Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis 9780226234243

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SAY NO TO THE DEVIL

THE LIFE AND MUSICAL GENIUS OF REV. GARY DAVIS

Ian Zack

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS | CHICAGO AND LONDON

Ian Zack is a New York–­based journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Forbes, and Acoustic Guitar. He worked as a concert booker for one of the oldest folk venues in New York, The Good Coffeehouse, where he got to know some of Rev. Gary Davis’s students. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by Ian Zack All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15    1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­23410-­6  (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­23424-­3  (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226234243.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zack, Ian, author. Say No to the devil : the life and musical genius of Rev. Gary Davis / Ian Zack. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-23410-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 0-226-23410-X (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-23424-3 (e-book) 1. Davis, Gary, 1896–1972. 2. Guitarists—United States—Biography. 3. Blues musicians— United States—Biography. 4. Musicians, Black—United States—Biography. I. Title. ml419.d386z33 2015 787.87′1643092—dc23 [b] 2014026575 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper)

WE CAN’T BE A DEVIL ALL OUR LIVES. WE HAVE TO SING SOME GOOD SONGS SOMETIMES TO KEEP THE DEVIL OFF US. R E V. G A R Y D A V I S

CONTENTS Acknowledgmentsix INTRODUCTION: THE ANTI–­ROBERT JOHNSONXV

P R O L O G U E : YO U G O T T O M O V E 

1 6



1

T H E R E WA S A T I M E T H AT I WA S B L I N D ( 189 6 –­1 916 )



2

S T R E E T-­C O R N E R B A R D (1 91 7 –­28 )

24



3

“ I WA S A B L U E S C AT ” ( 1 9 28 –­3 4 )

34



4

G R E AT C H A N G E I N M E (1 9 3 4 –­4 3) 

43



5

M E E T YO U AT T H E S TAT I O N (1 94 3 –­4 9) 

64



6

W H O S H A L L D E L I V E R P O O R M E ? (1 95 0 –­5 5)

81



7

I ’ L L B E A L R I G H T S O M E D AY (1 9 5 5 –­5 7)

96



8

I C A N ’ T M A K E T H I S J O U R N E Y B Y M Y S E L F ( 19 5 8–­5 9) 

105



9

H E K N O W S H O W M U C H W E C A N B E A R ( 19 6 0 –­6 1)

119



10

L E T T H E S AV I O R B L E S S YO U R S O U L : THE REVEREND IN THE PULPIT

132



11

C H I L D R E N , G O W H E R E I S E N D T H E E (1 9 6 1–­6 2)

138



12

L O R D , S TA N D B Y M E ( 1 9 6 2–­6 3 ) 

159



13

O N T H E R O A D A N D O V E R T H E O C E A N ( 19 6 4)

1 78



14

T H E G U I TA R L E S S O N S : “ B R I N G YO U R M O N E Y, H O N E Y ! ”

197



15

B U C K D A N C E ( 1 9 6 5 –­6 6 )

204



16

W H E R E YO U G O I N ’ , O L D D R U N K A R D ?

223



17

T H E R E ’ S A B R I G H T S I D E S O M E W H E R E ( 19 6 7 –­7 0)

231



18

T I R E D , M Y S O U L N E E D S R E S T I N G ( 19 7 1–­7 2 )

244

EPILOGUE: WHEN I DIE, I’LL LIVE AGAIN

262

Selected Discography

269

NOTES

271

INDEX

309



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

could not have written this book without the help of hundreds of people who gave their time, insight, and expertise along the way. When I first discussed the idea of a Rev. Gary Davis biography with Davis’s former guitar student Stefan Grossman, his offer was characteristic: “I’d be happy to help you 100 percent.” Over the course of several years, Grossman not only provided me with personal artifacts from his private archive, including photos, letters, documents, and other ephemera, but also acted as a sounding board and guided me in my research, never tiring of my countless arcane questions. His deep affection for Davis is palpable, but it neither clouded his judgment nor intruded on my independence as a scholar. Thanks also to Mitch Greenhill of Folklore Productions and Chandos Music, Davis’s management company and music publisher, who shared documents and memories of the Reverend and of his father, Manny Greenhill, Davis’s longtime manager. Librarians and archivists are the unsung heroes of historical research. Dozens assisted me with long-­distance queries about their collections, including Greg Johnson at the Blues Archive, University of Mississippi; Anna St. Onge at the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York University; Scott Krafft of the Northwestern University Library; Henry Fulmer at the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina; Kristin Eshelman at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut; Jason Prufer of the Kent State University Main Library; Lynn Richardson of the Durham County Library; Scott Sanders of Antioch College; Marilyn Graf at the  Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music; Alvin Singh of the Lead Belly Archive; John Rumble of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum; Maureen Russell and David Martinelli at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive; Tiffany Colannino of the  Woody Guthrie Archives; Gavin W. Kleespies of the Cambridge Historical Society; and Meredith Rutledge-­Borger of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Todd Harvey at the Library of Congress, who on my behalf plumbed deep into the library’s holdings (particularly the expansive Alan Lomax Collection), sometimes based only on my hunches or suppositions; Jeff Place at the Smithsonian Institution, who not only was a font of knowledge about Folkways Records and Moses Asch but also allowed me to employ his interns for my research during their off hours; and Aaron Smithers and Jamie Vermillion at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who help administer the Southern Folklife Collection, one of the great archives of American music. It’s a fitting tribute to Davis’s own patience and generosity as a teacher that so many of his former students jumped at the chance to provide recollections, artifacts, and insights into his life and music. In addition to Stefan Grossman, several deserve singling out, including Ernie Hawkins, Alex Shoumatoff, Joan Fenton, Barry Kornfeld, North Peterson, Larry Brezer, John Mankiewicz, John Dyer, Allan Evans, and Woody Mann. Other musical acquaintances of Davis also shared stories and items from their own collections, including Larry Cohn, Andy Cohen, and Happy Traum. Fortunately for posterity, some talented folklorists and promoters took an interest in Davis and his music early in his time in New York and throughout the folk revival. Izzy Young, folk music’s Jeremiah, shared insights, copious opinions, and precious relics from his priceless collection, including diary entries and concert posters; Ed Pearl, the irrepressible owner of the Ash Grove club in Los Angeles, knew Davis as well as any promoter, and his insights proved invaluable; Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records provided background on a number of key episodes, including enough detail that I was able to locate a long-­lost lawsuit over the song “You Gotta Move”; John Ullman, who hosted the Reverend on the West Coast twice, provided many stories about and insights into Davis’s life on the road; and John Cohen, one of the first New Yorkers to take an interest in Davis after his move from the South, shared photos and memories. A number of historians were generous in their willingness to educate me and provide leads for my research. First and foremost, Ronald D. Cohen, professor emeritus of history at Indiana University Northwest, who opened his vast Rolodex to me, eagerly prodded me x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

down fruitful roads, and read the raw manuscript; also Neil V. Rosenberg at Memorial University of Newfoundland, who sent me unpublished excerpts of interviews as well as copies of newsletters from his days in the Indiana University Folksong Club; Michael J. Kramer of Northwestern University, who gave me entrée into Northwestern’s archive of the Berkeley Folk Festival and helped me get in touch with festival organizers; Elijah Wald, who not only walked me through the publishing process but also offered terrific advice on improving my narrative and provided me with unpublished materials from his own research; Jeffrey Noonan of Washington University in St. Louis, who educated me about nineteenth-­century parlor guitar styles; and William Lee Ellis of Saint Michael’s College, who shared materials and insights from his extensive research on Gary Davis. In addition, I owe a great debt to the late Robert Tilling, whose lovingly compiled book in tribute to Gary Davis was an invaluable source. When I called him just weeks before his death, he told me: “I was hoping someone like you would come along,” and he encouraged me to make use of the anecdotes he’d collected over many years from Davis’s friends and musical contemporaries. Research assistants around the country helped me look through archives and scan microfilm reels, including Steven Kruger at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Aja Bain, Adam Schutzman, and William Leisek at Smithsonian Folkways; Manu Shetty at the University of Chicago; Ashley Turner at Harvard University; and Nancy Morgan and Michael Panzer at Temple University. Much appreciation also goes to Vennie Deas Moore, a talented researcher who assisted in efforts to track Gary Davis and his family in South Carolina. Court clerks too provided invaluable help, often at great distance. Thanks to Peggy La Maina, deputy county clerk, Atlantic County, New Jersey; Keisha Elliott, deputy register of deeds, Durham County, North Carolina; Sharon A. Davis, chief assistant register of deeds, Durham County, North Carolina; and Kali Holloway, assistant director of communications, New York State Unified Court System. Private tapes and concert recordings of Davis proved extremely beneficial in my research into his life story and music. In addition to the college archives referenced above, Lou Curtiss in San Diego copied several concerts from his collection; Manfred Helfert in Mainz, xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

­ ermany, provided a rare live radio performance of Davis’s from 1961; G and Richard Noblett sent recordings made of Davis in England in 1966 and 1971. Many thanks to Thomas Tierney, Toby Silver, and Michael Brooks at Sony Music, who provided me with scans of recording cards and other documents from Davis’s 1935 American Record Corporation sessions; Chris Clough and Bill Belmont of the Concord Music Group, who provided copies of Riverside and Prestige recording contracts; Gary Kueber of Open Durham, who provided a photograph of one of Davis’s Durham residences; Louis Jay Meyers of Folk Alliance International, who allowed me to duplicate one of the few lengthy interviews ever given by Manny Greenhill; Gordon Lutz and Michael Rogosin, who helped me locate filmmaker Lionel Rogosin’s long-­overlooked interviews of Davis and his second wife, Annie; Alan Balfour, whose knowledge of the British blues scene and extensive musical collections proved invaluable; Mitch Blank, who shared treasures from his museum-­worthy archive of folk music audio tapes and memorabilia; Marty Kohn, who volunteered to search newspaper microfilm for me in Detroit; Leigh Cline, who provided tremendous help and a slew of contacts in the Canadian folk scene; Adam Machado, who assisted with helpful leads from his own folk and blues research for Arhoolie Records; Bryan Brown, who digitized for me many out-­of-­print Davis LPs; Alastair Cochrane, who provided me with scans of concert flyers from Davis’s shows in Glasgow and Cambridge; Scott D. “Record Fiend” Wilkinson, who sent me liner notes about Blind Connie Williams from his great blog; Paul Swinton, who passed along details from a 1971 interview of Davis in England; Kirsten Dahl, who provided a wealth of information about her late ex-­husband, Ian Buchanan, as well as copies of some of Buchanan’s tapes; Yuri Bernikov, of Russian -­Records.com, for Stinson catalog scans; Jocelyn Arem, who gave me some tidbits uncovered for her impressive Caffè Lena History Project; David Dubosky, who helped me press the New York City Police Department for details of Davis’s arrests; Georges Chatelain, who sent me photos taken in London in 1971; John Tefteller, who scanned some seventy-­eight labels from his extensive collection; John Byrne Cooke, for his wonderful photos of Davis at Club 47 in the early sixties; Veronica Majerol, for some French translation; Jim Marshall, who xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

sent me a flyer from Davis’s 1971 Brighton, England, concert; Sheldon Posen, who connected me with folk sources in Ottawa, Canada; and Roger Misiewicz and Helge Thygesen, who provided documents and record scans relating to Davis’s 1935 sessions. Much appreciation to all who agreed to be interviewed for the book, either in person, by phone, or by e-­mail: Billy Abercrombie, Phil Allen, David Amram, Bruce Barthol, Bo Basiuk, Harold Becker, Alex Bevan, Danny Birch, “Ragtime” Rick Blaufeld, Liz Blum, Roy Book Binder, Spencer Bohren, Oscar Brand, Larry Brezer, Derek Brimstone, David Bromberg, Rolly Brown, Joe Boyd, Bob Carlin, Leigh Cline, Samuel Charters, Earl Crabb, Alastair Cochrane, John Cohen, Larry Cohn, Bruce Conforth, Larry Conklin, Michael Cooney, Rev. Frederick Crawford, Lou Curtiss, Kirsten Dahl, Barbara Dane, Dr. Burt D’Lugoff, John Dyer, Ari Eisinger, Allan Evans, Seth Fahey, Joan Fenton, Richard Flohil, Steve Gilford, Harvey Glatt, Wavy Gravy (née Hugh Romney), Dick Greenhaus, Mitch Greenhill, Stefan Grossman, Jim Hale, Johnnie Hamp, Ernie Hawkins, Fred Hellerman, Rev. James Herndon, Paul Hostetter, Jerry Houck, Doris Houston, Beau Johnson (née Bill Dawes), Earl Jones, Robert L. Jones, Bob Kass, Steve Katz, Jesse Kincaid, Ken Kipnis, Barry Kornfeld, M. William Krasilovsky, Jack Landrón (aka Jackie Washington), Joel Latner, Lyle Lofgren, Taj Mahal, Barry Melton, John Mankiewicz, Woody Mann, Jim Marshall, Al Mattes, Dan McCrimmon, Ralph McTell, Doug Menuez, Janet Morris, Chris Morris, Michael Nerenberg, Richard Noblett, Barry Olivier, Hank O’Neal, Tom Paley, Bernie Pearl, Ed Pearl, North Peterson, Mitch Podolak, Andy Polon, Brendan Power, Simon Prager, Jerry Rasmussen, Ron Rebhuhn, Robin Roberts, Jim Robinson, Mark Ross, Charlie Rothschild, Tom Rush, Rick Ruskin, Tony Saletan, Alex Shoumatoff, Molly Scott, Gene Shay, Harvey Shield, Marc S. Silber, Dr. Alvin Singh, Betsy Siggins, Vic Smith, Alan Smithline, Ellen Stekert, Chris Strachwitz, Harry Sunshine, Mike Taub, Harry Taussig, Terri Thal, Robert Tilling, John Townley, Happy Traum, Harry Tuft, John Ullman, Dick Waterman, Dick Weissman, Harry West, David Wilson, Geoff Withers, Izzy Young, and Howard Ziehm. I’m very grateful to John Tryneski, Rodney Powell, and Ruth Goring of the University of Chicago Press for their guidance, expertise, and extreme attention to detail throughout the publishing process; and to xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Leslie Keros, my esteemed copy editor, whose careful reading and probing questions greatly improved the manuscript. And finally, a profound thanks to Wendy, Sam, and Hannah, who let me take on this project and provided so much encouragement and support along the way.

