father, John, struggled until 1883, and then decided, like a lot of other folks, that better times lay in the cities instead of the hardscrabble countryside. So he sold the house and what was left of the land, far fewer than two thousand acres, and loaded furniture and children onto the wagon, hitched up the mules, and started out the long sixty miles to Nashville. Dave was thirteen years old.

They went into the hotel business, and this, in retrospect, looks like the making of Uncle Dave the entertainer. The place they ran was the Broadway House. This was a time when a motley of entertainers would play the line of theaters on Broadway in downtown Nashville, and all these traveling performers had to stay somewhere. A lot of them chose the Broadway House, partly because they could use the huge open basement for rehearsals. These were performers of various stripes, jugglers and acrobats and musicians and magicians, animal acts and blackface minstrels and rube comedians.

These were also the days when audiences demanded showmanship. They’d come to be entertained, to be taken out of the ordinariness of their lives for the duration of the show, and they would settle for nothing less. Style weighed as heavily as content. Incertitude rang hollow, and mediocre showmen didn’t last too long. Dave saw a lot of rehearsals, and he was soaking up influences from all of them.

About this time a circus turned up in Nashville and pitched its tents in a vacant field. There Macon saw a comedian banjoist named Joel Davidson. The experience must have been revelatory, for Macon himself later wrote, in the often overblown language of the times:

It was Joel Davidson who proved to be the spirit that touched the mainspring of the talent that inspired Uncle Dave to make his wishes known to his dear old mother and she gave him the money to purchase his first banjo.

By 1887 all this had changed by a pocket knife: Macon’s father lay dead in a street altercation and the trial ended in an acquittal for the assailant. Soon the family had abandoned Nashville and the widow Macon headed them for Readyville, a town between McMinnville and Murfreesboro where there was a waystation for stage coaches. She figured that travelers would always need food and a place to sleep. Essentially, they were still in the hotel business.

It is probably here that the idea of becoming a professional musician first entered young Dave’s mind, for he built a makeshift stage atop a barn from which he could give impromptu shows for the travelers who were staying over. One can imagine this: A teenage boy with his open backed banjo and apparently boundless confidence, the end of the day and a skeptical crowd, Dave up there in the falling dark tuning his banjo while the nighthawks dart and check, the audience gauging him and Dave gauging them right back, trying to figure what will work and what won’t for an embryonic repertoire he doesn’t even know he needs yet.

All this time he kept learning songs, collecting them, writing them, stealing them. He also developed a distinctive introductory roll, almost like an invitation, a quiet caesura before the action starts, a musical hand gesturing you inside the song where the story commences, that would kick off most of his later songs.

At the age of twenty-nine, Dave married Matilda Richardson, who over the next twenty years would bear him seven sons. In 1900, with a child on the way, he looked about for a way to make a living. Ever a mule man, he went into the freight business. With a double team of mules, he hauled wagonloads of provisions and building materials and whiskey into towns the railroads did not accommodate. He was barely ahead of the internal combustion engine, but he wasn’t put off by its arrival. He didn’t trust the horseless carriage and he didn’t expect it to last. In From Earth to Heaven, a song he wrote about the freight business, he sings: I’ll bet a hundred dollars to a half a ginger cake/I’ll be here when the trucks is gone.

When he became a more prolific writer of protest songs, this was a theme he returned to again and again: Change is not always for the better, and change for the sake of change is never better. He seems like an early agrarian or one of Robert Penn Warren’s Fugitives, trying to hold on to a mythic South that had been slipping through Southern fingers ever since the War. He believed in flesh and blood. He had more faith in a beast of burden he could talk to rather than some mechanical contrivance that would not do his bidding. In days to come he would own cars and even write a paean to Henry Ford’s invention, but he never learned to drive one and he was always a little surprised when they performed as they were supposed to.

Now here’s a stop on the road that doesn’t exist anymore. Fiddlin’ John Carson had a Victrola record released that sold way beyond expectations. It was the first country-music hit. Folks scraped up the money to buy it and hoped later they could scrape up the money to buy a phonograph to play it on. It seemed an occasion of country people embracing one of their own who’d in some manner made good and transcended them but managed to keep intact the roots they held in common.

The record companies were amazed, but they were not stupid. They began to look around for other rural musicians.

Records were largely a sideline then, carried in furniture stores rather than music shops. The Sterchi brothers owned a chain of furniture stores that carried a line of Vocalion recordings. Dave had hauled a lot of furniture, and by now he was the best-known musician in the region. He’d been performing informally (one can’t imagine a formal performance by Uncle Dave Macon) for years at dances and private parties or wherever anybody wanted to hear a banjo played. He even had a partner now, a young man named Sid Harkreader who played guitar and fiddle and sang harmony with him. So when Vocalion asked the Sterchi brothers to help line up new talent, the first name out of the hat was Dave Macon’s.

