Gee, But It’s Hard To Love Someone When That Someone Don’t Love You- With Bessie Smith In Mind

 

 

 

“Hey, turn that record over and play Empty Bed Blues will you,” yelled Stanley Peters to his sweetheart of a couple of years now Josie Davis. Of course if any records were being turned over that day, by pretty please request or not, any long-playing records that meant that this pair, Stan and Josie, was in the midst of their periodic all stops out listening to the four double record albums,  Columbia Records version updated from the Vanguard Record  series (less scratchy and clearer tone of voice coming through the marvels of modern audio technology of Bessie Smith, the Empress of the blues. That title, that royal title disputed by the likes of Mame Smith and a bunch of last name Smith black female blues singers from say 1923 to 1933 when the market went crash for blues as well as everything else people had previously been willing to pay for when they had discretionary funds in their pockets not a common situation at the end of that period. Disputed too by Memphis Minnie although not one would deny that she could hold court as the Queen of barrelhouse blues and Miss Sippy Wallace bringing down the high lord Jehovah against her soul singing the devil’s music and not comfortable with the title princess not when big old Bessie was strutting her stuff about how she was number one and step aside sisters, step aside.

Leaving the question of genealogy aside for the aficionados to ponder over that periodic all out recording playing unto the night and early morning part bears some further explanation. See a couple of years before, a little before they had met Josie had heard a blues singer, a woman blues singer on WNUB the low- watt radio station over in Cambridge that she listened to at night while working like crazy on her Master’s degree in sociology. Josie was just then attempting to finish up that degree program at Boston University on her way to a doctorate since. That decision had been made for her by the democratic explosion of kids born, like her, 1948, within few years of the close of World War II who were fulling up the nation’s colleges and universities creating a crowded field of fiery liberal arts students who had honed in on that discipline, that soft-soap sociology, after being frozen out, totally frozen out, of the English Lit market by the endless lines of applicants as a place to make their mark.

But a Master’s degree could only be a stepping stone. Otherwise all that blood and sweat for the Master’s degree provided was a chance to wait on tables at some swanky bistro in the Back Bay or downtown for tips and some leers. And on a good night maybe an off-hand tumble in the hay. But usually not since the bistro scene was either guys loaded up with a date who expected said date to come across in the hay after that expensive meal and the date expected to come across since the guy had class enough to buy her an expensive meal and all after a string of coffeehouse coffee and pastry guys or worse, guy whose idea of a cool date was coffee minus the pastry watching the winos, con men, hipsters and other nighttime riffraff at the Hayes-Bickford. Or maybe married guys from out of town with a wife and three kids in some leafy Connecticut suburb who wanted to set you up as some kind of concubine. She had been through that whole routine except the waitress part her cross to bear being visiting professors, married with requisite three children clamoring for close work with interns like her and pillow talk. The guys from out of town might have been more honest about their desires anyway and the couple of time she went to downtown bars to have a drink, maybe get picked up when she was feeling horny and got picked the guys were better in bed than the hoary old professors who wanted to talk about the one bright idea that had had about thirty years before and had worked that to the bone or trying to impress a younger woman would let slip how they personally knew Emil Durkheim or something.   

The radio, that station, and Jim Miller’s American Folk Show at night on that station was her way of staying focused pouring over the endless statistics that she had culled over the previous two years in order to fill out her thesis about the close correlation in 1968 between those kids who drop out of high school and their ability to spent a lot of time tied up in the justice system. (According to Stan later, later when things had already gone awry between them he had to agree that Josie did a very good job of proving her point and her research would not look shabby even later much later in the 1980s when tracing the fates of lumpen kids, projects kids really, went out of fashion, along with the liberals who had previous championed their cause.) 

About ten o’clock in the evening on Wednesday nights Jim Miller would have an hour of blues, usually featuring a single performer or group, although Josie no fan of blues despite her love of folk music ever since high school, Hunter College High, in Manhattan back in 1962 when she got caught up with the folk minute craze running through the campuses and urban oases and hung around Washington Square Park and the Village seeing what was what. Usually tired, having to get up early the next morning she would pass on the show, couldn’t see what the big deal was all about with old black guys from Mississippi or hot shot younger black or white guys pushing their electric guitars to some netherworld. But as she was beginning to head to the radio on the shelf above her refrigerator she caught the beginning Bessie Smith’s Down-hearted Blues and decided to listen until the end of the song since the words “spoke” to her, the words about some two-timing man who spent all her money on whiskey and dope, ran off with her best friend and left her sad and blue. Josie didn’t know about the whiskey and dope part but she certainly knew about her guy running off with her best friend. Before she had come to Boston her best friend from way back in high school, Frida Hoffman, had taken her boyfriend, blue-eyed, blonde hair, Midwestern “aw shucks” Todd Morgan from Wisconsin where she had been an undergraduate right from under her nose when she had lived with Frida in her Soho apartment for the summer with Todd in tow and run off to summer of love San Francisco.