xiv

INTRODUCTION THE ANTI–­ROBERT JOHNSON

D

uring the folk revival of the 1960s, young sleuths tracked down elderly bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Son House, and Skip James, finding them ensconced in alternative careers as farm laborers, train porters, or factory hands or, in the case of James, languishing in a hospital bed. They’d made landmark recordings on 78 rpm shellac discs in the 1920s and ’30s before disappearing, and now the bleary-­eyed, disbelieving old men were whisked away to big folk festivals and feted like lost superheroes. Hurt became a genuine celebrity and folk icon. House was bestowed with the title “father of the delta blues.” And Lewis was invited to appear on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. While all this was going on, a man who had arguably been the greatest of all the blues-­based guitarists to record before World War II contented himself by basking in the warm glow of his circle of admirers. He’d never been found or “rediscovered” because he didn’t need to be. He’d been hiding in plain sight all along. Rev. Gary Davis had been living in threadbare poverty in New York City since the early 1940s. He preferred singing spirituals, not the blues, after his ordination as a Baptist minister. But his nearly unsurpassed ability as a musician was as plain as Scripture to his many young acolytes, even if the general public remained unaware. Bob Dylan, who rubbed elbows with Davis in Greenwich Village in the early sixties and recorded a number of his songs, considered him “one of the wizards of modern music.” Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead guitarist who, like many folk and rock musicians, took guitar lessons from Davis in New York, said he “had a Bachian sense of music, which transcended any common notion of a bluesman.” And Alan Lomax, the celebrated folklorist, rated him “one of the really great geniuses of American instrumental music, a man who belongs in the company of Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet.”1 Yet Davis—­“the Rev” to his musical flock—­never became an American cultural icon like Armstrong or Muddy Waters. Four decades after xv

INTRODUCTION

his death, his genius has gone largely unrecognized in the popular culture, even though he exerted a considerable influence on the folk scene of the sixties and on the early rock scene of the seventies. Indeed, many of Davis’s musical contemporaries stood in awe of his abilities. Danny Kalb, a founder of the Blues Project, the seminal sixties blues-­rock band, called Davis “absolutely the best overall American guitarist.” (Kalb, it should be noted, shared a bill with Jimi Hendrix at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and jammed with Waters.) And Jorma Kaukonen, the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna guitarist who has made Davis’s repertoire central to his own for forty years, regards the South Carolina native as “one of the greatest figures of . . . twentieth century music.”2

*

Davis’s relative cultural obscurity today stems in large measure from his life choices. Though he remained, up until the last years of his life, one of the world’s greatest, if not the greatest, of all traditional blues and ragtime guitarists, as an evangelizing minister he steadfastly refused to perform blues music—­that is, play it and sing it the way he could—­on the concert stage or in a recording studio for most of his career. (In private with the door shut—­and out of earshot of his devout second wife, Annie—­was another story.) The business of saving souls is what occupied him, and fame didn’t seem to motivate him, even when it appeared within his grasp. Barbara Dane, a white blues singer who shared a good many concert bills with Davis in the 1950s and ’60s, recalled that he never sought out the limelight. “He ran into, of course, a whole lot of up-­and-­coming . . . musicians who loved what he did and caused his name to be highly revered inside music circles,” Dane says. “That was enough for him apparently . . . and that’s probably an important part of who he is.”3 It could be said that Davis turned Robert Johnson’s legend on its head: he didn’t sell his soul to the devil, as Johnson was rumored to have done, to acquire superhuman blues guitar chops. Rather, Davis renounced blues music in his prime and devoted his life to God as a preacher. When recording blues material might have opened professional doors or record producers’ wallets—­and stamped an express ticket out of poverty—­Davis refused again and again. xvi

THE ANTI–ROBERT JOHNSON

Eventually, his gospel music got him to the Promised Land, or at least the Promised Neighborhood: a comfortable home on a street of well-­tended lawns, off the mean sidewalks of New York where for nearly two decades he’d stood hour after hour playing, singing, and preaching for spare change while fending off muggers and the police. His story is one of survival against the odds, gritty perseverance, unshakable faith, and talent’s triumph over towering adversity. It’s also a story of generosity—­his own and that of his followers, who worked tirelessly on his behalf both during his lifetime and after his death to try and get him his due. Davis couldn’t have begun with a poorer hand. The blind son of dirt-­poor sharecroppers in post-­Reconstruction South Carolina, he might have met the same fate as his seven (sighted, so far as we know) brothers and sisters, none of whom lived to the age of thirty. Davis would later attribute his survival to God’s hand: he’d been denied the ability to see but given something special in return. Without discounting that explanation, the sheer force of the Reverend’s personality, his razor-­sharp intelligence, and his iron will to survive deserve at least part of the credit, along with, of course, his otherworldly abilities as a guitarist and composer. He’s one of those rare musicians who help change the very conception of their instrument, who see potential where others see constraint. In his case, he also managed to translate darkness—­both literal and metaphorical—­ into light.

*

Some of his guitar students, mesmerized by his musical virtuosity and inspired by his doggedness in the face of hardship, had a tendency to idealize Rev. Gary Davis, perhaps in the wish to believe that he’d managed, against all odds, to fully transcend his harrowing beginnings. In that vision of his life, he emerged Buddha-­like from the abyss of the Jim Crow South and achieved a kind of walking nirvana, doling out life lessons from an exalted spiritual plain as he plucked out impossible riffs on his beat-­up Gibson. Some of his own music surely promoted that view: “oh glory, how happy I am,” “there’s been a great change since I been born,” “must have that pure religion—­must have religion in your soul converted,” and so on. xvii

INTRODUCTION

In truth, Davis was uncommonly giving, spiritual, tenacious beyond most usual conceptions of the word, funny, charming, quick-­ witted, and, of course, profoundly gifted. But he was also cocky, competitive, sinful, and at times unfaithful to the religious virtues he sang about so mightily. His music, one might say, was profoundly aspirational, and if he sometimes fell short of a commandment or two, the only one he had to answer to was God. He seemed to understand that about himself. The devil may have ruled on terra firma. But in the words of one of Davis’s spirituals, “A Little More Faith,” a final repose would be found in heaven, where “my sins are forgiven and my soul set free.”

xviii

PROLOGUE

YOU GOT TO MOVE All I know is, the house exploded after listening to him because they didn’t know him. I mean he was just a new star. Robin Roberts

O

n the morning of December 6, 1949, the music community in New York City awoke to tragic news: Huddie Ledbetter, the iconic, silver-­haired folk singer and onetime murder convict known to his legion of fans as Lead Belly, had succumbed to complications of Lou Gehrig’s disease on Ward R6 of Bellevue Hospital.1 From his tenement apartment on Tenth Street on the Lower East Side, Lead Belly had held court for nearly two decades as the alpha songster of the New York folk scene, a larger-­than-­life figure and one of the best-­known balladeers in the world. Before it finally took his life, the degenerative muscular disease formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) had laid low a man who in his prime had had a barrel chest and taut muscles honed by picking a thousand pounds of cotton a day with a partner back in his native Louisiana.2 Word that Lead Belly had passed into immortality at the age of sixty-­one shook fellow musicians from the nightclubs of Greenwich Village to the jazz lounges of Harlem. That day the folklorist Alan Lomax, who, along with his father, John, had discovered Ledbetter in 1933 at the Louisiana State Penitentiary—­where he was serving time for slashing a man with a knife—­announced that a memorial concert would be held to honor him, the first ever staged for an American folk singer.3 Lomax planned the concert in consultation with Lead Belly’s grieving wife, Martha. As part of the memorial, he’d wanted to show a movie he’d taken of the singer in his prison uniform at Angola, but 1

PROLOGUE

Martha was said to have told him, “I’d rather see him in his coffin than in his stripes,” and Lomax heeded her wishes.4 After nearly two months of preparations, the show took place at midnight on January 28, 1950, at New York’s stately red brick Town Hall on West Forty-­Third Street. It turned out to be the most spectacular musical gathering in the city since John Hammond’s monumental From Spirituals to Swing concert in 1938 brought together the leading lights of blues, gospel, and jazz under one roof for the first time. The program for the tribute read like a who’s who of blues, jazz, and folk music: Woody Guthrie, W. C. Handy, Sidney Bechet, Eubie Blake, Pete Seeger, Count Basie, and Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry among them. With Lead Belly’s famous twelve-­string Stella guitar suspended high up in the center of a gray curtain, the A-­list musicians took their seats on stage for the first act, waiting for their turn to approach the microphone and pay tribute to the departed songster.5 One of the performers that night was all but unknown to the crowd, though Lomax, Lead Belly, and a few of the musicians in their circle by then were certainly familiar with South Carolina–­born Rev. Gary Davis: the fifty-­four-­year-­old blind Baptist preacher had arrived in New York City six years earlier from Durham, North Carolina, where he’d tutored Blind Boy Fuller, one of the best-­selling country bluesmen of all time. While in Durham, Davis had landed a single recording session of his own that had captured his nearly unrivaled virtuosity as a guitarist, even if the 78 rpm records released under the name “Blind Gary” hadn’t sold well. Not long after, he’d found God and been ordained a minister. In New York, Davis lived with his second wife, Annie, in a shabby East Bronx apartment, subsisting on “pass the hat” offerings at small churches where he preached, the nickels and dimes that rattled in his tin cup when he performed on street corners in Harlem and around the city, and a welfare check. Davis’s rasping but powerful voice, his personal magnetism, and his showmanship served him equally well as a street evangelist and itinerant Baptist minister for poor storefront congregations. Although he’d pointedly chosen the mission of serving Jesus over leading the life of a blues singer, Davis possessed a staggering guitar 2

YOU GOT TO MOVE

technique grounded in blues and ragtime, and he was a born entertainer, whether performing spirituals or the secular rags and dance tunes (but no sung blues) he then included in his repertoire. He not only played the daylights out of his instrument but also drew upon a musical bag of tricks, such as pounding on his acoustic guitar like a drum with his right hand while picking out notes and entire chords with his left, making the guitar imitate human voices, and even creating a reasonable facsimile of an entire marching band on his six strings. All of which he punctuated with ecstatic cries of “Good God!” and improvised yelps of spiritual delight. It made for a riveting show. At the end of the first act of the Lead Belly tribute, a major New York audience got its first introduction to the Reverend. With the other performers—­including Guthrie and seventy-­six-­year-­old W. C. Handy, known as “the father of the blues”—­seated on the stage, Robin Roberts, a young aspiring singer and actress, got ready to lead out Davis. He carried a metal walking cane and wore dark aviator glasses, a suit, and a guitar slung in unorthodox fashion around his neck rather than over his shoulder. As Roberts offered up her arm, Davis gave no indication of any nerves. In fact, he almost seemed to size up the beautiful brunette from behind his black shades. “How old are you?” he asked. “I’m twenty-­three,” his escort replied. Davis responded with what would become something of a trademark: a bit of southern folk wisdom, tinged with sexual innuendo. “Young mules,” he told her, “always kick hardest.”6 According to the script for the program, Lomax gave the following introduction to the crowd at Town Hall and to a radio audience tuning in live on WOR in New York as the blind musician emerged from behind the curtain: When Lead Belly was a young fellow, he played second guitar for the greatest of the blues singers of that day—­Blind Lemon Jefferson of Dallas, Texas. They roamed the streets together the dry days and

the wet—­singing for ten hours at a stretch, their fingers finding the new chords and figures that came to make Negro folk music. Meet now one of these great street musicians, Reverend Gary Davis.7

3

PROLOGUE

Like a gifted athlete in his prime, Davis had a knack for seizing the spotlight, and his brief performance that night became the stuff of quiet legend. Seventeen-­year-­old John Cohen, a future member of the seminal folk revival group the New Lost City Ramblers, had a seat in the packed house, having convinced his father to take him to the late-­ night concert. Cohen had been listening to Lead Belly’s records for two years, and he was aware of Pete Seeger and the Weavers, but he was unprepared for what he saw now on the stage. “They closed the curtain and a short time later this one old man comes out into the spotlight with his guitar and cane. We had no idea who he was,” Cohen recalled. “He played two numbers on the guitar, then went back behind the curtain. It was amazing. I was really just learning to play the guitar. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”8 Tom Paley, later Cohen’s bandmate in the New Lost City Ramblers, remembers being seated on stage for the first act next to Woody Guthrie, who occasionally sneaked back behind the curtain to have a drink before returning to his chair. When Davis came on, Paley did a double take. He’d once scooped up two “Blind Gary” 78s at a secondhand record shop and listened in awe to the guitar playing on those scratchy old records. He never expected for a moment that Blind Gary would materialize before his eyes. “When they brought this blind man up with the guitar and introduced him as Reverend Gary Davis, I didn’t know the Davis part of the name,” Paley says, “but he was blind and his name was Gary and I thought, ‘Could it be this amazing guitarist from those old records?’ And, yes! Yes it was!”9 In Cohen’s recollection, the Reverend played two songs that night: “You Got to Move,” a driving spiritual featuring impossibly syncopated guitar—­which would become the subject, two decades later, of a copyright lawsuit with the Rolling Stones—­and “Marine Band,” an instrumental rag in which Davis’s lone guitar imitated the brass bands of his youth. The effect on a crowd that had never heard this orchestral style of fingerpicking, or the guttural shouts of a street evangelist, was startling.10 “People just went mad because he was the most exciting new thing at the entire concert,” Roberts remembered.11 The New York Times report on the show singled out only two performers by name: Jean Ritchie, the Kentucky folk singer, and Davis. 4

YOU GOT TO MOVE

“The attentive audience gave heavy applause to the Rev. Gary Davis, blind singer from the Deep South,” the Times said.12 Dan Burley, a Kentucky-­born boogie-­woogie pianist, also performed that night. Burley moonlighted as a journalist and an influential one at that, as managing editor of the New York Age, the city’s leading black newspaper. Burley seemed to grasp the significance of Gary Davis’s performance, writing the following day that Davis was “a likely successor to the great folk singer, guitarist Lead Belly.” In fact, as the ethnomusicologist William Lee Ellis has written, Davis may have possessed a repertoire equal to that of the prolific Lead Belly, who recorded two hundred songs in the two decades after his discovery and probably took untold others to his grave.13 But even though the audience—­and a good many of the perform­ ers—­left Town Hall that chilly winter’s morning believing they’d witnessed the emergence of an extraordinary talent and possible heir to Lead Belly, nothing ever came easily for Rev. Gary Davis. Committed as he remained to his church work, he would be relegated to the musical margins and a life of urban poverty for another dozen years. Davis would live hand-­to-­mouth as he’d done for decades, counting on the kindness and good taste of those who heard him shouting his songs over the racket of city buses and police sirens or preaching the gospel in a cramped storefront. Still, on that big stage, with the spotlight upon him and the roar of the New York crowd in his ears, Davis must have sensed how far he’d come on a perilous journey that began deep in the South Carolina countryside.