It must have been a potent moment: He’d been making music for free all his life and now he had the chance to perhaps get paid for it and lay everything else aside. But he was already fifty-three years old, a little late in life to be changing careers. But there seemed little choice. The freight business he knew had been supplanted by automobiles and he still had children at home to feed. He signed with Vicalion and headed for New York, not knowing that he was blazing a trail that countless musicians would follow: Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, Dock Boggs and Mississippi John Hurt, plus scores of others whose epitaphs are just names on old phonograph records.

His first recording was Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy, a song that in later years he would say he learned from a black man named Tom Davis, but history has forgotten Davis’s story and no one knows where he learned it or how close to the original (if such a thing exists) Macon’s version is. By making it his first record, Macon must have considered it his best shot at launching a new career and it is a song he returned to again and again and recorded numerous times, as if striving toward some ideal of musical perfection.

All the versions have the same feel of not only lost landscapes and lost times but a lost people, a race supplanted. The banjo rolls hollowly out and it seems to be coming from some place enormously distant, from some alternate world outside time itself, and the voice when it comes, conspiratorial and amused, jerks you abruptly into a plot that’s already started: There’s stolen meat in your knapsack, hounds on your track, and you’re pulling for your shanty home where Mandy is waiting. The song is all motion and action, there’s no time for rationalization or introspection but, above all, it is so caught up in the joy of life that everything else seems incidental.

In this song and in songs like Way Down the Old Plank Road and Buddy Won’t You Roll Down the Line (both included by Harry Smith, no slouch in taste, on his Anthology of American Folk Music), the music creates a visceral three-dimensional world then draws you in to a time that doesn’t exist anymore but stills feels prescient. Times and circumstances alter, the music says, but the eternal human frailties and verities remain the same. There’s always that sense of being vividly alive. In Way Down the Old Plank Road, the feeling of desperate abandon when Macon cries KILL YOURSELF! sounds as if the words could be either a command or a mental note to himself. Hard times or good times, there is a stoic, dark-humored core that seems to render qualifiers or modifiers irrelevant. It is not the good times or the bad times that matter but the experience of living itself.

The reaction to these first recordings was immediate. There seemed to have been an audience already poised and waiting on Uncle Dave, and all that was needed was this connection to bind them together.

When he was booked into the Loews Theater in Birmingham, Alabama, there weren’t enough seats for all the folks who wanted to sit in them. A two-week engagement extended to five, and still the place was packed. The theater manager was arrested by the fire marshal for permitting too many fans inside.

Soon Macon was playing the Loews chain from Boston to Florida and beyond. At an age when most men are contemplating retirement, Uncle Dave Macon was on the road to becoming country music’s newest superstar.

Macon was far luckier than most: The crash of 1929 sent most rural musicians back to sharecropping and coal mining, but Macon had a job on the Grand Ole Opry, and he always had a label willing to release his music.

He wrote protest songs about prohibition (Dave took it personal that it had become so hard to buy a decent drink of whiskey), about the downtrodden farmer (Eleven Cent Cotton), and about whatever peeved him at the moment always with a stoic humor that regarded the world with a sort of sardonic fatalism.

Time and Change — always Macon’s enemies — were rolling on down the line. The Opry was big business. He had grown old, beginning to sound dated to more modern ears. The Young Tucks of county music were coming aboard, and Macon regarded them with a jaundiced eye. To him, showmanship was half the music, and most of these trespassers came up wanting. They didn’t have the requisite style. You’re a pretty fair banjo picker, he told Earl Scruggs, but you’re not very funny.

By the end of the 40s, the music was changing and the audience was changing with it. Hank Williams had arrived and country-music singers were beginning to be judged as sex idols the way that movie stars were. Macon’s wife had died and he was spending lonesome nights in a Nashville hotel. Before he died in 1952, he willed one of his banjos to a young entertainer named Stringbean Akeman whom he considered his protégé, but he must have seen the time coming when clog-dancing banjo pickers would be reduced to comic relief between modern songs.

He couldn’t have known the whole of it, the arrival in Nashville of a new breed of producers like Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley and crooners like Jim Reeves who sweetened the music and diluted it until it was more palatable to audiences with an affinity for mainstream pop. Perhaps he would have harkened back to his days with the showmen in the basement of the Broadway House and found it ironic that style was still supplanting substance, veneer more than ever disguising reality.

Even banjo-playing altered. There would come a time when newgrass pickers would try to force the banjo into the realm of quantum physics. But Macon’s own playing was not as simple as it sometimes sounded. In his later days, nearing eighty, he relied mostly on a frailing or clawhammer technique, but scholars dissecting his 1920’s recordings have identified almost a score of different styles that he had mastered running from ragtime to blues and they’re still finding more. And any one of them sounds realer and truer than anything that has come along since.

