The Dying Crapshooter's Blues by David Fulmer Read Free Book Online

wasn’t all he heard, hard as his mother tried to shield his young ears from the other music that was around, what they first called “gutbucket” then “blues.” It was low-down, vulgar, sinful, and a raw reminder of the man whose last name they both carried.
    Still, she couldn’t strike her son deaf, even if she wanted to, and the devil’s music was everywhere: on the street corners, at the Saturday markets and fish fries, pouring out from the burlapped windows of the unpainted clapboard shacks at the country crossroads where they sold moonshine by the pint and where all the men and half the women toted pistols or razors. Young Willie was so completely enraptured by what he heard inside and outside the church doors that when a well-meaning Statesboro neighbor gave him an old six-string guitar, the path of his life was set.
    His mother tried to take the guitar away for his own good, and he fussed and pouted until she gave in. She taught him every church song she knew in hopes of keeping him on a godly path. It didn’t work; with his eyes blinded, he sopped up everything he heard, and along with gutbucket blues, he mastered ragtime, popular tunes, coon songs, and dance numbers. He could play in the dark delta style, rag it all bouncy like Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller, or deliver a ballad in the way the singers along the Piedmont did it.
    It was his luck to also possess a sweet voice, high and strong and full of texture. Along the way, he switched to twelve-string guitar and found the lush ring and drone suited him all the better. He played fast and loose with dancing fingers, sometimes using a bottleneck or straight razor like they did in Mississippi. He came to believe to his soul that he was as good as anyone around, and no one who heard him disagreed.
    So, like his father, now long gone, he played the devil’s music for a living. He hoped God would understand, and believed sincerely that a morning in church after a night on Decatur Street was a small payment in the direction of his salvation.
    He had even more reason to cross that sanctified threshold this morning. He had felt death’s cold shadow creeping around the street corner the night before, and it gave him a spooking he couldn’t shake. Little Jesse might be on a slow train to hell, but the poor boy was on his way all the same.
    Willie knew Jesse as a wild and reckless gambler who used crooked dice and marked cards. It was little wonder that someone had shot him. He had always expected that either a wronged woman or cheated man would be the one to do him in. Jesse swore it was an Atlanta policeman. Something wasn’t quite right about it. Though who knew what kind of trouble followed a fellow like him?
    Willie mulled it some more, recalling how Robert Clark had scurried away, wanting no part of whatever had happened.

Robert had to know what kind of juju he was risking by leaving Jesse to die alone. And yet he had bolted from the scene like a scared rabbit.
    Passing Pittman Place, Willie turned his thoughts from that sorry business to brighter news. Word had gone around that the Columbia company was sending some folks to Atlanta to make records. Someone had told him about the article in the newspaper stating that the record people would be setting up in the Dixie Hotel on Tuesday, and he planned to be there. He walked on, shuffling through his long list of songs and thinking about what he might play for the people.
    Presently, he reached Decatur Street and stopped on the corner to listen for a moment. The broad boulevard, with its markets, barbershops, billiard rooms, and backroom and basement speakeasies, was a beehive of music and motion six nights a week. On Sunday morning it lay as still and quiet as the wake of a parade. All he heard were echoes.
    Moving along the street, he took in the squalor that had been left for the light of day: the fetid odors of garbage, manure, and raw whiskey; the taste of the black