Gee But It’s Hard To Love Some One When That Someone Don’t Love You

“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 album double records Columbia version of Bessie Smith, the Empress of the blues.

That periodic 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 WCAS the low watt radio station over in Cambridge that she listened to at night while working like crazy on her Master’s degree in social psychology. Josie was just then attempting to finish up at Boston University on her way to a doctorate since in the crowded field of fiery liberal arts students who had honed in on that discipline after being frozen, totally frozen out of the English Lit market by the endless line of applicants, as a place to make their mark a Master’s degree could only be a stepping stone. Otherwise all that blood and sweat provided was a chance to wait on tables at some swanky bistro for tips and some leers. The radio, that station, and Jim Miller’s American Folk Show 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 gone awry he had to agree that she did a very good job of proving her point and her research would not look shabby even later 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 now was all about with old black guys from Mississippi or hot shot 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 hard-earned 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. Well actually she did know about the whiskey and dope part. Or at least the dope part because she did not like whiskey the one time an Irish boyfriend, a real Irish boyfriend from Ireland, from Cork, a IRA guy on the run one way or another she had picked up in a bar one night when dating Irish rebels was the flavor of the month for liberal/radical Jewish girls like her, gave her some even when it was watered down. Her liquor desires centered more on generous glasses of wine, mainly reds, when she needed to relax a bit but her dope flavor of the month, especially at Wisconsin where she had been an undergraduate was almost anything anybody had in their stash, bennies, and diet pills a specialty. Guys were always asking her to buy "product" as they called it, would get the stuff, maybe give her a few joints or pills and then split-sometimes to "find themselves, sometimes to just split because that was the kind of age the 1960s was. She had been willing to take her lumps on that score. She had left a few guys flat-footed herself so she was not crying, feeling blue about that. It was the running off with best friend that enraged her, make her more than sad and blue.

Before she had come to Boston her best friend from way back in high school, Hunter High which was a well-known elite school for girls then in the city filled with Jewish-American Princesses (JAPs) looking to have that school on their resumes when husband hunting , Frida Hoffman, who was a grind like her, although she could travel with the JAPs when they wanted something from her, had taken her boyfriend, blue-eyed, blonde hair, Midwestern “aw shucks” Todd Morgan from Wisconsin right from under her nose. After graduating from Wisconsin and before heading to Boston, dreading to have to live at home with her parents over in Stuyvesant Town, she had lived with Frida in her Soho apartment for the summer.  She had brought Todd along, after Frida insisted that she could put him in touch with some music people she knew in the Village who might help a budding folk rock singer like Todd. Josie had introduced Todd when they first met and Josie half-saw the "look" in Frida's eyes then but Frida was Frida and checked out  half the guys in the world. This time though Frida landed a low blow and one night had run off to summer of love San Francisco with Todd with whom she was having an affair on the side when Josie had to travel to Boston to find an apartment and to checkout her internship through Boston University.

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 famous Brahmin Brattle Street Child collected ballads if not before, which if you thing about it really encompassed the blues for lyrics, just not the beat, 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’ve 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 had on her. Sandy gave a sly nod. Needless to say that weekend she perhaps drove her fellow tenants on Commonwealth Avenue batting, or murderous, playing the compete set while drinking wine, red, 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 helped 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 pull 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 singer who 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 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 about Skip James 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 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.