HAND ME MY TRAVELING SHOES

Not long after Blind Willie McTell graduated from the school for the Blind in Macon, Georgia, he turned up in Atlanta. (There’s a theory that says he’s Blind Willie McTear, that an instructor at the school misheard McTell and wrote the name down wrong, so perhaps the mythic weight of having your name committed to some sort of legal document in that time and place made you beholden not only to the authority that signed the papers and affixed seals of legality, but to the lesser authority that served and interpreted them.) Something was beginning to happen in American music, and a lot of it was happening in Atlanta. Street musicians dependent upon coins tossed in guitar cases or passed hats were drawn there by the city’s size and relative prosperity. If you only counted the blind musicians and ignored the sighted, you’d still come up with an impressive number.

Truly there must have been giants on the earth in those days. All those blind blues singers were steady on the move, crisscrossing the South like black spores on a glass slide, setting up on street corners and opening their guitar cases, ears attuned for the clink of change, always alert for a new song they could borrow and make their own with lines from the floating debris of a thousand other blues songs. They lugged their guitars and coat-hanger harmonica racks, uncertain where they’d be when night fell on them, whose floor they’d sleep on, where the next meal was coming from and when it would get there. The corners on Decatur Street must have thronged with them; the competition for prime locations must have been fierce. Imagine the traffic jams, the fortunes a seeing-eye-dog franchise could have made. It was a harsh and provisional world McTell had come into. You had to be tough just to survive.

Dark was the night, cold was the ground. When Blind Willie Johnson turned up in Atlanta, McTell almost immediately hooked up with him. Johnson was a slide-guitar player of great technical proficiency, and he was also a Baptist minister, and between them they covered the field, both the secular and the washed in the blood.

Riley Puckett was there. He was a white guitarist (blind too, of course, and also working the streetcorners) who within a couple of years would play lead guitar with the Skillet Lickers, his innovative picking and odd bass runs helping the Skillet Lickers to sell a lot of records and making this white string band the Rolling Stones of their day. (Bootleggers rejoiced and laid on an extra shift when the Skillet Lickers came to Atlanta to record.)

A lot of things will remain mysterious about Blind Willie McTell, and not the least of them is whether or not he ever played with Puckett. But the odds are that they met. Some of the Skillet Lickers’ recordings, like Georgia Rag and Razor Ball, have the ragtimey feel of McTell songs, and there was at this time an enormous amount of cross-pollination going on in music. You are what you hear, perhaps. McTell’s own music is more Piedmont than Mississippi Delta blues. His voice is higher and more nasal than the conventional blues singer’s voice, and the music is more accessible than, say, Son House or Charley Patton. (Having recorded McTell, the archivist John Lomax initially declined to release the sessions. He had recorded McKinley Morganfield and Son House, and being more familiar with the traditional country blues sound, he complained that McTell did not sound enough like a blues singer.)

Of course, if you’re playing for an audience and you expect to get paid, the idea is to play something the audience wants to hear. A background of performing in carnivals and tent shows and the picnics that at the time were part of the African-American social scene had given McTell’s repertoire a broader sweep than most Bluesmen. Listening to his catalogue, you hear music that ranges from traditional twelve-bar blues to ragtime to sly, ribald songs that must have made him the life of the party, to songs that existed for no other reason than to allow him to do some virtuoso guitar-picking, and that hat must have come back heavy then. The conclusion that he knew what he was doing is incontestable.

McTell and Blind Willie Johnson traveled what was known as the Georgia circuit: Atlanta and Augusta, Savannah and Macon. Had they wandered south and stumbled across the fabled crossroads where a decade later Robert Johnson would deal with Satan, McTell might have bargained for his vision: He had been blind all his life and he could already play the guitar.

Still, he was luckier than most. He’d learned at the blind school in Macon not only to read words but to read music by feeling out the shape of the notes with his fingertips, in a time when even most sighted musicians learned and performed by ear. And he could take care of himself. He’d been a hard worker since his early teens, working with carnivals and traveling medicine shows and minstrel shows.

He was born in Thomson, Georgia, either in 1898 or 1901, depending on which source you want to believe. By the time the McTells (or McTears: there’s another story that someone on the father’s side of the family had changed the name from McTell because of trouble with whiskey stills and government revenuers) had moved to Statesboro, Willie had been shown the rudiments of guitar playing by his mother, and he gathered more skill from neighbors and visiting pickers and whomever he met, soaking it all up. Already he was writing songs in his head and changing other tunes to his liking and already he was developing an affinity for wandering, a habit that would stay with him all his days.

By the time he arrived in Atlanta, he’d also taken up the twelve-string guitar. He’d learned on the six-string, but had seen that for his purposes the twelve was infinitely better. With its complementary strings tuned an octave higher than the regular strings, not only was there more volume, but whether fingerpicking or using a bottleneck, the higher strings enriched the melody and elaborated on it. It also set him apart from other street musicians.

All these street pickers were living too close to the ground to know that they were part of the dawning of the richest, most complex period of American music. This period began around 1926 and would last only until the beginning of the Depression, and it would not come again.