5

CHAPTER ONE

THERE WAS A TIME THAT I WAS BLIND (1896–­1916) It’s so hard I have to be blind I’m away in the dark and got to feel my way And nobody cares for me1 Re v . Gar y Davis

E

lderly blacks in Laurens County, South Carolina, still remember an old railroad trestle and a putrid piece of rope that hung from it for decades. The rope, they say, had last been put to use back in 1913 by a white mob that lynched a black man accused of rape. While the rope and trestle live on only as jagged shards of memory, other unpleasant reminders endure of the harrowing environment in which Gary Davis grew up, most notably the Ku Klux Klan Museum and Redneck Shop, housed in what used to be a segregated movie theater. Items available for purchase at the shop include white hooded robes, Klan stickers, and photocopies of “Whites Only” segregation signs.2 A few paces away is the Laurens County Courthouse, a Corinthian-­ columned building that looks about the same as it did in Davis’s youth. The courthouse square in the city of Laurens, the county seat, retains a retro feel, its red brick storefronts adorned with Coca-­Cola and Bull Durham Tobacco ads painted on the side. It doesn’t take a lot of conjuring to envision the old stagecoach route that linked Laurens County to Greenville and Spartanburg to the northwest in the 1800s. Back then, if you had traveled along that dirt thoroughfare from the courthouse and veered off a great distance into the gently rolling hills, you’d have eventually found yourself amid a quiet patchwork of ragged farms, mountain-­fed creeks, and lush forestland miles from any hint of bustle. This is the place where Gary Davis’s life began—­and might well have ended, if not for his astonishing musical gifts.3 Laurens County was in the midst of social and economic turmoil in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Union victory in the Civil 6

THERE WAS A TIME THAT I WAS BLIND (1896–1916)

War had left the state’s farm economy in ruins. Many white farmers who’d depended on forced labor had been wiped out as four hundred thousand South Carolina slaves became free under the watchful eyes of federal troops and the Freedmen’s Bureau. Farmers who’d managed to stay afloat still needed a workforce, and newly freed blacks had few skills outside of farm work, so the uneasy alliances of sharecropping and tenant farming had arisen in place of outright servitude. At the same time, a violent struggle had erupted over Reconstruction, as whites aimed to take back what Robert E. Lee’s troops lost on the battlefield. One center of resistance was Laurens County in the northwest corner of the state. In 1870 it was the scene of a bloody riot, when a brief battle between white and black militias over a local election prompted thousands of armed white men to descend on horseback from surrounding counties; they chased down and attacked blacks over several days, killing six, including a recently elected black state legislator, whose corpse was left rotting in the road. As terrorist acts against blacks escalated statewide, President Ulysses S. Grant tried in vain to assert federal authority and tamp down the influence of the Ku Klux Klan by suspending habeas corpus in Laurens and eight other South Carolina counties and placing them under martial law. But by the time the century drew to a close, Washington gave up trying to impose its will and turned its attention elsewhere. In 1895, South Carolina’s new constitution effectively resurrected the antebellum order. The charter imposed, among other things, a poll tax and de facto literacy test for voting—­voters had to be able to read or interpret an entire passage of the state constitution, an impossibility for illiterate former slaves—­as well as a ban on interracial marriage; it provided the legal basis for the Jim Crow laws and customs that would subjugate blacks for decades to come. The following year, the US Supreme Court established “separate but equal” as the law of the land from sea to shining sea. If life was hard for most black South Carolinians then, it was especially so in Laurens County, where only 4 percent of blacks worked a farm they owned, the second-­lowest proportion of the state’s forty counties. John and Evelina Davis were among the sharecroppers in Laurens trying to eke out an existence on a patch of someone else’s land. On April 30, 1896, their eldest son, Gary, was born.4 7

CHAPTER ONE

Gary Davis’s mother, the former Evelina Martin, was seventeen when she gave birth, and she would go on to have a total of eight children, most likely by multiple fathers. But with proper medical care for blacks practically nonexistent, six of her children died as infants; only Gary and a younger brother—­probably a half-­brother, named Buddy Pinson—­survived, and Buddy would die in 1930 at age twenty-­ five, stabbed to death by a girlfriend with a butcher’s knife. That would leave Gary as the sole survivor of Evelina Davis’s large brood.5 The event that would define Davis’s life—­the loss of his sight—­ occurred soon after birth. “I’d taken sore eyes when I was three weeks old,” he recalled in one version of the story. “They [took] me to a doctor and the doctor put some alum and sweet milk in my eyes and they caused ulcers in my eyes. That’s what caused me to go blind.” In his later application to attend a school for the blind, Davis’s mother would tell a similar story, blaming his blindness on “medicines of doctor who made a mistake.”6 A doctor who examined him as an adult would conclude that Davis had suffered both infant glaucoma and ulceration of the cornea,7 a condition that can result from neonatal conjunctivitis contracted from a mother with gonorrhea and also can afflict children with a severe Vitamin A deficiency. As to what led to Davis’s blindness, a family friend named Tiny Robinson gave a different explanation: she said Davis’s mother blinded him by trying to treat his eye infection with lye soap, an old folk remedy. Davis’s second wife, Annie, corroborated the story about the doctor as Davis himself told it. Both accounts seem plausible, but the common denominator was the absence of even rudimentary medical care. Davis said the doctor told his family that he “might overcome it” as he aged,8 but he never regained his sight. Davis’s blindness was “near total,” as his blind school application would note, meaning he wasn’t in complete darkness. That jibes with Davis’s own description decades later in New York: “I could tell the look of a person, but to tell who it is, I’m not able to do that.”9 The exact location of Davis’s birthplace remains unconfirmed. However, in one interview, when asked about his parents, he said: “This was Mr. Abercrombie’s farm. He had a great big plantation. I don’t know how long we stayed with Mr. Abercrombie ’cause I was a baby then.” The plantation Davis remembered most likely belonged 8

THERE WAS A TIME THAT I WAS BLIND (1896–1916)

to a Jonathan McCall Abercrombie, who owned 322 acres in Young’s township, in the upper-­west quadrant of the county not far from the town of Gray Court.10 “My parents were workin’ people—­farmers,” Davis recalled. “They raised everything on the farm—­chickens, cattle, hogs, dogs. .  .  . peaches, apples, plums, pears, apricots—­pretty near every kind of thing.”11 Cotton, of course, was the big cash crop, aided by the region’s temperate climate and long growing season, and Davis may have neglected to mention it on that occasion because it was a given. Davis’s parents weren’t well suited to raising children, and Davis’s maternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Annie Spencer, quickly assumed responsibility for young sightless Gary. Davis’s mother “was once upon a time a rough woman”—­a southern euphemism for being sexually loose—­who was always “twistin’ about from one place to another,” Davis remembered, and “didn’t care to be bothered with no children.” His father was “in trouble all the time.” John Davis eventually left South Carolina and was shot to death around 1906 by the sheriff in Birmingham, Alabama, apparently after slitting a lover’s throat and telling the authorities, “Come and get me.”12 Evelina Davis not only gave up primary responsibility for raising her son to her mother—­she outright rejected Gary emotionally, although she remained in his life. The abandonment had a profound effect on him. As Davis later recalled: I felt horrible about it ’cause I felt like I was throwed away. In fact, my

mother never had cared as much about me as she did my younger brother. . . . He was her heart. . . . Because of the way she talkin’ to me, she’d wish that I were dead. She tell me that a heap of times.13

It’s surely no coincidence that the themes of death, abandonment, the lost child in the wilderness, and a reunion with his mother ran through Davis’s gospel message and music. Indeed, gospel as an art form grew out of the misery and deprivation of the southern black experience, and those themes are common in the music as a whole. In Davis’s case, it’s easy to see why. Perhaps his most famous song, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” though based on traditional spirituals, has a strong autobiographical element for the only surviving child of eight, with its signature lament, “death don’t have no mercy in this land.” 9

CHAPTER ONE

Davis would often sing about seeing his mother in heaven, when, presumably, all would be forgiven under God’s grace. But his anger would also remain palpable. In “Lord, I Wish I Could See,” he would address his mother’s rejection in searingly poetic detail, singing: “Nobody cares for me, because I’m away in the dark and I cannot see.” The other theme that would occupy Davis as both a minister and performer—­personal salvation and the rejection of sin—­can be seen, in part, as a response to the wayward ways of his parents: his mother’s philandering and his father’s “troubles,” which may have been alcohol related.14 “You got to learn how to live [be]’fore your children,” Davis would sing in “You Got to Go Down,” and it’s likely he had both parents in mind. Life in Laurens County revolved around the harvest, particularly cotton, although low market prices only added to the economic distress of the landlocked white farmers and their black tenants in the tempestuous decades after the Civil War. Davis and his family had an unsettled life as sharecroppers, to say the least, and it was probably quite desolate, though Davis would rarely discuss his childhood in those terms, and he never tried to elicit any sympathy when asked about his early years. Still, he hinted at the lack of basic necessities like shoes, telling a concert audience in the 1960s that the clay was so red in Laurens that when the rains came it would “put another shoe sole on your foot.”15 The Davises rarely stayed on one farm for very long, and Gary’s account of moving year after year during his youth is a remarkable testament to the instability of the sharecropper’s life: We stayed at Mr. Abercrombie’s place and we moved from that

place .  .  . near the railroad to Mr. Tan Moore, it was. Then after

we left there, we went to Mr. Joe C. Calhoun, and we left there—­ uh—­one place I remember we lived at—­I was a small child then—­ was Mr. Jim Todd’s near a town. .  .  . and [we] went to Miss Nero

Trainhem’s. And we left Miss Trainhem’s and went to Mr. Calhoun

Wallace’s place. We left Mr. Calhoun Wallace and went to Waterloo on Mr. Joe Culbertson’s place; and after we left there, we went to Doctor Fuller’s. Left Doc Fuller’s and went to Miss Lou Crumm-

10

THERE WAS A TIME THAT I WAS BLIND (1896–1916)

ley’s. From Miss Lou Crummley’s, we went to Miss Pet McKilvey’s. From Miss Pet McKilvey’s, we went to Willard Dick. Left there and

went to Mr. Paul Roper’s and stayed there. We left Mr. Paul Roper’s

and went back to Miss McKilvey’s. From Miss Pet McKilvey’s [to] Mr. Joe Whamps. We left Mr. Joe Whamps and went to Mr. Jim Lewis McCarthy’s. Stayed there for about two years.16

The sharecropping system, with its contracts and strict accounting, was intended, in part, to protect black farmers from exploitation, but in practice most were illiterate, and plenty of opportunity existed for landlords to take advantage. Farm owners typically provided supplies like mules and feed as well as clothing and a place to live in return for a quarter to half the harvested crops. Davis recalled how the system kept his family from making any real economic progress: Down there you worked on the halves, like if you made ten bales [of cotton] you’d get five and the boss man get five. Now if you got $10 from the boss man, he’d look for you to pay $20 back. . . . The guy

would come out there with his great big old goggly-­looking glasses

on his face and say, “Why don’t we run up accounts? Well, you got $150 so-­and-­so-­and-­so, and the one day that you didn’t work and I

had to hire somebody in your place—­I’ll charge you $50 for that.

Then you know I had to pay for all the fertilizer, and it comes to so-­ and-­so-­and-­so. . . . Well ah . . .” and he’d get to figuring up: “Sum total—­well, I owe you a nickel!”17

White farm owners often had little cash to pay for labor and were inclined to keep tenants on at the end of the cultivating season if they met their obligations as laid out in the rental contract. If not, owners might send them packing unless the tenants had too many debts to pay.18 Tenants, on the other hand, moved around a lot, seeking the best terms. The Davises, it seemed, had problems with most of their landlords. Though he was blind, young Gary learned how to do just about everything on the farm, his labor doubtless a necessity for his family. He picked cotton and sugar cane, pulled corn fodder, and baled hay. He had a special affinity for the animals he raised, especially the chick11

CHAPTER ONE

ens. He recalled raising 350 head of chicken, who became the future minister’s first flock, alighting onto his shoulders when he approached the coop.19 In the absence of any affection from his mother, Davis often called his grandmother “maw.” She cared for him but ran a strict home, whipping him with belts or switches if he got out of line. Housing for sharecroppers consisted of one-­or two-­room wood frame dwellings, with the children often sleeping on pallets. Food was scarce, and what little they had often went to important guests. “Lots of times my grandmother used to go to church and bring back a gang of preachers and eat up the best food,” Davis remembered. “The rest of the children would be scared to ask for it. I wouldn’t. I’d get to the table. . . . I’d say, ‘Maw, I’ll thank you for some chicken!’”20 Usually, the response came back: “Eat what’s before you.” And that was “whatever they’d give us. If it would be cornbread and cabbages, it would be that. And if it be butter and bread, we get that. If it be butter, molasses and bread, we get that. If it be bread and milk, we get that.”21 Visiting preachers were treated like dignitaries because of the church’s dominant role in black southern life. At a time when blacks endured growing restrictions on their rights and freedoms, renewed assaults on their dignity and physical attacks intended to cow them into submission, the church became, literally, a sanctuary. Nearly every black South Carolinian adult claimed church affiliation.22 Blacks ran their own congregations, and with politics off limits, churches became the voice of solidarity and aspiration. Ministers and preachers—­ usually men with engaging personalities and a gift of oratory—­ occupied a privileged status in the community. One can easily see how Gary regarded these men with awe, given the perquisites they enjoyed. Davis’s grandma, who had likely been born a slave, was a religious woman. (Plantation owners often encouraged their slaves to sit in on church services and participate in revivals.) She taught Davis his first spiritual, “Children of Zion,” which he would later record and which he would claim was “over five hundred years old,” perhaps suggesting an African origin to the melody. He also remembered first hearing the spirituals “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning” and “Blow, Gabriel” from his grandmother. Unlike his mother, Grandma Annie 12

THERE WAS A TIME THAT I WAS BLIND (1896–1916)

“always would carry me to church and everywhere she wanted to go,” Davis recalled.23 As a boy, Davis sang in the choir of the Center Rabun Baptist Church, whose congregation still exists today in Gray Court. The congregation first held services in 1873 under a brush arbor “in the woods,” church members recalled. By 1904, when Davis was eight, the church occupied a forty-­by-­sixty-­foot wood frame building with wings on one side, a belfry, and a baptistery, and its congregation numbered about 125 souls.24 Davis later identified himself as a Missionary Baptist. In South Carolina, the Missionary Baptist movement had come into its own during a religious revival in the 1830s that occurred amid the Second Great Awakening, when Protestantism spread rapidly in both the North and South. An evangelical sect, Missionary Baptists put most of their energies into converting the masses and expunging evil from the world in preparation for Christ’s Second Coming. The Missionaries’ focus on saving individual souls appealed to a growing number of slaves throughout the South,25 who helped it become one of the most popular denominations for rural southern blacks after the Civil War. That evangelical zeal would ultimately follow black migrants like Gary Davis to their small storefront congregations in northern cities, and in his case, evangelism would become his life’s work once he became a minister. Firsthand accounts of the churches of Davis’s youth are rare. A white woman who identified herself as Aunt Kate witnessed an early twentieth-­century black church service in Laurens County, and her chronicle is one of the few that survive from that era. She described a packed church building as “well lighted by gas” and services much more spirited than what she was used to at her own church, including “the shouting they do now, [which] consists of waving the hands and keeping time with the music as their heels strike the floor.” She went on: The text the preacher took was a very appropriate one for the occa-

sion as the meeting closed that night—­“The harvest is past, the summer is ended and ye are not yet saved.” .  .  . The singing appealed to me most. How would you like to hear an old time darkey

