Charley Nelson will not be playing at a juke joint near you. It
would be unfair to leave his story out of the Backroads project on such
a technicality, though. Nelson’s an 88-year-old master of the 88s. He
lives on land his parents bought in the piney woods region of
Mississippi southwest of Jackson. He’s had recent opportunities in
music — an offer to record a CD, and a contract on the table for a set
at the Chicago Blues Festival (without a sample, audition, or questions
asked). A Japanese film crew offered to pay him $300 to allow them to
tape him playing piano in his living room. “I’ll never be that hungry,”
he told them.
When I visited him for the first time about four years ago, he
had three pianos in various stages of decay in the living room of the
trailer he stayed in on his folks’ land. His place stood across a
gravel road and sprawling vegetable garden from where his brother
lived. The two bought walkie-talkies to communicate with, but Charley
switched the frequency around to listen to hunters in the nearby woods.
The ruins of his childhood home smoldered on the lot next to his that
day. He and his brother had to get rid of the old place as it had
become a haven for critters.
He kept a shiny silver .357 magnum in a six-pack cooler beside
his piano bench. He explained that it was for a son he’d fathered in
his early seventies. Not the early seventies, his early
seventies. Apparently “that bigfoot boy,” as Charley called him, had
two habits that disagreed with Charley. One was asking for money and
the other was taking things that didn’t belong to him. Charley
questioned his parentage of the boy, and said he’d asked the mother to
submit the boy for DNA testing, which she declined. Thus the
chilliness, I suppose.
Charley makes muscadine wine. He gave me a flask of it in a
cleaned out Crown Royal pint bottle. I took the first sip later with
some hesitation, and found it to be to my liking. It’s tart with a hint
of sweetness and a trace of natural carbonation, like Piney Woods
champagne. I told him how much I enjoyed it and he sent me home with a
mason jar full after my next visit. I’m saving it in my liquor cabinet
for a special occasion. The grape bits coagulated into a pulpy disk
that sits on the bottom of the jar.
Charley was born, “28th of October, 1919. That was a bad day
for the world,” he jokes. “When I was a little fella, about ten, there
was a guy from Chicago. He found out I played organ and he wanted to
take me up there and put me through the school of music. But I wasn’t
leaving my mama and daddy,” Charley says.
There was a time, the late 1930s to be exact, when Charley
played juke joints and fish fries all around the Nelson homestead. I
asked him if he had run across any notorious bluesmen who would have
been active then. He told me that he was the onliest one who played
piano around there. I’ve always loved that little gem of Deep South
dialect: onliest. It’s as if “only” doesn’t quite convey his
singularity as a player. Since he’s the onliest one of his generation
left standing, it makes sense that he’d figure prominently into his
telling of their history.
Charley picked a little guitar too, but still permitted a
cousin to accompany him to gigs out in the country. One night or early
morning the two were walking home when they heard a car approaching.
They recognized the sound of topless Packard a group of rednecks rode
around harassing people like them in, and dove for a ditch beside the
road.
The necks pulled over. Charley and his cousin heard one of them yell “Niggeeerrrr.”
“I carried that big 32-20 with me,” Charley explains, “and blew it off over their heads. They never bothered us no more.”
The 32-20 Charley referred to was a revolver that Colt manufactured until at least 1919, the year of Charley’s birth.
Charley and the Colt traveled around the state, mostly playing log camp dormitories until leaving home to serve in WWII. 
He remained in the service, living in Utah, until the 1970s, when he returned home after a busted marriage or two.
He plays the kind of barrelhouse piano you might imagine you’d
hear wafting between the slats of one of those lumber camp dorms. He’s
of wiry build and quite limber. I marveled at his dexterity and speed
as he played an uptempo gospel tune he’d written the first time I
visited him. He tickled out the last few notes, and feeling he had
nailed it let out a “whoo!” to punctuate the end.
“A lot of people think rich people has the most fun, but I
don’t believe it,” he says. “They have the most opportunity, but they
too busy trying to make more money. A person ain’t got no money, ain’t
got nothing to worry about. Go out there and have a ball if he want to
, come back home and go to sleep. Nobody’s coming around to rob him.
For what? Old car like mine? It’s a pretty good car, but it’s old.”
Charley’d cleared the three pianos out and replaced them with a synthesizer before the last time I visited.
“It sounds good to me,” he explained.
And for Charley, that’s all that matters.