Though McTell couldn’t have known it, by 1926 the record business was turning toward him. The sales of phonograph records had grown exponentially, and things were to a point where there was a lot of money to be made. To the surprise of executives in New York, people in the rural South bought a lot of music. A record by a fiddle player named John Carson sold faster than Atlanta record stores could restock it. This was the sort of news that got noticed in New York. People so poor they sometimes had to choose between a phonograph record or a new pair of shoes were opting for the music, choosing the magic over the practical, the mystery and wonder of their lives encoded into spiraling grooves of shellac.

McTell sings in Let Me Play with Yo’ Yo-Yo:

I’ll take all my money

put up against the wall

I’ll take what sticks

and you can have what fall.

Record-company owners were doing essentially this very thing. They were in the process of figuring out what sold best; they had not yet learned how to homogenize and move it toward a one-size-fits-all center, so they were throwing everything at the wall.

A lot of weird music was sticking; like Frank Hutchison’s bizarre take on the sinking of the Titanic, with do-si-do square dances being held on the lower decks and the captain inquiring, How’s your machinery? Or Dick Justice’s Cocaine, its imagery and cast of characters, furniture repo men, whipped babies, and women in alleys, the narrator simply wild about his good cocaine making a sort of jagged, surreal poetry that would soon vanish from popular music and not come around again until Bob Dylan surfaced in the early 60’s. The Okeh label was recording Dock Boggs, a Virginia coal miner whose dark music and eerie hollow banjo sounded like what you’d hear if you leaned your head against the door to hell to eavesdrop.

These three performers had in common not only that they were white, but the fact that they didn’t much sound like it. All three were steeped in the blues, a variant of it that would come to be thought of as white or mountain blues. The record companies were also recording a Texan named Blind Lemon Jefferson and a street singer named Blind Blake, and in 1927 Victor got around to Blind Willie McTell.

For a blind man, McTell possessed an amazing degree of self-sufficiency. He figured out the intricacies of the New York subway system and got wherever he needed to be.

He recorded again in 1928, this time for Columbia, and these two sessions produced classic songs like “Broke Down Engine” and “Mama, Tain’t Long Fo’ Day” and “Statesboro Blues” that would roll down the years and resonate with musicians like the Allman Brothers and the White Stripes long after McTell was gone.

His song Delia, a stoic, dark-humored account (took Delia to the graveyard, never brought her back) of a woman murdered by her lover (say you love them rounders, and don’t love me), reads like an O’Connor story or E.A. Robinson poem. Dylan covered it in the early 90s. Johnny Cash rewrote it as Delia’s Gone, but he kept the son’s air of detached, matter-of-fact violence.

Almost before it had begun, the boom was over. Something had fallen on Wall Street, folks said. Whatever had fallen, its echoes rippled on and on. The record business was hit hard, nowhere harder than in the rural South, sharecropper or millhand, black or white. First Reconstruction and now this Wall Street debacle. A choice between a new record and a little flour and lard is not really a choice.

Dock Boggs went back to the coal mines, Frank Hutchison went to work in a West Virginia grocery store, John Hurt went back to sharecropping in Mississippi. William Samuel McTell had nowhere to go except to the music he hadn’t even left, so he went back to Decatur Street and wherever his traveling shoes and traveling blues would take him. In the early 30’s, he sojourned all over the South with Blind Lemon Jefferson.

In 1934 he married Ruth Kate Williams, who long after McTell was dead would remember what he told her when she asked why he stayed on the road so much: “Baby, I was born a rambler. I’m gonna ramble until I die.”

Listening through McTell’s recorded work is almost like participating in a séance. Spirits come out of the dark, dead voices and the voices of folks not yet born when the recordings were made speak through the music, and amaze you at how much came from McTell.

The picking and strumming pattern he uses in songs like Mr. McTell’s Got the Blues shows up in Jimmie Rodger’s numbered blue yodels, and occasionally some of the words: She’s tailor made, she ain’t no handme-down. Eric Clapton uses the guitar lick and some of the words from Stole Rider Blues in his own Motherless Child. Taj Mahal and the Allman Brothers put their own spin on Statesboro Blues.

“Any good gal’s got a mojo but she’s tryin’ to keep it hid,” he sings on “Scarey Day Blues”, and over the years McTell had become adept at hiding his own mojo, swapping one mask for another, sliding adroitly from role to role as if simply changing clothes.

When word circulated that a new recording scout was in Atlanta, McTell immediately turned up with his guitar and a new persona, ready to make a record. He was Red Hot Willie Glaze for Bluebird, He was Blind Sammie for Columbia, and Georgia Bill for Okeh. He was also Blind Willie for Vocalion, Barrelhouse Sammy, and naming himself after a barbecue joint where the tips had been good, he was Pig n’ Whistle Red when he cut some sides for Regal.