13

CHAPTER ONE

of the Uncle Remus type rise and sing in [a] sweet alto voice as only a negro can, “I have a mother at the beautiful gate. She’s a waiting an’ er watching for me.”26

Davis would use similar lyrics in one of his own compositions, “Soon My Work Will All Be Done,” in the 1960s. The spirituals sung in the early black Baptist churches were those of a people, first enslaved and then oppressed, who dared to conceive of a better life. As James Weldon Johnson would write in the Second Book of Negro Spirituals, the black churchgoer “dreamed his dreams and declared his visions; he uttered his despair and prophesied his victories.”27 The true meaning of the black spirituals—­who churchgoers had in mind when they sang about “the devil,” or what “promised land” they hoped to reach—­was known only to them. If blacks in Laurens County preferred the relatively safe confines of the church, they had good reason. Race relations were touch-­and-­ go at best, and the threat of violence always hung in the air. At their annual convention in 1904, black South Carolina Baptists noted that lynching, homicide, and other capital crimes were on the rise, and it didn’t take much to set a white posse in motion. Davis recounted one story from his youth of a black man who was lynched for hugging a white woman. “They took that man out there and made sausage out of him . . . that’s what they done.”28 Violence could be avoided if certain protocols were followed, as one historian of black life in South Carolina noted: On public roads and sidewalks, [a black] conceded the right of way

to whites and tipped his hat or head to them. . . . He addressed post-­ adolescent whites with titles of respect though such titles were

never extended to him. Instead of the respectful “Mr.” he might be

called “Professor” or “Reverend,” for white Carolinians regarded those terms as neutral. If he were elderly or “respected,” he was ad-

dressed as “Uncle. If his wife were old and “faithful,” she was “Aunt” or “Auntie.”29

Not all race relations were bleak. Davis could point to examples of kindness from whites. He always remembered a white neighbor who took pity on the little boy whose mother was rarely around. “He used 14

THERE WAS A TIME THAT I WAS BLIND (1896–1916)

to tell me about a white lady, how good she was to him,” Davis’s second wife, Annie, recalled. “She’d feed him and . . . she had a little boy just about his age and size . . . and they would play together. And he said she’d even let him sleep over at night.”30

*

Music became a part of Davis’s life from a very young age. He took up the harmonica around age five at the encouragement of his mother’s elder brother, William. Davis learned to mimic the squeals of pigs, the squawks of chickens, the chug-­a-­lug of a steam train, and the baying of hounds on a coon hunt. He became accomplished at the blues harp and often included solo harmonica pieces in his concerts later on. By the time Davis turned seven, his parents had gone their separate ways and his mother had remarried. A stepfather, who didn’t remain in Davis’s life long, bought him his first five-­string banjo, and Davis taught himself how to play.31 Around the same time a traveling musician came through toting the instrument that would become like Davis’s third arm: “The first time I ever heard a guitar played, I thought it was a brass band coming through,” he remembered. “I was a small kid and I asked my mother what was it, and she said that was a guitar. I said, ‘Ain’t you going to get me one of those when I get large enough?’”32 By the late nineteenth century, mail-­ order houses like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Company had figured out a way to deliver inexpensive, mass-­produced guitars to communities across the nation, helping transform what had earlier been largely a parlor amusement for the urban middle class into an egalitarian hobby for all, including the rural poor. Black musicians already well versed on the banjo transferred banjo picking styles to the guitar. At the same time, parlor guitar sheet music, wildly popular among whites in the 1800s, influenced the first generation of southern black songsters and blues musicians, who often included spiced-­up versions of parlor guitar favorites like “Sebastopol” and “Spanish Fandango” in their repertoires.33 To satisfy his curiosity, seven-­year-­old Gary made his own guitars, using a brace-­and-­bit to drill a hole through his grandmother’s pie pans, cutting a piece of timber for the neck, and stretching copper 15

CHAPTER ONE

wires across it for strings. For his efforts, his grandma usually whipped him. Soon, Davis’s mother bought him his first guitar, paying $2.50 for an instrument with a “fine tone,” he recalled. (The low-­end guitar in the 1902 Sears, Roebuck catalog sold for $2.45.) The new guitar laid around for a week before Gary picked it up. “She went to work and left me with that guitar and she come back that morning and I was eatin’ that guitar up,” Davis said.34 A local musician named Craig Fowler taught Davis his first guitar chords. Among the early songs he learned to play were “Darling, You Don’t Know My Mind,” a tune that shows up in the repertoires of both country and blues singers, and “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand,” a spiritual that Davis would later record. Davis and his guitar became inseparable. At night he liked to sit out among the stalks of cane and play under the stars.35 Davis’s grandmother didn’t much care for his new hobby. “Oh, put that thing down,” she told him, “or the devil will get you!” But she eventually warmed to his playing of church spirituals. Baptist churches didn’t permit guitars at services, so Davis had to keep his instrument at home. “You better not bring no guitar in no church!” he recalled. “They thought it was wrong. After, I got to reading after the Bible to find out what the Bible said about instruments. I played guitar anytime, Sunday and anytime. No harm in playing music, but it is what you play.”36 For a budding guitarist in Laurens County, music could be soaked up everywhere: out in the fields in the form of work songs; at informal porch gatherings, barn raisings, or daylong country picnics; from traveling tent shows; and, of course, at church, where a cappella singing predominated. Davis recalled that two of his most famous songs, “Candy Man” and “Cocaine,” came from traveling carnival shows, which also provided his first exposure to the blues. “The first song that was a blues I heard was a man in a carnival singing ‘I’m on the road somewhere, if the train don’t break down, I’m on the road somewhere,’” Davis recalled.37 Carnival, circus, wild West, and minstrel shows crisscrossed the nation at the turn of the twentieth century, featuring many of the musicians who would pioneer the new sounds of ragtime, blues, and 16

THERE WAS A TIME THAT I WAS BLIND (1896–1916)

jazz—­what music publishers and the press had dubbed “coon songs.”38 Traveling companies usually pitched huge canvas tents that could seat hundreds of people around a stage lit in the early years by kerosene lamps. They put on extravagant spectacles with music, theatrical comedy, minstrelsy (with both white and black performers in blackface), acrobatics, and circus freak-­show acts. Every show had at least one brass band with a dozen or more members, and some of the white-­owned circuses employed a white band for the main stage and a black band for the sideshow tent. When traveling shows arrived in a town, usually by rail, they drummed up business by sending their bands parading through the streets to the town center decked out in gold braided silks, sometimes riding atop colorful horse-­pulled bandwagons.39 North Carolinian Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham, who became one of the leading blackface comedians on the minstrel circuit, recalled joining the Florida Blossom minstrel show in Greenville, South Carolina, as a young man and played the bass drum in the brass band: Every day at 12 o’clock sharp, while the men was settin’ up the tent, we’d hold a parade through town. . . . We’d hire some local kid . . . to

lead the way carrying the American flag. . . . In addition to the noon

parade, after the show we’d walk a mile and half into the town again in the evening . . . and start playin’ some jazzy tunes.40

In an era before mass entertainment, the sights and sounds of these bands, with their glistening horns and thundering drums, made quite an impression. “Saturday was a great day in the city and the streets were jammed at 4 p.m. when the colored minstrels had their parade,” the Laurens Advertiser reported when Davis was a small boy.41 Davis’s first memory of hearing a guitar—­that it sounded like “a brass band coming through”—­is no idle quip. From his earliest years, he imagined the six-­stringed instrument in his hands as capable of making the fantastic cacophony of sounds he heard from those rousing brass bands. That conception would help fuel his revolutionary approach to the guitar, not as a mere vocal accompaniment but as a band in a box with cornets, trombones, tubas, clarinets, and drums all at his disposal. Davis spoke a lot about the influence of pianists on 17

CHAPTER ONE

his arrangements, going so far as to call his guitar “the piano around my neck.” But brass bands appear to have had an equally important role in the development of his style. Brass bands performed at schools and in factory yards, and on the earliest 78 rpm recordings42 they could be heard playing popular songs, Sousa marches, blues, and ragtime. Davis played all those genres on guitar, and the songs he heard traveling bands play would show up later in his own repertoire. In the fall of 1915, for instance, most of the brass bands on tour were performing the songs of William “King” Phillips, a cornetist whose composition “Florida Blues” Davis would teach to students but never record. During the same season, the brass bands were cutting their teeth on the latest sheet music hit of W. C. Handy, “Hesitating Blues,” a song Davis would make famous (as “Hesitation Blues”) for guitarists during the folk revival. Davis also would record several marches, including, most famously, “Soldier’s Drill,” which he derived in part from John Philip Sousa. Playing his guitar night and day amid this fertile musical landscape, Davis began to attract the attention of whites in Laurens County, who invited the blind boy to entertain them at picnics. As Davis remembered, “The white people sometimes would come by and set a while with me to hear me play. They would make great expression and statements to my mother what success I would be able to have if she would give me over to them. . . . They would give me money. And they would keep me off all day and feed me. Give me clothes.” He added in another interview: “The most I made at picnics sometimes was fifteen dollars. I thought that was money! After them get through eating, you understand, they’d rake up all the fragments, put them on a plate and bring me something to eat. I’d eat. That’s right.”43 By the age of fourteen or fifteen, Davis was reportedly a good enough musician to play in a string band in the city of Greenville that included a virtuoso blind guitarist named Willie Walker, as well as two lead violins, a bass violin, and a mandolin.44 Black string bands were common throughout the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in addition to blues and ragtime, they played popular songs and country tunes, along with the square dances and set dances they performed for black and white functions. The Mississippi 18

THERE WAS A TIME THAT I WAS BLIND (1896–1916)

Sheiks, featuring guitarist Bo Carter and several of his brothers, epitomized the tradition with their Depression-­era recordings. It would have been great schooling for Davis to perform for both blacks and whites, in big halls as well as for small dances, country suppers, picnics, and the like. Versatility was the string band’s stock-­in-­ trade, and the variety of venues offered Davis an ideal opportunity to build a wide-­ranging repertoire of blues, ragtime, country dance tunes, vaudeville and medicine show songs, ballads, and popular songs in addition to the spirituals he learned in church. Band members had to be able to play a slow waltz, a fast rag, or a square dance, depending on the mood or predilection of the audience. Vestiges of that versatility remained in Davis’s repertoire throughout his musical life, not only in the astonishing variety of tunes he could play but in how he could take a single song and render it in myriad ways, such as the three versions of “Candy Man” he knew, including one played in waltz time and another as a two-­step dance. Willie Walker loomed large in Davis’s memory. Years later in New York City, when Davis would pillory the skills of most professional guitarists, he would speak with some reverence about Walker.45 Like Davis, Walker used a fleet fingerpicking technique that’s come to be known as Piedmont-­style guitar, named for the Appalachian foothills region of the East Coast that spans Georgia to New Jersey. The Piedmont style is marked by a steady, rhythmic alternating bass pattern—­ “boom-­chick, boom-­chick”—­played by the thumb, while one or two other fingers pick a syncopated melody on the treble strings. It may have derived in part from old-­time banjo picking, parlor guitar styles, and ragtime piano. Blind Blake, another influential blind guitarist who recorded in the 1920s and 1930s, was the Piedmont-­style guitarist whom Davis admired most. Unlike the dirgelike blues that came to be associated with the Mississippi Delta region, the Piedmont style is essentially dance music. But the name is a bit misleading, as related fingerpicking styles seem to have emerged elsewhere at around the same time. Mississippi John Hurt, who grew up around the Delta region and would first record in 1928, played in a similar fashion. And in Kentucky, a black guitarist named Arnold Shultz taught a thumb-­based picking style later popu19

CHAPTER ONE

larized by Merle Travis and now often called Travis picking. None of the other practitioners of the style, however, would rival Davis in the sheer complexity and variety of his compositions. It’s possible Blind Willie Walker was a source for some of Gary Davis’s most celebrated ragtime guitar pieces. Davis himself called Walker a “guitar dog,” and the bluesman Josh White, who led Walker around in Greenville for a time, rated him the best guitarist he’d ever heard, even better than Blind Blake. But as to whether Walker taught Davis some of his songs, Davis gave conflicting accounts. Stefan Grossman, one of his later guitar students, recalls Davis on at least one occasion saying that he’d learned “Make Believe Stunt” (aka “Maple Leaf Rag”) and “Cincinnati Flow Rag” from Walker. But in a taped interview with Grossman around 1969, Davis said without hesitation, “I didn’t ever learn any of his pieces.” He added that “most I heard him play was the blues like ‘Crow Jane.’”46 Walker died young of congenital syphilis, having only recorded four sides for Columbia records, two of which—­“South Carolina Rag” and “Betty and Dupree”—­were issued. While they reveal a superb guitarist, they don’t sound remotely like Davis and are nowhere near as intricate as Davis’s most groundbreaking arrangements. It’s impossible, of course, to assess Walker’s repertoire from a single 78, but the available evidence suggests that even if Davis learned “Make Believe Stunt” and “Cincinnati Flow Rag” from Walker, he rendered them in his own style. He always wore as a badge of pride the fact that he played the guitar like no one before him. “That’s my motto, not to bring out something somebody else had heard before,” Davis reflected years later. “I always did look to do things different than anybody else did.”47 Davis eventually tired of splitting fifty dollars in earnings for a night’s work with five other musicians. He described Walker and the others as unambitious. “We would have got somewhere if I could have got them to come on and go with me, but you see I couldn’t get ’em nowhere.”48 With his growing skills as a musician, however, Davis discovered that by picking the guitar he could get something perhaps even more important to him: positive attention, the kind his mother never gave him. In particular, he found the young ladies receptive to his talents. 20

THERE WAS A TIME THAT I WAS BLIND (1896–1916)

Joseph McLean, Davis’s adopted nephew, said many years later in New York: “When he was a young man in the South . . . he would walk down the road playing his guitar and the men would put their wives in the house!”49 During the folk revival, Davis would often perform a virtuoso instrumental ragtime piece that he sometimes called “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (and Playing Guitar at the Same Time).” (It also was known as “The Twelve Sticks,” based on the Dozens, a traditional African-­ American insult game featuring head-­to-­head taunts to determine who comes out on top.) Davis used the tune to mark his territory as the hottest player around on six strings. Introducing the song to audiences, he would explain that during his young days he’d learned to play his guitar one-­handed while hugging a girl, pulling a fast one on her mother listening from the kitchen. It was a matter of survival. “Old folks’ll shoot your arm off they catch you huggin’ a girl,” Davis remembered. “You can kiss ’em but don’t hug ’em.”50 Playing guitar one-­handed became one of Davis’s signature moves later on as a street singer, the kind of skill that would turn heads and fill his tin cup with nickels and dimes. He once described the youthful origins of the technique, and while the story might have been embellished for maximum effect, it rings broadly true: When I was coming up, you know, I was a courtin’ boy. The girl would follow the boy to the porch and kiss him. . . . She wanted to

hug him, well I did too. . . . I went down in the woods by a pine tree and I tried some tricks to see if I could play my guitar right on and

hug this pine tree! And I played the guitar with one hand and hug that pine tree. I said, ‘Now this here, this ought to work.’ This girl’s mother was crazy about music, didn’t care nothing about what it

was . . . So when I got ready to hug her, you understand, that’s when

the old woman done turned her head [away], I get a chance to hug her.51

If Davis, by his late teens, was beginning to have real success as a musician, his family had other plans for him. On August 26, 1914, Davis, at 18, was enrolled at the South Carolina Institution for the Education of the Deaf and the Blind, located on a “healthful and pleasant site” in the town of Cedar Springs in neighboring Spartanburg 21

