White Bicycles by Joe Boyd Read Free Book Online

player Ransom Knowling, Muddy’s drummer Willie Smith, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, the Reverend Gary Davis and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. I had called the run-through to explain and rehearse my ideas for the tour. I wanted Ransom to play bass with most of them, Otis and Willie to play with Rosetta, Brownie to play guitar with Joe, Sonny to play harmonica with the Reverend Gary and so on. When I finished my speech, they looked at me blankly. Resentments and objections came at me from all sides. Muddy was upset that we hadn’t brought his whole band. Rosetta didn’t want a blues player like Otis backing her up. What emerged, to my naive surprise, was that they were almost complete strangers to one another.
    The world of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry and the Reverend Gary Davis – of coffee houses, college concerts and ‘folk blues’ – was unknown to the Chicagoans. Brownie and Sonny had played together as a duo since leaving South Carolina and following Leadbelly on to the 1940s folk circuit. Brownie was a deft finger-picking guitarist and a warm singer with a limp, a cane and a huge girth. Underneath the practised politeness was a bitter man: years of conforming to the expectations of white audiences had taken their toll. Sonny was the genius of the rural blues harmonica and had been blind from birth. He was so gentle and deferential behind his dark glasses that it was difficult to determine what he felt about anything. Brownie and Sonny, I discovered, cordially loathed each other offstage. The one thing they agreed on was that, owing to some ancient feud, they wanted nothing to do with the Reverend Gary.
    Also blind and from South Carolina, Gary’s harsh persona had been formed on the back roads of the rural South as an itinerant preacher between the wars. A nephew brought him to the Bronx in the ’50s, where a small band of devotees discovered his monumental skills in a long-forgotten ragtime picking style. A generation of white guitarists took lessons, often earning their schooling by arranging gigs for him. They would lead him from his Bronx tenement to the stage, making sure he ate and dressed himself properly along the way.
    Gary was an alarming-looking man who took some getting used to. His chin was covered in grey stubble and he wore a battered hat and a rumpled black suit. His dark glasses slid down his nose to reveal milky sightless eyes. He horrified Rosetta and her husband/manager Russell the first morning at breakfast when, with shaking hand, he seized the sunny-side-up fried egg, lofted it over his upturned mouth (yolk all the while dribbling down the front of his shirt) and dropped it into his mouth. The edges of the white, trailing grease, protruded from his jaws as he chewed.
    Tom Hoskins was delegated the task of swabbing down the front of Gary’s shirt. Tom was a twenty-five-year-old Southern charmer, responsible for the detective work that had tracked down Mississippi John Hurt in the town of Avalon the previous year. He had listened over and over to the 78s until he decoded lyrics alluding to the South Delta hamlet where he found Hurt sitting on a front stoop, exactly where the scout from Paramount Records had discovered him thirty-five years earlier. With Hurt bowing out of the tour due to illness, Tom came along to help me with the other musicians. Looking after Gary proved to be a full-time job.
    Tom had none of the awkward deference of Northern blues acolytes. He quickly discovered that Gary loved a bit of marijuana in his corncob pipe along with the rough tobacco. Gary and Tom became the party animals of the tour, ready to hang out with fans, preferably female, long past the time everyone else had gone to bed. With young admirers at his feet, Gary would get out his guitar and Tom would load up the pipe and score a bottle of Scotch. The music would continue until the noise drew complaints from next door or until Tom had made sufficient eye contact with one of the girls to bring proceedings