When McTell was in his fifties he abruptly quit singing anything but spirituals. No more playful ribaldry like Let Me Play with Yo’ Yo-Yo, no more mojos Mama wouldn’t let him see. In 1957 he began preaching in the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Atlanta. Maybe he heard the sand running in the glass. His widow said in an interview in 1977 that he was tired, that he said he wanted to get back to God.

His last recording session took place a year before he laid it all aside to follow religion. A man named Ed Rhodes, who ran a record store in Atlanta, heard that there was a blind guitar player singing for tips behind a bar called The Blue Lantern Club, a musician playing the twelve-string guitar and sounding just like Huddie Ledbetter.

Rhodes went to see for himself. It was McTell, and Rhodes, who owned some recording equipment, tried to persuade McTell to record for him. Considering that he had recorded for decades under a dozen different names, McTell was strangely hesitant, but ultimately he was talked into it. Over a period of several weeks, McTell loosened up and reprised an entire career’s worth of music. The songs were interspersed with accounts of his years on the road, an oral autobiography of his life and times.

Intentions here were good; the follow-through left much to be desired. The tapes languished for years in an attic, ultimately winding up in a garbage can. When they were discovered, only one salvageable reel of tape remained. (It was released on Prestige/Bluesville as Blind Willie McTell’s Last Session.)

He’d long suffered from diabetes, and complications from the disease brought on a stroke. He died in 1959 in the state hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia. When he was buried outside Thomson, his tombstone read: WILLIAM McTEAR.

So he never lived to see the 60’s, when the old blues giants were sought out and lionized, when necktied Yankees showed up on Mississippi John Hurt’s front porch and waited for him to come in from the field. He never worked the college circuit like Son House and Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. When he died, the great folk revival was still embryonic, the Kingston Trio in matching blazers were singing antiseptic versions of Appalachian ballads. Yet to be were Dylan, Elizabeth Cotton’s strung-upside-down guitar playing Freight Train on national television, Robert Johnson bubbling under Billboard’s Hot 100.

Blind Willie McTell was in the ground but his music wasn’t. Plunder his music and you’ll find the bones of other music not fleshed out.

Dylan, in particular, has been instrumental in keeping McTell’s music alive. He recorded respectful, loving versions of Delia and Broke Down Engine. Perhaps part of Dylan’s McTell attraction was the shifting personas, the Blind Sammies and Pig ‘n’ Whistle Reds. Dylan once recorded under the name of Blind Boy Grunt, and his own closets must be stuffed with masks he’s cast off and disguises he’s sent out to be altered again and again.

In 1983 Dylan wrote the ultimate eulogy, Blind Willie McTell, one of the most haunting songs, an impressionistic distillate of East Texas martyrs, Southern plantations burning, the ghosts of slavery ships.

Between the lines you can imagine Blind Willie McTell and Blind Willie Johnson working that Atlanta, Augusta, Macon, Savannah circuit, traveling the dirt roads in the darkness they are heir to, a quarter moon unseen over the trees, their guitar cases carried like credit cards that will get them a meal, a pallet on the floor, a woman’s smile they can feel rather than see, a poet’s voice forty years down the line that will sing: No one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.

SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD

THE WEEK BEFORE MERLEFEST I went by to check on Grady, and he was putting a fuel pump on his RV. It was a huge RV so ancient it looked like something the Joads might have fled the Dust Bowl in, and something was always going wrong with it. Grady had skinned knuckles and a half-drunk beer and a home-rolled Prince Albert cigarette stuck to his lower lip that waggled when he talked.

He was not in the best of moods.

I don’t think I’m going to this one, he said. It’s got to where all this traveling around costs too much money. I believe I’ve about seen everything anyway.

I looked at the RV. It was emblazoned with hand-pained legends memorializing bluegrass festivals past. The Bean Blossom Festival, the Foggy Mountain Festival, MerleFest ‘96, ‘97, ‘98. Maybe he had seen everything. He told me about Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, cracking a bullwhip and preening as the newly crowned King of Folk. Another time at Newport, his RV had been parked next to the one belonging to Mother Maybelle Carter. They had sat in lawn chairs and watched twilight come on, and she had shown him how to play the autoharp, placing his fingers just so to form the chords.

Grady told me a lot of things, but he had the goods to back it all up. The walls of the house he rented were papered with surrealistic collage of photographs of the high and the mighty, the late and the great: Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs, Don Reno and Red Smiley. Grady was in a lot of the pictures. Bill Monroe was embracing him like a long-lost brother in one, and there were pictures of Grady’s own band, the Greenbriar Boys, skinny guys in Hank Williams suits standing before old-timey WSM microphones as if they were frozen back in the back and white ‘40s.

If you go, go up and talk to Doc Watson, Grady said.

I may. I always wanted to know where he got that arrangement for Sitting on Top of the World.

He got it off that old record by the Mississippi Sheiks.

I heard that record. That’s not the arrangement.

Well, hell. Just go up and ask him. Walk right up to him, he’ll tell you. He’s not stuck up like a lot of them are. He’s a hell of a nice guy.