So the song hit home and as she reached to finally turn the damn thing off on came Empty Bed Blues and she was hooked, listened to the whole hour and heard that soulful melancholy voice all night in her sleep. Here is the funny part, the part that ties everything together as she listened she found that she got more and more into the music, that it kind of grew on her, she didn’t want it to end. She was haunted by the whole experience and the next day she ran over to Central Square in Cambridge, got off at that stop on the Red Line anyway and walked up to Sandy’s Record Shop heading toward Harvard Square to see if he, a connoisseur, the guru of all things folk unto the Child ballads if not before, which if you thing about it really encompasses the blues and asked him, since in those days he ran the store himself mostly, if he had any Bessie Smith records available for purchase. Sandy gave her a big smile and said-“I got a not bad condition, not too scratchy used complete four album eight record Columbia vintage set of her stuff that you won’t want to turn off.” Sold.

Sold after Josie explained that effect that her feature on Jim Miller’s show ha don her. Sandy gave a sly nod. Needless to say that weekend she perhaps drove her fellow tenants on Commonwealth Avenue batty, or murderous, playing the compete set while drinking wine to drown her sorrows. Drinking her blues away and it was six, two and even which of the two drugs was chasing her blues away.                        

Bessie safely in her grasp Josie got more interested in other women blues singers available for sale at Sandy’s like the newly “discovered” Sippy Wallace who told one and all in her time not to “advertise your man,” good advice if the man was anything worth keeping like Stan who had help her get through the male fright Todd blues,  Big Mama Thornton who did the original version of Hound Dog which she had heard Elvis do when she was young and was crazy see him do with that swagger and snarled look on his face and whose version put Elvis to shame and a whole bunch of women named Smith, or so it seemed beside Bessie. Got into those little old guys from hot-house Delta Mississippi too although she was still stand-offish toward those bad ass Chicago blues guys with the wicked bad lyrics of lust, dope and booze.

One afternoon at Sandy’s while she was looking for a Skip James recording she saw a sign that Big Tommy Johnson who was reputed to be the latest reincarnation of blues legend Robert Johnson, a max daddy blues man according to Sandy but whom she could take or leave, was playing at a club in Inman Square a few blocks up from Sandy’s called Joe’s Place. She asked Sandy about this Johnson and about the place, including about whether she was going to get hassled if she went alone and sat at the bar. Sandy told her he was not that familiar with Johnson (but don’t ask, please don’t’ ask Sandy about Skip James as Josie found out because you will get harangued for an hour or more with every arcane fact known to man about that bluesman) but that she would have to take her chances, as always, when guys see a single pretty young women after they have had a few drinks.    

So that Saturday night feeling a little blue about her progress on developing a theme for her thesis, a little fearful about going alone but also a little man hungry if she was honest with herself especially if a guy knew something about the blues and wasn’t just sitting there at Joe’s leering at his next “conquest” she went into Joe’s and sat unmolested at the bar while Johnson was playing. As it turned out he wasn’t what she was interested in for blues music but she wasn’t hassled, half damn it, either.

She would go there a few more times until the night she met Stanley who had walked up to her and told her he had seen her in the place before, did she like the blues, did she know the blues and about six thousand bits of other information. And not once did he “hit” on her, didn’t ask her what she was doing after the show. What did get him somewhere, get him two years of loving as it turned out, although not that night when he left, half damn it, her at the door of the club with a “hope to see you here again” was a date after he mentioned about three thousand stray facts about Bessie Smith. Including this observation-“You know when you start listening to Bessie, especially if you start at Volume One of the Columbia record set, you half want to shut the thing off but as you listen more you don’t want it to end, want to play the thing all day and night.”  Yes, Josie thoughts, a kindred. A kindred who she was getting ready to go to her record player and turn over the vinyl so Stan could hear Empty Bed Blues.