CHAPTER ONE

County. The school was founded in 1849, but state officials shuttered it during Reconstruction when black students were ordered admitted, and later reopened it, keeping blacks segregated from whites. Davis’s application was endorsed by his mother, now known as Evelina Cheek, who was then living in the town of Gray Court; she was illiterate, signing with an X. The other family member whose name appears on the application is that of Clay Martin of Laurens township—­ her father and Davis’s grandfather. “The parties herein concerned have no property returned for taxation in Laurens Co[unty],” the application noted, and Davis was admitted as a beneficiary pupil, unable to pay the $150 tuition for nine months. According to one account, a white southerner impressed with Davis’s guitar skills covered his fee, but the application provides no confirmation of this.52 The year of Davis’s admission, the school’s superintendent, N.  F. Walker, had successfully lobbied for a state constitutional amendment to reclassify the school from a “penal and charitable” institution to an educational one. “Every deaf and every blind child within the bounds of these United States has a right to hope for an education,” he’d written in an open letter to voters that ran in various South Carolina newspapers.53 Still, though all the blind children, white and black, had classes in music (organ, piano, cornet, violin, and singing) as well as in physical education, they also spent up to three hours a day in industrial training to help prepare them for “useful citizenship.” For the girls that meant sewing, crocheting, bead work, basketry, and rug weaving; and for the boys, “broom, mat, mattress and brush making, chair seating and hammock weaving.”54 For a musician of Davis’s caliber who clearly had ambitions beyond the “useful citizenship” being offered for blind youth, life at a boarding school must have seemed quite restrictive. Davis later said he learned to read New York Point, a precursor to Braille, at Cedar Springs. By some accounts, he taught music there,55 but since guitar wasn’t in the curriculum, in all likelihood the arrangement was an informal one, more like the one-­on-­one lessons he would become famous for in Durham and New York. In any event, he seems to have grown discontented rather quickly with the vocational training the 22

THERE WAS A TIME THAT I WAS BLIND (1896–1916)

school offered, leaving after only six months and returning to his family’s farm in Laurens County. Asked about the school decades later, Davis said he didn’t like the food served there,56 but that may have been his way of saying that he wanted to make his own way in life, even with the decks stacked against him.

23

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STREET-­CORNER BARD (1917–­28) The itinerant street singer has been an important factor in the life of the Negro spiritual. J ohn Lomax and Alan Lomax , Our Singing C oun try

I

stayed on the farm till I got grown,” Gary Davis recalled. “When I left off the farm I was twenty-­one years old. When I started travelin’ through the country. Playing guitar. Goin’ from one city to another.”1 It was 1917, and Davis’s first steps were tentative. He followed his mother a few miles up the rural roads of Laurens County to the sleepy town of Fountain Inn, which straddled Laurens and Greenville counties and had been a favored stop on the stagecoach route between the city of Greenville and Columbia. On June 5 of that year, with the United States having declared war on Germany, Davis registered for the draft, along with millions of other men between the ages of twenty-­one and thirty-­one. In addition to noting Davis’s blindness, the county registrar wrote “no occupation” for Davis’s employment status.2 But it’s clear Davis had already embarked on what would be his primary avocation for the next four decades: street-­singing. Davis sang and played guitar on street corners and at dances “to make my little change,” as he later explained.3 It’s doubtful his mother offered much assistance, financial or emotional, besides putting a roof over his head. Davis learned to lead himself around. “I’d go so far, you know, every day, until I learned how to go all the way to where I wanted to go. I traveled by feeling and hearing my way. You see when God takes one member, he leaves you with another.”4 By the time he’d left home, Davis had already formulated the trailblazing approach to the guitar for which he’d become known. “I completed my style out!” he would later tell a close friend of his, the blues musician Larry Johnson.5 That would have given him a decided advan24

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tage over some of the other street singers trying to survive merely on public sympathy. On street corners in the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, blind itinerant singers served as an all-­too-­ common reminder of the poor medical care, malnutrition, and rampant disease plaguing black communities. Many blind singers had accompanists or “lead boys” to help them get around. Blind Lemon Jefferson, who became one of the best-­selling blues artists of the 1920s, once teamed up on the streets of Dallas with the young Lead Belly, and Josh White was all of seven or eight when he began leading a long line of blind singers in and around Greenville.6 The folklorists John and Alan Lomax would encounter many blind street bards on their song-­collecting trips during the Depression. Most struck a pitiful figure, as the Lomaxes noted: “Piloted by his wife or by some little boy, he inches along through the streets and down the alleys of Negro working-­class neighborhoods, shouting and groaning out a spiritual in his hoarse, twelve-­hour-­a-­day voice, reminding saints and sinners that the blind must eat. The comrade of his dark, slow journeys is the battered guitar he plays.”7 From the beginning Gary Davis was different. He’d learned the painful lesson that he couldn’t count on anyone, not even his mother, for help, and that made him unusually independent for a blind man of that era. Within a couple of years of arriving in Fountain Inn, Davis had moved his base farther up the road to Greenville, where, still in his early twenties, he “got wild,” performing in barrelhouses, chasing women, and singing on corners for nickels and dimes. Much later, when it was suggested that Davis had “been around” as far as women were concerned, he would reply in typically jocular fashion: “No, I ain’t been around, I been through. If I’d been around, I couldn’t see everything I needed to see.”8 At the same time, Davis described himself as having been a churchgoing young man, and there’s little doubt the music of the church continued to inspire him. With their proliferation of black churches, the Carolinas would later, justifiably, be known as one of the cradles of gospel music. In particular, the three contiguous counties of Laurens, Greenville, and Spartanburg deserve special mention. During his time in Greenville, Davis could have crossed paths with a 25

CHAPTER TWO

boy named James Davis (no relation), who would later form the group that became the Dixie Hummingbirds, one of the preeminent gospel vocal quartets after World War II. James Davis recalled encounters with sanctified street singers during his youth in Greenville, but Gary Davis wasn’t the only minstrel performing in Greenville then. Another was Joe Taggart, who likely attended the same school for the blind as Davis and who in the 1920s became the first of the itinerant religious singer-­guitarists to record.9 Taggart had a rudimentary guitar technique compared with Davis’s, strumming and fingerpicking simple patterns in open tunings. But Taggart’s young lead boy, Josh White, reared in the churches of Greenville, possessed a much more sophisticated style. White would soon begin his solo recording career in the 1920s, singing both blues and spirituals (as “Joshua White, the Singing Christian”) before moving to New York and becoming a star in the cabarets. As White’s biographer has noted, the music of the church, arranged for group singing, had a harmonic complexity far exceeding that of the blues, and it’s likely Davis heard White’s music on record if he never encountered him on the street.10 In neighboring Spartanburg, Ira Tucker, the future lead singer of the Dixie Hummingbirds, and his childhood friend Julius “June” Cheeks, who would lead another seminal gospel quartet, the Sensational Nightingales, were soaking up church music in the early decades of the twentieth century. Cheeks, in particular, sang in the raspy, shouting style that Gary Davis favored, and he later scored a hit with the spiritual “Morning Train,” which Davis also would record (as “Get Right Church”). For these young black men of little means in the Jim Crow era, the church provided an escape route, although in Davis’s case, as for many gospel musicians, devotion to sacred music didn’t translate easily into success in the secular world. When he left the safe confines of church to sing on the streets of Greenville and Laurens, Davis had to navigate a veritable mine field of race relations, without the benefit of sight or a lead boy to help him avoid the dangers that lurked about everywhere for a black South Carolinian. In 1920, a black man was lynched in Laurens after he “brushed against” a white youth on the street, the News and Courier reported.11 26

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Davis committed a similar “offense” during his time in Greenville, and he seems lucky to have lived to tell the tale: I went into a store in Greenville, South Carolina, on Burnich Street

. . . to buy a sack of flour. I couldn’t see the woman. She had eyes. She could see. She coulda got outta my way. The store-­keeper said, “By God, you’re walkin’ up against that white woman.” I just tell you

truth I didn’t know nothin’, I was so scared. I said, “Mister, I can’t

see.” [And he said,] “By God, you ought be careful.” I forgot what I come in that store to buy. I forgot I was hungry. . . . I felt like I had come close to gettin’ killed.12

Despite the perils he faced, Davis from an early age displayed a fierce independence. He wasn’t always willing to pay the devil his respect, consequences be damned: One time I came along the street playing my guitar. An old white

fellow was sitting out there on his porch. “Hey!” he says. “Stop right here and play me and my friend a tune.”

I stopped. I said, “Would you mind giving me one of them ciga-

rettes?”

He said, “Why, do niggers smoke cigarettes?” I said, “Hell, yes, I smoke cigarettes!”

“Well, you won’t get no damn cigarettes from me,” he says. “I

don’t see no sense in niggers smoking cigarettes. Sit right down there on that stump and play me a piece of a tune.”

I said, “Damn if I will.” That’s what I told him—­“You can go to

hell. I wouldn’t play you a damn tune if you were hanging over hell.” That’s exactly what I told him, and I walked right on out of the yard.13

If racial intolerance weren’t enough, Davis was painfully aware of how others viewed him as a blind man. In an era when the disabled still figured prominently in popular freak-­show entertainments, the stigmas attached to blindness were palpable. Davis’s condition put him in a special category of wretchedness, shunned even by his own oppressed brethren. He recalled feeling as though acquaintances merely tolerated his company, and he was always wondering whether some27

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one had spit in his food. And it was assumed that he was no use for a woman of any means. “You could tell when everybody would see me walking down the street with a woman that they wouldn’t bite their tongues at all. They asked, ‘Can’t you do no better?’ You understand, they thought it a shame for a woman to take up with a blind man.”14 Not long after arriving in Greenville, Davis met a woman and fell in love for the first time. His Uncle William was living in Greenville then, on Echo Street. Mary Hendrix roomed in the same house, and Gary became quite taken with her. One Saturday evening she asked him to help pay for her insurance—­probably burial or sick benefits coverage—­and, seeing that she was “nice and submissive in her speech,” he obliged, handing her fifteen dollars, presumably money he’d earned singing. “I had been belongin’ to the church before I married. Looked like she cared to be such a good Christian woman. I always did say I wanted me a Christian woman for a wife. Cause I didn’t want no rough woman for a wife.”15 They lived together for two months, and on June 17, 1919, Gary and Mary were married by Judge W. M. Scott in Greenville. Her age was given as twenty-­eight, his as twenty-­three. Unable to sign, they both marked an X on the license. “Got me a little two-­by-­four place,” Davis remembered, probably referring to a small shack. Six months after the wedding, a census worker arrived on Oscar Street, where Gary and Mary were living at number 230. Davis’s occupation was listed as “musician” and his place of business as “street.” Mary was taking in washing and ironing at home.16 At least for a time it appears they were smitten. Mary cooked and washed Gary’s clothes, no doubt made filthy by his street singing. After a year in Greenville they began traveling together, getting as far north as Norfolk, Virginia, where Davis later recalled “making $300 a week just standing on the street playing guitar.” While that may sound fanciful, Davis could very well have collected that much on a good week, as other street singers then boasted of similar income.17 As he settled into his life as an unaccompanied minstrel, he no doubt continued honing his musical vocabulary and skills as a street musician. To attract a crowd and get them to part with their change, he had to vary his repertoire, and he probably rotated blues, ragtime, 28

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popular music, and spirituals, depending on his audience. Though only about five foot eight, he had a rough, resonant voice that could cut through the hustle and bustle of a busy street corner. With his growing virtuosity on the guitar, he must have thrilled passersby. The police presented an ongoing problem because many cities had laws on the books against vagrancy, often lumping together outright beggars and street performers who solicited donations. Sometimes officers would go so far as to apologize to Davis, telling him they liked his music but had to move him along, so he and Mary never put down roots. The songster Pink Anderson, born a few miles from Davis in Laurens County, recalled seeing Davis playing in Mt. Holly, North Carolina, near Charlotte, around 1922.18 In moving north and leaving South Carolina behind, Gary and Mary were joining tens of thousands of other blacks in the great migration that shifted into high gear in the 1920s, following the economic dislocations of World War I and the infestation of the boll weevil, which wreaked havoc on southern cotton crops beginning in 1920.19 North Carolina, in particular, became a key stopover on the way north and to cities like New York and Chicago. By 1923, Gary and Mary were living in Asheville at 103 South Market Street, and Davis seems to have developed quite a local reputation as a street performer. Several North Carolina musicians, including Walt Phelps and Aaron Washington, recalled seeing Davis playing in Asheville’s Pack Square. Washington told the music historian Bruce Bastin that he first met Davis in Asheville around that time, and he gave the first eyewitness sighting of Davis’s unorthodox way of holding the guitar, up high with the strap around his neck, rather than over his shoulder, which gave him a sharper attack on the strings as his right hand picked out blistering single note runs up and down the neck: “He would sit in the square and play the guitar. Mostly he would hold the guitar right up close to his head. . . . Wouldn’t hardly anyone pass without throwing money at him.”20 After a few years of traveling together, Gary and Mary soured on one another. Mary had become bitter and turned into “a quarreling kind of woman” by Davis’s account. His second wife, Annie, would later comment that Mary took advantage of Gary’s ability to dispos29

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sess people of their spare change: “All she started was dressin’ nice, and trottin’ up and down, first one place then the other. And he said he didn’t never accomplish nothing with her.”21 The cause of the breakup remains a matter of some conjecture. According to Bastin, Greenville bluesman Roosevelt Brooks related that Mary “quit one blind man for another,” meaning she left Gary for Joe Walker, the blind guitar-­playing brother of Blind Willie Walker, Davis’s former string band mate. Davis’s later welfare file in Durham, North Carolina, said that Gary left Mary in Winston-­Salem in 1924. Davis himself later offered conflicting details about why they parted. Mary “told me she didn’t care nothin’ about me, only her support,” he said. But he also related that he found out Mary had a “living husband,” perhaps his way, after the fact, of negating the marriage emotionally if not legally. There’s no record of a divorce being filed in Winston-­Salem to dissolve their union, if indeed it had been legal in the first place.22 Whatever the case, Mary’s rejection sent Davis into a tailspin because he’d fallen so hard. It wouldn’t take a great leap to surmise that he felt his mother’s abandonment all over again. “It proved so deep it caused me might near stand on my head and howl like a dog. You see, in the first beginnings of a person’s life, if you hang with a thing, get attached to it, you love that first thing. . . . It may not be fit for you to love, but you still love it.”23 Davis wouldn’t marry again for eighteen years. What followed the breakup was a period of wandering and recklessness. Now about twenty-­nine, Davis began drinking heavily for the first time, saying later that he “never knowed what a drop of whiskey was” until he “got tangled up with” Mary.24 He would speak of going from one town to another, staying only long enough to fill his tin cup and then moving on. He’d play anywhere a buck could be made: barrelhouses, dance halls, country jukes, places where the alcohol flowed and by the end of the night tempers often flared. “I been in places where men got killed. Didn’t shake me a bit more than nothin’,” Davis recalled. His love for Mary unrequited, he didn’t allow himself to get emotionally involved with any woman, instead using his skills with the six-­string to soften up his game for sexual conquest. 30