Well, he’s blind. Maybe that makes him a little more approachable.

Grady didn’t want to hear it. A blind man can be a prick the same as anybody else, he said. He’s just a hell of a nice guy.

Early in the morning of October 23, 1985, Arthel Doc Watson received the worst news a father can get: His son was dead. Eddy Merle Watson had been plowing on a steep hillside when the tractor he was driving overturned and rolled on him.

It was a blow that Doc almost did not recover from. It was a blow that resonated on a number of levels: Aside from the incalculable loss of a child, Doc had lost a friend and a fellow musician. For a time it seemed he might even lose the music as well, because Merle and Doc and the music were inextricably bound together.

In 1964, when he was fourteen, Merle had learned to play guitar while his father was away. He had learned to play it so well that when Doc went back on the road, Merle went with him. That fall they played Berkeley Folk Festival, and he was all over the place on Doc’s next album, Southbound. They toured and recorded together for the next twenty-one years, right up to that morning in 1985.

Merle became a proficient blues guitarist, and some of the albums subtly reflect his love for the genre. But he could pick flattop guitar with the best of them, and he could frail the banjo in the style of country performers like Uncle Dave Macon. When he died he was a few days away from winning Frets magazine’s Bluegrass Picker of the Year award.

In what may be one of the few purely altruistic gestures in the music business, a handful of folks decided to do something. A friend of Doc’s, Bill Young, together with Townes and Ala Sue Wyke, approached Doc with a proposition. Townes is Dean of Resource Development at Wilkes Community College, in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and the three of them convinced Doc to play a benefit concert on the campus. The funds raised would be used to create a memorial garden in Merle’s honor.

Doc agreed, and a few of Merle’s friends, including the banjoist Tim O’Brien, volunteered their time and ended up playing from the beds of two flatbed trucks.

That was the first MerleFest, in 1988. By contrast, the festival in 1999, while still held on the college campus, was a vast sprawl of tents and stages and concessions accommodating more than a hundred performers and over sixty-two thousand people in the audience.

There was not a flatbed truck in sight.

The first night of the festival was cold and rainy, but the performances went on inside tents, where hundreds of folding chairs were arranged in rows. When you came out of the tents, the wind would be blowing and the rain would sting your face, but nobody seemed to mind. Earlier there had been a little grumbling when the performer list had been released: Hootie and the Blowfish? Steve Earle? These were not the direct descendants of Bill Monroe. Earle had been touring with the bluegrass great Del McCoury, but there was a loose-cannon quality about him, and he was a lot more edgy and confrontational than, say, Ralph Stanley.

But never mind. This audience could take it in stride. They had come to have a good time, and by God they were going to have a good time.

There is some kind of common bond between participant and observer; common heritage maybe, the unspoken reverence for certain values: Family, home, and the tattered remains of the American Dream. Disparate elements of the audience mingled as easily as Freemasons meeting far from home and exchanging the password. Except here no password was needed. The fact that you were here seemed password enough.

The second day was sunny and as perfect as days in April get, and the shuttles were busy early ferrying folks down to the main gate. The parking lot is a mile or so from the festival, and buses carry festival-goers down a winding road to the entrance. Watching this potential audience disembark you are struck by the fact that there seems to be no type, no average, and that every spectrum of America is represented: middle-aged hippies and their new SUV driving yuppie offspring; farmers and farmers’ wives; factory workers; the well-off in expensive outdoor gear from L.L. Bean; and longhaired young men in beards and fool’s motley who seemed determined to be ready should the ‘60s clock around again.

And just as you are about to decide that there is no common element among the spectators, you notice the percentage of people carrying instruments. Guitars and banjos in hardshells. Cased fiddles tucked under the arm and God knows how many harmonicas pocketed like concealed weapons.

You don’t see this at a rock concert or at the Grand Ole Opry, folks coming equipped to make their own music should the need arise. But bluegrass is widely perceived as handmade music, as opposed to, say, the output of song factories on Nashville’s Music Row. The people who love bluegrass love it enough to learn to play it, and they are intensely loyal to the music, to the performers, and to one another. That love of music is the common factor, the source of the brotherhood that seems to radiate off the audience like good vibrations.

Music is always in the air here. Wandering past tents and the open-air stages, you hear it segue from bluegrass to old-time rustic to a tent where a Cajun saws his fiddle at breakneck speed, and young girls jerk and sway with their partners on sawdust-strewn floors. There are vendors everywhere. MerleFest is a growth industry. Attendance has grown every year that the festival has been in existence, but not as fast as the number of vendors and service providers: You can buy the usual tapes and CDs of your favorites, t-shirts and sweatshirts and blankets and plaster busts of musicians and folk art and homemade jewelry; Italian food and Mexican food and down-home American food; anything you want to drink, unless you want it to contain alcohol, alcohol is forbidden on the festival grounds.

