We ran up on Black Smoke one night at the Boom Boom Room on Thomas Street in North Memphis, back when it was called the J&J. Nice enough dude. We chatted awhile, emptied intoxicating golden liquid into our bellies from chilled aluminum cylinders. He mentioned that he enjoyed picking a little guitar. Well, I'm pretty sure that his guitar is of normal size, but you get the idea. He made it pretty clear that he preferred his blues downhome, citing Lightnin' Hopkins as a sonic mentor. Now hearing a young African American man espouse such musical ideas is pretty damn unusual, so we decided that we must really take in a performance. But, proving as elusive as his nickname, Black Smoke disappeared-- poof!
Until a hot day a couple months later, when I followed the sound of old time blues drifting down Beale Street to the W.C. Handy House. On which porch sat none other than our friend Black Smoke. I encouraged him not to go poof again too soon for me to retrieve my voice recorder. The conversation and the music proved worth the wait. He waxes eloquent on the art of unaccompanied acoustic blues, and talked shit to me for having only seen a mule in photographic form. Though he acknowledges that he's among the younger practitioners of this black art, his story features details that could've come right out of the Lightnin' Hopkins diary: he learned to play from a bootlegger, and, yes, has spent time on the wrong side of a mule.
His story in his words follows. Thanks to Brent Powell for the photograph.
I’m from Arlington, Tennessee out Highway 70 [from Memphis]. Back when I was a boy, I
had heard blues around the house. My family listened to stuff like
Billie Holiday which was good.
I started playing when I was about 15, just messing around. I used to wash this guy’s car, he was a bootlegger named Buddy Harris in Arlington. He’d give me a dollar, which was pretty good money then. He had a guitar laying on the back seat, an old acoustic, and I asked him about it. He said he played, which I didn’t know. He got it out and played some Jimmy Reed, honky-tonk stuff. I just fell in love with it, said, 'Man you’ve got to show me how to do that.' He said, 'Naw, naw.' But I just kept on worryin’ him. Then one day he told me, 'If you wash my car four Saturdays you can have it.'
So that would have been about $4 he sold it to me for, and that was a good deal. It was an old, beat up Stella. Then my problem was I didn’t know how to tune it, so then I had to work another three weeks to learn how to tune the guitar. He showed me cross-natural tuning and honky-tonk.
My family farmed cotton and sharecropped. I knew I wasn’t going to be a
farmer. I couldn’t wait to get that letter that said 'Welcome to the
Army.' When I went into the military, and got married, and my wife didn’t want me messing around with music. There’s a stigma that goes along with people who play music. I never really put it down, though, and played every chance I got. In the army you can check out a guitar from the rec center and play it all day. So I did that, and met some guys and put a little band together and played around posts and little clubs. That went on all the way through my career. We played rhythm and blues stuff, and Temptations and Brooke Benton, Percy Mayfield. Smooth and mellow like, but
tough.
When I started playing,
everybody had nicknames, and I didn’t, so I told people I was Black
Smoke and it stuck.
When I got back to Memphis I got in a group called Tar-G with Larry Winfield. Then I started trying to put bands together. I played with Carl Drew, he’s about 80-something years old.
I just like the sound of one man playing blues. It takes a lot of
nerve. I know guys that won’t do it. They could, but they don’t have
the nerve. They might have the skill, but it’s a psychological thing.
I started playing the one man thing about seven years ago. I always did like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Muddy Waters, and more of the country stuff. I could never get the fellas around here to want to play that. It’s too slow — it’s a feel man, like a spirit. You can know them scales, but it ain’t how well you play, you just have to know how to put that one note there. Those guys want to add to it, they get bored. After they play around the pocket a while you ain’t got them blues.
Blues is what you’re feeling. You feel different from what I feel, but you have experienced it. Always about them women. Older you get, it’s still going to be the same. You never master them women. You can constantly write about that.
We need to get some younger peoples into blues. I’m 56 and I’m probably around the last generation not in a nursing home that still plays it. Blues is something you have to die at to be successful anyway. The young generation just don’t get it. My kids say, 'It sounds so sad, I don’t want to feel like that.' They’ve never even seen a mule. Have you seen a mule? A picture, right? Well, I’ve walked behind one.
The reason I like to play by myself is that it’s so creative, you can
do so much. I write a lot of stuff while I’m playing. I may borrow a
little, but it’s
always been Fannie Mae, even though her name was
something else to me. Just change that name around, or don’t even
mention no names. Make her an oak tree or something, sing about how you
love all trees.
[image copyright Padre Photos 2007]