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He later acknowledged, but only in a single interview with the folklorist Alan Lomax’s ex-­wife, that he may have fathered several children during his wanderings in the 1920s. “I am so said to be the father of three children,” Davis said. “I don’t know how true it is. I know I been there, but I don’t know what I did. . . . Two of ’em is dead, I think. . . . I have a boy, twenty-­two years old. He’s in Durham. So they said. I don’t know how true it is.”25 That would put the birth of Davis’s alleged son in 1928. During the folk revival, Davis would maintain that he had no children. But his account is too specific to be dismissed as macho boasting. Davis lived for a time in Washington, North Carolina, a harbor town one hundred miles west of Raleigh, where he would later be ordained a minister, according to a biographical account by one of his later guitar students.26 He already had begun visiting Durham, the city he’d soon call home. His life of wandering put Davis in contact with a great many performers whose repertoires provided fodder for his expanding musical imagination. But by the 1920s, musicians looking for inspiration no longer had to limit themselves primarily to the regional artists they grew up hearing or those they encountered in their travels. America’s nascent recording industry had begun revolutionizing the transmission and development of songs and styles. The industry had started before the turn of the century with a few small labels issuing novelty recordings featuring actors, minstrel troupes, and opera singers as well as bands playing the military marches of John Philip Sousa. Now leading companies like Columbia, Paramount, and OKeh were selling thousands of 78 rpm records a month featuring the homegrown talents of blues, hillbilly, and religious singers. Their music, sold through mail-­order catalogs and at dime stores and furniture stores, spread far and wide to both white and black listeners.27 So-­called race records specifically targeted the black buying public, which showed a hunger for both blues and sacred music. Popular religious recordings ran the gamut from black gospel quartets singing in a European-­influenced jubilee style, to guitar evangelists like Rev. Edward Clayborn and Blind Joe Taggart, who sang spirituals accompanied by bluesy guitar, and singing preachers like Rev. J. M. Gates, 31

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who recorded hellfire sermons and songs backed by a spirited congregation. There’s no doubt that Gary Davis heard the records of sacred singers like the brilliant, gruff-­voiced Texas slide guitarist Blind Willie Johnson, leading blues artists like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, and Memphis Minnie, and popular crooners like Gene Austin, because Davis cited them many years later as influences, spoke about their music, or played their songs. The 1920s also marked the beginning of the Jazz Age, and the music emanating from New Orleans, Chicago, and New York had a pronounced effect on Davis’s guitar style. One of his guitar students later on, Ernie Hawkins, recalled that Davis told him how he learned from the jazz records of Louis Armstrong and others. Back then, the makers of phonographs—­companies like the Wisconsin Chair Company and the Victor Talking Machine Company—­also produced records to play on them, and furniture stores cued up the latest releases to attract buyers of Victrolas. Davis never missed an opportunity to adapt the newest band sounds to his six strings. He had what his students would later characterize as a photographic memory, which is unsurprising given recent research suggesting that the blind have better and more accurate recall than sighted people.28 “Every time the next big jazz record came out, they’d be playing the record out on the street. And he would walk by every day, he had his guitar with him, and he would stop under the speaker and work out the song and then move on,” Hawkins says. “Being in his twenties in the Jazz Age, when Louis Armstrong was in his twenties, when Bix Beiderbecke was in his twenties, when all these seminal musicians in the Jazz Age were in their twenties, that was an amazing time. . . . This was an oral tradition and he absorbed it all.”29 Unlike the vast majority of guitarists who played in a country blues style—­Lonnie Johnson was a major exception—­Davis would incorporate jazz chords and changes into his arrangements, with a sophistication that belied his lack of formal knowledge of music theory. Though he continued playing the blues—­the devil’s music, in the mind of upright blacks like his grandmother—­church was never far from Davis’s mind, even during his reckless days. At some point during his travels, “the Lord had called me to preach . . . and I just 32

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wouldn’t give up,” he said.30 Aaron Washington remembered Davis’s love of spirituals during his time in Asheville, North Carolina. “I used to pick up his guitar. The first thing that I would hit was some kind of old blues. He wouldn’t say nothing. By and by he asked me if I ever played any spiritual songs. I told him no. He told me that it might be a good idea if I did play spirituals because I would get just as much enjoyment out of it.”31 For Davis, the tension between the sacred and the secular world would reach a peak during his time in Durham, just when he might have been on the cusp of major success as a musician.

33

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“I WAS A BLUES CAT” (1928–­34) He was well liked in this town, too. . . . He’d go uptown anywhere if he wanted to make himself some money. Drug store, shoe store, any of ’em, they’d let him play there. Du r ham re side nt W illiam A. Ame y

W

hen Booker T. Washington visited the black section of Durham, North Carolina, early in the twentieth century, he discovered a bustling city whose residents were “shining examples of what a colored man may become.” W. E. B. DuBois, arriving a short time later, found a vibrant enclave focused on “teaching and preaching, buying and selling, employing and hiring.”1 Durham boasted a great many black-­owned businesses, from grocery stores and haberdasheries to construction firms and insurance societies—­and even a rising black wealthy class. But it was hardly a utopia, deeply segregated as it remained. The Seaboard Airline Railroad tracks that bisected the city largely divided it along racial lines, with whites to the north and the black section, Hayti (pronounced HAY-­tie by the locals), to the south. Referring to the advancement Washington and DuBois trumpeted, the editors of the city directory felt it necessary to point out that “all these things have been accomplished by people not especially favored by nature.”2 For rural transplants lured by the promise of black progress, however, Durham offered something sorely lacking on the farm: economic opportunity. For newcomers, most of that opportunity lay with the city’s chief tobacco concerns, the American Tobacco Company and Liggett & Myers. The region’s brightleaf tobacco, a mild aromatic variety, had gained immense popularity as a smoking tobacco before the Civil War and as a pipe tobacco when pipe-­smoking caught on in the North in 34

“I WAS A BLUES CAT” (1928–34)

the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Blacks arriving in Durham could find plenty of seasonal low-­skilled jobs at the tobacco factories, churning out smoking tobaccos like Duke’s Mixture and Bull Durham and cigarettes like Lucky Strike and Chesterfield to feed the world’s growing nicotine habit. Work in the red brick factories along Main and Pettigrew Streets was grueling and tedious. But wages of up to nine dollars per day offered at least the hope of a more stable life than sharecropping allowed, and thousands of southern blacks made their way to Durham in the first few decades of the 1900s.3 Gary Davis was among them, visiting Durham frequently before moving there in the late 1920s.4 Once again, the chief attraction appears to have been his mother’s presence there. Evelina Morris, as she was now known—­Lena for short—­worked in the Liggett & Myers factory on Main Street and lived in Hayti.5 Estelle Hodges was just sixteen when she got a job at the Liggett & Myers factory in 1927, where she met Lena Morris, whom she called “Babe.” Lena, about forty-­eight years old by then, needed assistance with reading and writing on the job, and Estelle helped her out. Both worked as tobacco stemmers, whose sole task consisted of carefully pulling the stems off moist tobacco leaves without damaging the leaves in the process. (Tobacco work was usually segregated, with blacks preparing the tobacco for manufacture and packaging and whites running the machines.) Estelle and Lena became like mother and daughter in Estelle’s reckoning. Since Estelle had a long walk to work, Morris offered her a place to stay, and she moved into the apartment Morris shared with Gary Davis on Mobile Avenue in Hayti for about two years. Davis, now in his early thirties, spent all hours playing his guitar and singing on the streets. That required getting a permit from the chief of police after a request by the superintendent of public welfare, with violators facing a ten-­dollar fine under a city ordinance.6 One such request on Davis’s behalf survives: July 16, 1931

In re: Gairy Davis.-­Col. [sic] Mr. G. W. Proctor Chief of Police Durham, N.C.

35

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Dear Mr. Proctor,

The above named man has requested a permit to

play guitar and sing in the colored section Friday, July

17th. If it meets with your approval, I am glad to recom‑ mend that he be given a permit for this date only. Very Truly Yours, W. E. Stanley

Supt. Public Welfare7

It seems unlikely that Davis would have requested a permit to play every day, though play he did. “No snow or rain didn’t stop Gary,” Hodges remembered. “He would have a cold, and when we’d get home from the Liggett & Myers factory thinking Gary was home, Gary would be gone. And when he’d come in he’d be just as wet . . . She’d lay him out: ‘I ain’t gonna let you in!’ Gary would get to playing that song about ‘When the Saints Go Marching Home.’ She’d get up and open that door wide open and let him come in. And he’d sit up and play till near about day . . . She had to run him to bed.”8 One spot Davis favored was a tent on South Pine Street, where a Mrs. Pearl Osburn sold barbecue, pigs feet, and hush puppies to the tobacco workers from Liggett & Myers and American Tobacco as they got off work in the evening. When the Liggett & Myers stemmery let out at 6 p.m., workers poured out, still in their pin-­striped uniforms, walking east down Main Street. After a hard day on the hot, dusty factory floor, they stopped and listened to Davis playing and singing, pitching spare change into a crockery bowl set out to collect donations. Davis played blues and church songs then. “Anything you wanted to hear he could play it,” recalled William Amey, who owned the Shell gas station across the street and often lent Davis a chair. “He’d play a Lord’s Prayer, and he had another, ‘Shake My Mother’s Hand for Me’ that he played. . . . Another one, he was ‘going over the mountain where the chilly winds don’t blow.’”9 Street musicians with guitars, banjos, and washboards plied their trade in Hayti’s bustling business district along Pettigrew and Fayetteville Streets, which boasted banks, movie theaters, laundries, five-­ and-­tens, barbershops, and ice cream parlors. Or they set up on the 36

“I WAS A BLUES CAT” (1928–34)

roads leading out of town or at the train depot. Davis didn’t play in Durham’s churches at first. He preferred performing at weekend rent parties, where the working class drank, danced, ate regional foods like chitterlings (hog intestines, boiled or fried), and blew off steam while cash-­strapped hosts earned a few dollars to pay their landlords. “I was a blues cat then,” Davis remembered. “I played blues and blues and blues again and again. I would go to parties, dances and things like that. Chittlin’ struts and all that kind of thing.”10 Davis sometimes led a band that played the regional party circuit. Amey remembered driving Davis and the other members of a guitar quartet—­Charley Bailey, Scrap Harris, and Thomas Burke—­in a seven-­passenger Chalmers touring car along unpaved roads to play for parties and dances in High Point, Winston-­Salem, and Charlotte. Amey slept in the car, and the musicians gave him a cut of the night’s take after the parties let out. “Maybe they’d get up there, say 8 o’clock or 9 o’clock, the music would start. They’d play till 3 or 4 o’clock the next morning. . . . Boy, they could make some music!”11 In Durham some of the most generous audiences for street musicians congregated at the tobacco warehouses during the fall, when white and black farmers from all over auctioned their harvest to the city’s tobacco companies. Glen Hinson, a historian of that era in Durham, has explained why farmers newly flush with cash were willing to pay for good entertainment: They’ve spent their nights sleeping on blankets spread over the flattened tobacco bales in the bare quarters on the side of the warehouse. Off near the entrance, two black men, one with a guitar

slung over his back and the other with a washboard under his arm,

amble in and take a place against the wall. Within a minute, the quiet warehouse echoes with the sound of an upbeat rag. A crowd, as much black as white, begins to form around the musicians, urging them on with their cries: “Play that thing now!” “Make that guitar pure talk!”12

There’s little doubt that Davis played regularly at the tobacco warehouses, where he could count on a steady stream of traffic. “He’d come down that warehouse and stay all night,” recalled Wilbert Atwater, a 37

CHAPTER THREE

musician from nearby Orange County. But Davis could find an audience anywhere in black Durham—­on the sidewalk, even inside stores, Amey recalled, “because they’d get a crowd in there.”13 Crime was a big problem in Hayti, presenting dangers for a blind street singer who ventured out at all hours and preferred not to be led around. Davis had already begun carrying a .38 special and a knife for protection. “I carried a pistol all [the] time I was in North Carolina. . . . I didn’t ever shoot nobody,” he recalled.14 He did, however, make it clear that, although blind, he was not a man to be trifled with. One day, as Amey headed toward the Bull City Barber Shop on Pettigrew Street, he saw Davis walking and playing his guitar when a woman bootlegger named Ola called out from her porch that she had five dollars she owed Davis. She held out the cash so that he could reach for it, but another man came up suddenly and snatched it away. After a brief argument, Davis grabbed the man, and in a flash a pearl-­handled knife with a three-­and-­a-­half-­inch blade materialized in Davis’s hand. “It must have been up his sleeve or somewhere,” Amey remembered. “And just instantaneous he hit him like that. And boy, the blood’s just skeetin, man just fell down on the street. They got an ambulance and took him to the hospital.” When Davis struck the man the first time, Amey recalled, he said, “Lord, search my heart,” and then struck him again, saying, “Tell me whether I’m right or whether I’m wrong.” Davis would sing those words when he recorded the spiritual “O Lord, Search My Heart” in 1935. The next morning Davis went before a judge, and Amey testified on his behalf. After hearing what had led to the attack, the judge let Davis off with a warning, saying, “Don’t you go around here cutting nobody else.” Decades later, Amey still marveled at Davis’s lightning-­ quick thrust with the blade.15

*

By 1929, a small, lanky twenty-­two-­year-­old guitar player named Fulton Allen had moved to Hayti. Born in 1907 in Wadesboro, North Carolina, Allen had a fourth-­grade education and, like Davis, was blind. But he’d lost his vision only about two years earlier, probably as 38

“I WAS A BLUES CAT” (1928–34)

a result of untreated gonorrhea, according to a doctor who examined him in Durham.16 Davis, out late one night, first met Allen’s wife, Cora Mae, who’d been wandering the streets in search of her husband. “His wife met me on the street one night about 12 or 1 o’clock and she asked me where she could lay her tired body down,” Davis recalled. He took her back to his mother’s house and gave her a bed. The next morning, Cora Mae had breakfast and went looking again for her wayward spouse, finally locating him in North Durham playing guitar on the street.17 According to Davis, Allen had rudimentary skills on the guitar when he arrived in Durham from Winston-­Salem. “When I first run across him, he didn’t know how to play but one piece, and that was with a knife. He wanted to take some of my training. . . . He’d come up to my house every day and sit down and play.”18 Their sessions together are notable because they represent the beginning of Davis’s monumental influence as a teacher, which he would fully realize in New York. With Davis’s help, Allen—­as Blind Boy Fuller—­would become one of the most successful and imitated of all country bluesmen to record before World War II. Not that he impressed his teacher: “He would have been alright if I kept him under me long enough,” Davis would say later, stating it not as a boast but as a simple matter of fact. Durham musician Willie Trice backed up Davis’s assessment: “Fuller used to say, ‘All of us boys can play, Willie, but Gary is our daddy.’”19 It would become clear from Fuller’s recordings a few years later what a profound influence Davis had on his music. Davis’s transformation from bluesman to evangelist seems to have occurred gradually. In what may have been a transitional period, Amey recalled hearing Davis perform spirituals at a funeral chapel during the 1930s. After hearing how well mourners took to Davis’s music, Amey began recommending him for other funerals, at which Davis would sing or chant the Lord’s Prayer and play his guitar.20 The Baptist churches of Davis’s youth strictly prohibited guitars at services, but these funerals may have given Davis a sense of the power his guitar playing and singing had to comfort the downtrodden. He surely needed the work. The census taker who’d come to his home at 5121/2 Pettigrew Street in 1930 wrote “none” for his occupation.21 39

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Early in 1934, Davis’s mother, who’d been sick for several years, became seriously ill. Estelle Hodges said, “She was in the hospital, and they couldn’t do her no good . . . so they sent her home.”22 It was during her decline—­three months before she died—­that Davis had what he later described as a religious awakening: I was lying on my bed. Came something in the room to me: I thought it was a fowl, or a chicken. It got on me, and it was heavy.