During the course of the four-day festival, you learn that a lot of these people know one another. They know one another well enough to remember the names of their respective children and what everybody does for a living. They will meet again before the year is out, whether they live in Alabama or Pennsylvania. They begin in the spring, at MerleFest, and through the careful allocation of vacation days or the advent of three-day weekends, their paths will cross at bluegrass festivals in the South, or in Midwestern states like Michigan or Indiana, where bluegrass is almost a religion. They will see the shows and late in the day will get together and grill out and catch up on old times. Likely they will drink a beer or two and make a little music themselves.

Like family. In a sense they are a family, loose and nomadic but keeping in touch, and at the very bottom of this family is what they believe bluegrass music is all about.

Family and Doc Watson

Doc Watson, blinded by an eye infection during infancy, first learned to play the harmonica. From there he went to a banjo with a drum made from the skin of a house cat. But when he’d listen to records, the guitar was what he liked, and he began fooling around with one his brother had borrowed. His father heard Doc and told him that if he could learn a song by the end of the day, then he would buy Doc one of his own. When his father came in from work that night, Doc played When Roses Bloom in Dixieland, and the next day Doc owned his first guitar.

Watson was playing on the radio at age nineteen, and in the years between learning that first song and becoming an icon, he played roadhouses and church socials and square dances. He played all kinds of music, country, rockabilly, swing, Appalachian ballads about young women wronged by their lovers.

It is amazing to listen to the Folkways records Doc made with Clarence Tom Ashley in the early days of the ’60s. His style seems fully formed: the complex picking, the impeccable interaction between bass and treble strings, the breathless, death-defying runs he interjects into spaces of time so small there seems scarcely room to accommodate them. You keep listening for him to miss a note, deaden a string, but he does not. There have been countless long and drunken arguments over how many guitars, one or two, were playing on a particular track. It was one guitar, Doc’s guitar.

In every great performer’s life there are watershed concerts, events that forever alter the rest of the career from what has gone before. For Doc one of these came in 1963, when he was brought to the Newport Folk Festival by the folklorist Ralph Rinzler. Doc was forty-one years old. He sang about blackberry blossoms, shady groves, houses of the rising sun, and the sad fatalism of sitting on top of the world. When he began, he was an unknown guitarist with a pleasant baritone, on a long and winding road from Deep Gap, North Carolina. When he was helped from the chair and led from the stage, he was on his way to a contract with Vanguard Records, and he had reinvented forever the way folk musicians approached the guitar.

As has been said, there are more than a hundred performers here, and there are no slouches. These are the heavy hitters and brand-name pickers of bluegrass, everyone from hardshell traditionalists to the avant-garde, folks who through virtuoso playing and infusions from jazz are moving bluegrass into new and uncharted territory.

But no one questions what this thing is all about.

The Texas singer-songwriter Guy Clark usually performs his song Dublin Blues during his sets, a song that has the quatrain:

I have seen the David

I’ve seen the Mona Lisa too

I have heard Doc Watson

Play Columbus Stockade Blues

At the mention of Watson’s name there is an outbreak of applause, thunderous and spontaneous. It happens the same way before different audiences each time Clark performs the song.

When Doc is led up the wooden steps to the stage, he approaches from the rear, and the first thing you see is his silver hair. At the first sight of it, the audience erupts. Doc is guided across the stage to where folding chairs have been positioned before the microphones. He is assisted into a chair, and he feels for the guitar in the open case beside his seat. He takes the guitar and sits cradling it, his face turned toward the crowd he can feel but not see, waiting until the applause dies down.

A stocky young man with a black beard has seated himself in the chair beside Doc’s. He has taken up a guitar as well. He touches Watson’s arm, and Watson leans toward the microphone.

This is my grandson Richard, he says, and he’s going to help me out a little here. This is Merle’s boy.

The crowd erupts again. The torch has been passed.

Doc’s guitar kicks off a set of country blues, old Jimmie Rodgers songs, and the song Clark referenced. The third generation holds his own with ease, as if perhaps guitar playing was simply a matter of genetics.

Between songs Doc jokes easily with the audience, tells a couple of stories. The audience eats it up. They’re eager to laugh at his stories, and maybe they’ve heard them before; their laughter anticipates the punch lines. They love him. He could sell them a used car with a blown transmission, a refrigerator that keeps things warm instead of cold. His voice is comforting and reassuring. He could be a neighbor sitting on the edge of your porch, or rocking right slow in the willow rocker.

Except for the playing. The picking is impeccable; it’s what you expect Doc to do: the hands sure and quick, the notes clean and distinct, and the absolute right note to go where he picks it. Those cannot be seventy-six-year-old hands, the audience is thinking.

Maybe they are not of a mortal at all; maybe they are the hands of a king, a god.

And with the guitar clasped to him and his fingers moving over the strings, he is a god, the king of what he does. They are the hands of a man sitting on top of the world.