. . . It got on me and spoke to me and say, “I has a message.” I bit it in the face, and it got off and begin to act pitiful. I broke down and

commenced to cryin.’ While I was cryin’ it was a little boy came to me. Had hair as long as he was high. Had a French harp in his mouth

and he was blowin’ straight up, singin’ this song: “I’m on My Way Back Home.”23

Fifteen years later, Davis broke down sobbing as he recounted these events—­which he described as occurring not like a vision but “just like I was natural awake.” He never explained who the creature was, but it seems clear that it was a manifestation of the devil, while the child was an angel beckoning him to God. At that moment, he said, he “surrendered and give up. Give up entirely.” Davis went on to sing the words to the song the long-­haired boy sang to him in his bed: I’m on my way back home (×3) Oh those of you have crosses Trials and temptation too

But I started to go with Jesus

I am determined to go through . . .24

Davis’s mother died on June 28, 1934, aged fifty-­six, in Lincoln Hospital, the city’s segregated black medical facility. Her doctor gave the cause of death as “mitral regurgitation,” a heart disorder. At the time of her passing, she and Davis were living together at 715 Whitted Street in Hayti.25 Although his mother had rejected him as a child, her death must have come as a severe blow. It left Gary Davis, at age thirty-­eight, as the last living member in a family of ten (counting stepchildren). If he’d had any doubt until then what role the church would play in his 40

“I WAS A BLUES CAT” (1928–34)

life, the loss of his mother surely helped force the issue. Bereft of any of the comforts, however meager, of kin, Davis would fill the void with God’s love. The date and place of Davis’s ordination as a minister have long been matters in question. Although some references have been made to a 1933 ordination, that date is implausible given the timing of his religious awakening. Davis’s Durham welfare file indicates that he was ordained in 1937 at the Free Will Baptist Connection church in Washington, North Carolina, where he’d previously lived, and Davis later confirmed it, along with his baptism—­no doubt, submersion style—­ in the Pamlico River. Annie Davis, his second wife, said Davis was ordained at the Free Will Baptist Church in Raleigh, but she may have confused his trial sermon with his ordination. Davis gave his trial sermon in Raleigh. Its subject was a perennial one for a man whose family had been decimated: “a child leaving home, trying to get back.”26 Davis was hardly the first bluesman to join the church. Indeed, the line between spirituals and “the devil’s music” has long been a much more porous one than church officials like to admit. One of the first delta bluesmen, Son House, served as both a Baptist and Colored Methodist Episcopal pastor as a young man in his church days, preaching for about seventeen years in the 1920s and ’30s.27 Robert Wilkins and Skip James both became preachers after giving up blues singing. (In James’s case, he would sing the blues again after his rediscovery during the folk revival.) Blues singers like Mississippi John Hurt and Blind Willie McTell also recorded spirituals, with some, like Blind Lemon Jefferson, using a pseudonym (Deacon L.  J. Bates) on their sacred material so as not to offend devout record buyers. Even the father of modern gospel music, Thomas A. Dorsey, had a previous blues life as “Georgia Tom” when he teamed up with Tampa Red on risqué hits like “It’s Tight Like That” before turning to God and incorporating blues and ragtime forms into his spiritual compositions. And Mahalia Jackson, destined to become America’s greatest gospel singer, honed her powerhouse contralto as a child by imitating the blues shouter Bessie Smith. For Davis, he would soon be known as Reverend Gary, and he’d combine his passion for God and church with his vast knowledge of blues, 41

CHAPTER THREE

ragtime, jazz, marching band songs, hillbilly, and minstrel show tunes to create some of the most dynamic guitar-­based music ever put on record. As an evangelist in training, he would henceforth devote his creative energies to composing spirituals for use in his new calling: saving souls. While that no doubt gave his life meaning and purpose, from an economic standpoint it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

42

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GREAT CHANGE IN ME (1934–­43) His mind seems to rest purely on the church. Du r ham Welfar e Departme n t worker

U

pon his mother’s death, Gary Davis found himself in awful financial straits. His newfound religious faith led him to devote more time to the church and less time to street-­corner singing; it also spelled the end of his days as a “blues cat,” making him less marketable as a performer at rent parties and dances. Whatever help his mother might have given him was no more. In December 1934, Davis applied to Durham’s welfare office for assistance. A note from his intake file reads: “Blind man, about 40 years of age. No people to help him. Lives with John King, who gives him rent but is unable to feed him. Man’s mother died in June, left a little insurance but he has spent all of that now.”1 Davis, another entry indicates, “sleeps in the kitchen of a two-­room duplex house. Home very poorly kept. House is a [sic] dilapidated condition.” In mid-­1935, Davis briefly got work through a state relief program funded by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, a New Deal agency, but he quit after a short time, complaining he hadn’t been paid for an unspecified job in Raleigh. Shortly thereafter, Durham’s welfare office began a four-­dollar monthly aid grant to Davis. A welfare worker visiting him in May noted that he was in need of bed clothing and learned that he was open to work at Durham’s mattress factory for the blind. Davis “can put bottoms on chairs and repair mattresses, etc.,” his welfare file noted. “He would like work of this kind.”2 That Davis was willing to undertake the monotonous repair work he’d learned at the Cedar Springs blind school back in South Carolina is proof of his desperation. 43

CHAPTER FOUR

It must have come as an unexpected gift that July when James Baxter “J. B.” Long, a talent scout for the American Record Corporation (ARC), invited Davis to go to New York to record, along with Blind Boy Fuller and George Washington, an albino washboard player and singer whose nicknames included Bull City Red and Oh Red. Long played a prominent role in the history of African American music, becoming a cultural tastemaker almost by accident. As manager of the United Dollar department store in Kinston, about one hundred miles southeast of Durham, he catered to black patrons, cashing their checks, letting them buy cigarettes on credit until they were paid, and selling them records.3 After a terrible collision between a train and car carrying a group of farmers in Lumberton, south of Kinston, Long’s customers began asking for records about the tragedy. (Songs about catastrophes and natural disasters, like the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, often proved popular.) Long notified the record companies about the interest in a Lumberton wreck song, and ARC, based in New York, asked Long to provide the song and a local artist to sing it.4 After getting some help with the lyrics, Long held a competition in his store for black artists.5 Later, as an ARC scout, he would identify performers for the label to record, in a region that proved to be a hotbed of blues and gospel talent. Long became North Carolina’s answer to H. C. Speir, the Jackson, Mississippi, businessman responsible for the recording careers of Delta bluesmen Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson. Around 1935, Long transferred to the United Dollar in Durham on West Main Street. The brick store with large window displays would become notable in Durham’s history as one of the few white-­owned businesses during the Jim Crow era to serve blacks and to provide an integrated lunch counter. Near Durham’s tobacco warehouses a few blocks away, Long encountered Fulton Allen—­whom he would dub Blind Boy Fuller—­wearing a blanket-­lined overall jumper, playing his guitar, and singing. Long told him to come by the store if he was interested in making records. “Every song he knew was some[thing] he had bought the record and learned from, you see, and so I began to practice him a little bit,” Long recalled. He wrote to people at ARC about Fuller, telling them “that this blues singer knew all the songs 44

GREAT CHANGE IN ME (1934–43)

that everybody has, but if he could just get some new ones, why he’d be one of the best singers that I believe they had on the market. And it took him about four months, maybe six months workin’ before he really got to where I thought he was ready.”6 There’s little doubt that Fuller introduced his mentor, Gary Davis, to Long, and soon Long realized that Davis was the superior musician. Davis “could play the guitar up and down, any way in the world,” Long remembered. In late July, Long, with his wife and daughter in the front seat and Davis, Fuller, and Bull City Red in the back, drove to New York City, with the black musicians staying in Harlem at 133rd Street and 7th Avenue.7 The Depression had exacted a heavy toll on the once thriving record business, with some major labels like Paramount going under and others issuing far fewer recordings. The peak of blues and gospel recording had come in the late 1920s before the stock market crash, and although the industry had rebounded slightly from its nadir in 1933, the market for race records was still sagging, with roughly half of all blacks out of work. Blues, in fact, would soon begin making a comeback as the thirties wore on and the economy improved, but spirituals would prove a harder sell until after the urbanization of gospel music following World War II.8 ARC, formed by a merger of smaller labels in 1929, sought to capitalize on the public’s lack of discretionary income by partnering with department store chains to release blues, jazz, and hillbilly 78s under the stores’ inexpensive house brands. A 78 on these “dime-­store labels” often sold for about a quarter, versus seventy-­five cents on a commercial label. A song recorded by ARC in New York would usually appear on Sears and Roebuck’s Conquerer label, McCrory Stores’ Oriole label, S.H. Kress’s Romeo label and a handful of others. To make the economics of this enterprise work in a depressed market, ARC needed musicians who would work on the cheap, and the unknown Davis, Fuller, and Red certainly fit the bill.9 Anyone who has ever stood in front of a microphone to record knows it’s no small feat keeping nerves in check and fingers relaxed and nimble. For Davis and Fuller, add to the equation their inability to judge how long each take should run. In the studio, a red light would tell musicians to wind down in order to create a master that would 45

CHAPTER FOUR

fit on one side of a ten-­inch 78, which holds about three minutes of music. Durham musician Willie Trice recalled that Long or Bull City Red would touch Davis and Fuller on the shoulder to let them know they should finish up. Davis, Trice said, uttered on at least one occasion, “What you stopping me for? It weren’t long enough.” As Davis later said of the sessions, “I didn’t enjoy it too well. . . . I couldn’t hardly catch on to it too good until later on.”10 The first session took place on Tuesday, July 23, 1935, with Davis recording first and apparently putting aside his spiritual focus temporarily to sing two blues songs. As the sounds of his steel-­bodied National guitar rang out on the blistering single-­note runs and arpeggiated chords in the introduction to “I’m Throwin’ Up My Hands,” it was surely one of the most virtuosic displays of fingerpicking captured on record until that time. Fuller would steal many of the licks, played with less authority, on a song called “Mamie” he would record two years later. With “Cross and Evil Woman Blues,” the second blues Davis recorded that day, he may have been thinking of his first wife, Mary Hendrix, or possibly his mother when he sang the opening lines: Lord, you women sure do treat me mean (×2) Why you treat me just like I was

Some man who’s never been seen

Davis seems to have taken the line from Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Matchbox Blues,” recorded in 1927. In Davis’s case, at least, the symbolism is hard to ignore: the blind man as a nonentity in the eyes of women who would curse the day he was born or deem him unworthy of marriage. While Davis’s guitar work was spectacular, showing no outward signs of nerves, his vocals told a different story. Far from displaying the booming “voice of God” that would be captured on record and command the stage during the folk revival, Davis strained to sing on that first day. Some have speculated that hollering out his songs on Durham’s bustling streets had taken its toll on Davis’s vocal cords,11 but that’s an insufficient explanation given that his vocal abilities would be in full flower in New York during the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s, when he continued singing on street corners. More likely, Davis was 46

GREAT CHANGE IN ME (1934–43)

simply in poor health, without a companion or family member to look after him. Davis made only two solo recordings that day. He may have refused to record any more blues on account of his religious beliefs, according to musicians who knew him. The bluesman Walter “Brownie” McGhee, who arrived in Durham a short time later, remembered: “Long wanted him to sing blues and he didn’t want to sing the blues and that was a conflict right there.” The Greenwich Village folk singer Dave Van Ronk, one of Davis’s first guitar acolytes in New York, echoed this account: “They put the arm on him to record some blues because blues sold. He never forgave them for that.”12 When Davis had finished, either by disagreement or design, Blind Boy Fuller went before the microphone and recorded three blues/ hokum tunes: “I’m a Rattlesnakin’ Daddy,” “Baby, I Don’t Have to Worry (’Cause That Stuff Is Here),” and “I’m Climbin’ on Top of the Hill.” The next day, Wednesday, the trio returned to the studio and Davis didn’t record as a solo artist at all, again perhaps the result of a continuing dispute over what he would sing. Bull City Red, accompanying himself on guitar, cut two songs, one of which—­a blues called “Now I’m Talking about You”—­included a backup guitarist, probably Davis.13 Then Fuller recorded two more blues. On Thursday, Fuller went first, accompanied by Red on washboard and Davis on guitar, recording one of Fuller’s most famous numbers, “Rag Mama,” followed by “Baby, You Gotta Change Your Mind.” On these tracks, Davis’s backup guitar is clearly discernible. Apparently, his desire to help out his student trumped any prohibition on recording the blues—­and perhaps the knowledge that the records wouldn’t be released under his own name. Then Davis took the microphone as a solo performer, but only on spiritual numbers. On the first, “I Am the True Vine,” he reworked a song recorded in 1930 by Eddie Head and His Family as “Lord, I’m the True Vine” and by Josh White in 1933 as “My Father Is a Husbandman.” Next, Davis recorded “I Am the Light of This World,” a song popular with gospel quartets. While he may have taken the melody and chorus from a 1931 recording by the Dunham Jubilee Singers, the guitar accompaniment, a fingerpicking tour de force, was all his own.14 On “O Lord, Search My Heart,” Davis showed off his blazing origi47

CHAPTER FOUR

nality as an arranger with a theme drawn from Psalm 139: “Search me, O God, and know my heart.” The lyric mimics his outburst during the knife attack in Hayti, though it’s unknown which came first. The spiritual has a blues structure through and through, but Davis’s choice of voicings—­such as the unorthodox, full-­throated G-­seventh chord with which he begins the tune—­were unheard of among other country blues players. And his pyrotechnics on the guitar—­cascading runs and instrumental solos between verses—­anticipated rock ’n’ roll. Davis ended his recording for the day with “I Saw the Light” in a duet with Bull City Red, who took the vocal, an indication that Davis’s hoarse voice was getting in the way of his material.15 Then Red recorded four solo numbers of his own and Fuller returned on the final take of the day, “Evil Hearted Woman.” On Friday, Davis had his most productive day of recording: spirituals only, seven in all, including some of his most memorable material from the period, such as the traditional “Twelve Gates to the City” (which Fuller would cover later, using Davis’s arrangement) and “I Belong to the Band—­Hallelujah!,” which had its roots in Sacred Harp choral singing. They were both destined to become classics in Davis’s repertoire. Some of the songs seemed inspired by his religious awakening, like “The Great Change in Me,” with its exclamation of “a great change since I been born.” In “You Can Go Home,” Davis once again had his mother in mind, coupled with the theme of going home that would always occupy him: You have a mother won’t treat you right Take her to yourself and God alone

Tell your mother she treated you wrongly You can go home

On “You Got to Go Down,” Davis backs up his exhortation that “you got to learn how to live [be]’fore your children” with some spoken preaching: Some of you people don’t realize it. Taking the world by storm.