But every set has to end, and when this one does, and Doc begins to rise, his hand reaching for the hand that without seeing he knows is reaching for his own, and the hands touch, the illusion shatter: The audience sees that he is not a god at all but a mortal with frailties like the rest of us, and this somehow is more endearing yet.

The applause erupts again.

Chet Atkins is the best guitar player in the world, Doc said.

I figured you’d say Merle Travis.

Well, Merle was a great influence on me. I named (my son) Merle after him, and we finally met when we did that Will the Circle Be Unbroken record. But Chet’s the best. He can play anything.

That’s what people say about you, I said.

I’m slowing down a little. I’m getting older, and I can feel my hands stiffening up. I don’t tour as much as I used to. I can feel myself slowing down, some of the runs are slower.

Close-up, Watson’s face is pleasant, ruddy, the silver hair a little thin but waved neatly back, every strand in place. He does not wear dark glasses, as most blind performers do, and in fact, it is easy to forget that he is blind: The lids are lowered, the eyes just slits, and he looks almost as if he’s just squinting into strong sunlight.

Where’d you come up with the picking on Sitting on Top of the World?

Watson laughed. I made that up, he said, that’s my arrangement. I heard it off that old Mississippi Sheiks record. You might not have heard of them. But I changed it. I just played it the way I wanted it.

What do you think about the way MerleFest has grown? It’s pretty big business now.

Well, it’s good for the music. It’s good for Merle, to keep people thinking about him. And people have to make a living, have to sell records. It’s good to know so many people love this kind of music enough to come way down here to hear it.

Do you think it’s changing? Music, I mean?

Music is always changing, Doc said. But it’s all music, just people getting together and playing. One thing I noticed though, somebody told me there were some complaints about one of the performers using some pretty rough language over the mic during his show. I don’t care for that. This has always been a family thing, women and kids, and that young fellow needs to remember where he is.

It was almost dark, and gospel music was rising from the tents when I walked down the road toward the parking lot. It was Sunday, the last day of the festival, and gospel was mostly what today had been about. There had been Lucinda Williams, of course, but mostly it had been gospel, like Sundays on old-time radio when the Sabbath was a day of respite from the secular.

Off to the right were the campgrounds. You could see the RVs, but they were hazy and ambiguous through the failing light, and music was rising from there, too the plinking of a banjo, a fiddle sawing its way through some old reel.

What you could see best were the campfires scattered across the bottomland, and for an illusory moment, time slipped, and it could have been a hobo camp or a campground for Okies on their way to the Golden State. There was a gully beyond the camp area. It was shrouded with trees, and fog lay between the trees like smoke, and it was easy to imaging Tom Joad slipping through them like a wraith, fleeing the vigilante men on his way upstate to organize the orange pickers. Or Woody Guthrie himself might ease up out of the fog, his fascist-killing guitar strung about his neck, a sly grin on his face that said all the world was a joke and only he was in on it. He’d warm his hands over the fire, for the night had turned chill, and he’d drink a cup of chicory coffee before heading down one of those long, lonesome roads Woody was always heading down.

Then I was closer, and I saw that the fires were charcoal and gas grills, where ground beef sizzled in tinfoil, and hot dogs dripped sputtering grease, and I saw that these people were much too affluent to be Okies and that the guitars they played were Fenders and Gibsons and Martins. They were guitars that Woody would never have been able to afford.

After a while Grady wandered up. I knew he’d made id, since I’d seen him a couple of times in crowds and had seen him playing guitar in a tent with other players, guys with homemade basses and washboards and Jew’s harps and whatever fell to hand. I hadn’t talked to him yet, though.

You learn what you wanted to know?

Doc heard it off that old Mississippi Sheiks record, I said.

I told you that.

He invented the arrangement, though. It’s his song now.

But he did talk to you. Was I right about him, or not?

I guess you were right, I said.

I thought about it. It seemed to me that Doc embodied the kind of values that are going out of style and don’t mean as much as they used to: self-respect and respect for others, the stoic forbearance that Walker Evans photographed and James Agee wrote poems about. Something inside that was as immutable and unchanging as stone, that after a lifetime in show business still endured, still believed in the sanctity of womanhood, family, property lines, the church in the wildwood, the ultimate redeemability of humankind itself.

Life sometimes seems choreographed from the stage of a talk show, where barbaric guests haul forth dirty linen and a barbaric audience applauds, where presidents disassemble themselves before a voyeuristic media, where folks sell their souls to the highest bidder and then welsh on the deal. It was nice that Doc was still just being Doc, just being a hell of a nice guy.

But Doc’s getting old, and those values are getting old, too. Maybe they’re dying out. Maybe in the end there will just be the music. For there will always be the music. It is what Doc loves above all things: from show tunes like Summertime to music leaked up through time from old, worn 78’s by Mississippi string bands, from the hollow, ghostly banjo of Dock Boggs to the contemporary folk of writers like Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan.

All Music that will endure and help us endure. The music will never let you down.