Don’t even know how to treat your family.

Doing all kind of ways. Living all kind of lives.

48

GREAT CHANGE IN ME (1934–43)

While the sermon was probably directed at his parents, it was unintentionally poignant, given Davis’s admission that he may have fathered several children during his wilder days. When Davis had cut his final song of the day, “The Angel’s Message to Me,” Fuller returned to record three solo tunes and Bull City Red added a pair of blues, “Black Woman and Poison Blues,” and “Mississippi River,” with Davis listed on second guitar. The results of the four days of recording for ARC that July turned out very differently for the teacher and his protégé. Fuller became “one of the most influential bluesmen in the southeastern states, and there can be few bluesmen of the late 1930s and 1940s who hadn’t heard his records,” writes Bruce Bastin.16 With Long as his agent, Fuller would record more than 130 sides for ARC, Decca, Vocalion, and OKeh before his death six years later. Of the fifteen sides Davis recorded, fourteen were issued under the name “Blind Gary” on ARC’s dime-­store labels, including Perfect, Melotone, Oriole, Conqueror, and Romeo, beginning on September 1, 1935, with Davis’s blues coupling of “Cross and Evil Woman Blues” and “I’m Throwin’ Up My Hands” and followed two weeks later with “You Got to Go Down” and “O Lord, Search My Heart.”17 On February 1, 1937, the last Blind Gary release, “You Can Go Home” b/w “Twelve Gates to the City,” was issued. One title—­“Lord, I Wish I Could See”—­ was rejected on January 28, 1938. The song—­in all likelihood a part of Davis’s street repertoire used to solicit money from passersby18—­may have been deemed unsuitable for release because of its highly personal nature. Davis’s unwillingness to record more than a pair of blues under his own name placed him squarely in the category of the singing “guitar evangelist,” along with Rev. Edward Clayborn, Blind Joe Taggart, and Blind Willie Johnson. Davis’s repertoire as a string band and street performer had been much broader than the selections he’d recorded for ARC. He’d refused to lay down any more blues and probably wasn’t asked to record popular songs, marches, or vaudeville tunes because the record companies didn’t perceive those to be of interest to black record buyers. It’s impossible to know, of course, whether Davis would have agreed to record any other secular music, with his focus so clearly on church songs. But the fact that he didn’t is a great loss to America’s musical legacy, given his vast and varied repertoire. 49

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As it turned out, the Blind Gary records didn’t sell well, in part owing to Davis’s strained vocals. The ARC files show 698 copies sold for his blues 78 and slightly fewer for his first gospel release, “You Got to Go Down” b/w “O Lord, Search My Heart”; by contrast, Fuller’s first 78, “Baby, I Don’t Have to Worry (Cause That Stuff Is Here)” b/w “Looking for My Woman,” sold 1,031 copies. As J. B. Long recalled of Davis: “If he’d a-­had the voice that Blind Boy Fuller had, he woulda been on a circuit somewhere, ’cause he could really play. . . . Sound just like . . . electric piano-­playing. . . . His playing of the guitar would sell you, but it didn’t sell records.”19 The 1935 sessions for ARC had the unfortunate timing of coming just three years before the dime-­store labels were discontinued,20 which meant that any releases would have had a fairly short shelf life. The lack of sales of Blind Gary in comparison with Blind Boy Fuller would help make Davis’s 78s much rarer when collectors began hunting for them decades later. Davis’s personal relations with Long suffered not only over the dispute about recording blues but also over payment for the sessions. Davis later said that he earned fifty dollars for his sides but that Long kept any royalties for himself. “I thought 50 dollars was some money. When I found out he was getting the royalties and I wasn’t getting but the 50 dollars. He had me covered on that, you understand, but I waked up. . . . He never got me know more.”21 Long later maintained that Davis, Fuller, and Bull City Red all waived possible royalties in favor of lump-­sum payments. Whatever the agreement, the ARC ledgers for Davis’s sessions indicate: “Artist royalty payable to J. Baxter Long.” Long received three-­quarters of a cent per side, meaning that a single record selling 600 copies would have netted him nine dollars in royalties. Since ARC released seven double-­sided “Blind Gary” 78s, Long probably made out better in the deal, but perhaps not much better.22 Cheated or not by Long, it wouldn’t be the last time Davis displayed a suspicious turn of mind. For a blind man who had been shunned by his mother and had to worry about being accosted on the streets, trust—­other than in Jesus—­didn’t come easily. As far as income from ARC was concerned, since Davis’s records sold poorly, at twenty-­five cents apiece, his missing royalties wouldn’t have amounted to much. 50

GREAT CHANGE IN ME (1934–43)

Brownie McGhee, who would also record for Long, held a less dubious opinion of Long’s character than Davis. “Without J. B. Long wouldn’t nobody have made a record,” McGhee recalled, “because [ARC] didn’t have anyone in that area.”23 The significance of the 1935 sessions for Davis is that they introduced the world to his monumental musical vision. Many of his original songs included hooks, melodies, and lyric phrases taken from music he heard on blues, jazz, and popular records in the 1920s and ’30s or from musicians he encountered firsthand, like Blind Willie Walker, during his formative years. But Davis’s intricate arrangements, in which he mimicked the upper and lower registers of a piano, the various instruments in a marching band, or the call and response of church music, had no parallel in the folk idiom. Not even the supreme virtuoso Blind Blake—­who at the age of thirty-­eight had succumbed to pulmonary tuberculosis seven months earlier in Milwaukee, a broke and forgotten musician—­could rival Davis in his conception of the guitar as an instrument with almost limitless possibilities. As Stefan Grossman, Davis’s later student in New York, would put it, “Davis’s music is so complex, it could be just like opera.”24 It would be unfair to call Fuller’s infectious guitar style completely derivative of Davis’s, drawing as it did from a variety of sources, including Blind Blake, Lonnie Johnson, and piano ragtime. But there’s no mistaking Davis’s profound influence on Fuller. Fuller recorded a couple of blues arrangements that are probably Davis’s—­“She’s Funny That Way” and “Mama, Let Me Lay It On You”—­two decades before Davis himself would introduce them privately to his guitar students in New York. As for Fuller’s biggest hit, “Step It Up and Go,” which sold half a million copies and became a country blues staple, Davis later maintained that he taught that to Fuller, too, according to bluesman Larry Johnson: By me coming out of the country like I did I was able to talk about records that Gary knew, such as Blind Boy Fuller. I said, “Yeah, Gary, I remember hearing that ‘Step It Up and Go.’” “Well,” he replied, “I taught that to him.” I said, “You’re kidding me!”

And he went to playing it, and a whole new thing happened. For

51

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about a year it just shocked me, you know, and then I finally started taking lessons from him.25

If Davis felt any sense of accomplishment from spending about a week in New York and recording for ARC, he returned to a life of deprivation in Durham, as his welfare records for the next few years make clear. On Christmas Eve in 1935, he apparently had nothing to eat, and W. E. Stanley, the city’s superintendent of public welfare, sent a note to the manager of the Piggly Wiggly food store, asking him to “please give Gary Davis $2.00 worth of food and charge to my account.”26 Davis had been found eligible to receive a monthly federal blind pension by the following spring, though it was being held up in Washington, DC, for unexplained reasons. A welfare worker noted once again that Davis was “anxious to get to work at the Mattress Factory for the Blind.”27 By April 1937, he’d been living for more than a year in a well-­kept three-­room house at 410 Poplar Street rented by Ella Whitaker, who had worked in the Liggett & Myers factory with Davis’s mom. The house is now destroyed, but a photograph taken during urban renewal in the mid-­1960s shows a simple frame cottage with a covered porch. Whitaker’s daughter Mary Hinton, who also lived there, told a welfare worker that “when Gary’s mother had died they had taken Gary [in] because he was so helpless.” Davis “was an awful lot of trouble,” she said, especially when it came to his smoking. Davis had actually caught himself on fire once, Hinton told the worker, and she and her mother “had just seen him in time” to help.28 Around May, the welfare file noted that he was ordained a minister in Washington, North Carolina, and Davis told a welfare worker who asked about his guitar playing that he “does not play the kind of music that meets public appeal” since he became “Christianized.” Davis was interested in “work concerning saving souls.” He hadn’t purchased new clothes in three years.29 In July, he finally succeeded in securing a blind pension of twenty-­five dollars a month. Davis continued to dazzle young musicians who came in contact with him and presumably (as he would in New York) played the blues in private if asked. Blues musician Richard Trice (Willie’s brother), from nearby Orange County, began hanging out and playing guitar in 52

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Durham as a fifteen-­year-­old when Davis was living with Trice’s cousin Mary Hinton. “He didn’t only play guitar,” Trice recalled. “He could play a piano, blow a saxophone, blow a harmonica, beat drums, he could do anything. He was just a pure God-­given wizard on guitar.”30 By this time Sonny Terry had moved to Durham. Born Sanders Terrell in Greensboro, Georgia, in 1911, the blind harmonica virtuoso had much in common with Davis. The child of a tenant farmer and also one of eight children, he’d been blinded as a teenager in two freak accidents, one self-­inflicted when he slammed into a table and the other suffered at the hands of a five-­year-­old who hit him in the eye.31 After his father died in a road accident, Terry went out on his own, playing on the streets and at dances. He first met Blind Boy Fuller in Wadesboro, North Carolina, and soon after followed him to Durham.32 Terry, Fuller, and Bull City Red began performing together at the tobacco warehouses and up and down Highway 70, which runs from Asheville in the west to Durham and points south. When Long asked Fuller to travel to New York again in September 1937, Terry went along as an accompanist. And during the next three years, Terry or Red or both would accompany Fuller on all his sessions. It’s often been speculated that Gary Davis, Blind Boy Fuller, and Sonny Terry performed together on Durham street corners. However, this appears to be a romantic notion. When asked years later by Stefan Grossman, the Reverend made clear that they didn’t work the streets together. Grossman: Did [Fuller] play a lot with any of the people in Durham?

Davis: Sonny Terry . . . that’s the only one I know that he played the guitar with.

Grossman: Did you play with Fuller? Davis: No, No, No.

Grossman: Did you play with Sonny Terry?

Davis: When first meetin’ him I didn’t. [Davis would both perform and record with Terry, beginning in the 1950s.]33

Terry and his future musical partner Brownie McGhee would play an important role in helping introduce Davis to the New York folk scene in the 1940s and ’50s. But in the late 1930s, Terry was about to get a big break that eluded Gary Davis. 53

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In the spring of 1938, John Hammond, a twenty-­seven-­year-­old record producer known for spotting talent, set off from New York with Goddard Lieberson, the handsome, English-­born composer and future president of the Columbia record label, in search of southern performers for a grand concert Hammond planned to stage called From Spirituals to Swing. It would present black music, from its rural blues roots to the swing jazz then sweeping the nation. Hammond, the leftist son of a Vanderbilt heir, believed that black musicians hadn’t gotten their due as progenitors of most of America’s popular music. He wanted audiences to understand the origins of the jazz being popularized by Benny Goodman and other white performers, and he thought music the ideal forum in which to promote a more racially integrated society.34 A gospel music enthusiast, Hammond presumably would have jumped at the chance to hear a singing minister who was the greatest exponent of Piedmont-­style guitar. “I wanted to include gospel music, which I listened to in various store-­front churches wherever I traveled, as well as country blues singers and shouters, and ultimately the kind of jazz played by the [Count] Basie band,” Hammond recalled. But in a major blow to Davis’s career, Davis never got the chance to audition for the show. Traveling in Hammond’s Terraplane convertible, Hammond and Lieberson came through North Carolina and called on J. B. Long at his home in the town of Elon College, hoping for an introduction to Blind Boy Fuller, whose records Hammond knew. (Hammond didn’t particularly care for Fuller’s singing, which he deemed too whiny, but Fuller had by then built a reputation as a great gui­tarist.)35 When they arrived in Durham, however, they found Fuller locked up in the city jail for shooting his wife, Cora Mae. Bruce Bastin has speculated that the shooting was probably accidental given Fuller’s accounts to welfare workers that he needed his wife by his side to lead him. Gary Davis had another take on the situation. He said Cora Mae had it coming: “He caught her with another man. He shot her with a .32.” Long showed up at the court hearing and helped to get the charge dismissed after Cora Mae refused to testify against her husband, and Fuller got a song—­“Big House Bound”—­out of the ordeal.36 With Hammond looking for guitar wizardry and Fuller behind bars, it seems likely that had Long introduced him to Gary Davis, 54

GREAT CHANGE IN ME (1934–43)

Hammond would have booked him for the concert. Davis, however, had clashed with Long, so the idea probably never came up in conversation. Hammond instead found Terry, who impressed him with his virtuoso harp playing and falsetto whooping, and Hammond offered Terry a place in the concert. Down the road in Kinston, Hammond also found with Long’s help the gospel group Mitchell’s Christian Singers. Hammond and Lieberson later headed to Chicago, where they booked Big Bill Broonzy as a blues guitar slinger. (Hammond had originally wanted Robert Johnson, who was poisoned to death in Mississippi that August.) The concert took place on December 23, 1938, at Carnegie Hall and was a smashing success. Terry blew and hollered his way to fame; Broonzy and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a flamboyant gospel-­singing guitarist from Arkansas, also received rave reviews. Over the next several days, Terry recorded for Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress, the first step in his rise to stardom on the early 1940s folk circuit in New York. Mitchell’s Christian Singers recorded for eighteen and a half hours in a New York recording studio.37 Gary Davis, arguably the most spectacular blues guitarist alive, stayed home in Durham, involving himself more deeply in the work of his church and languishing in near obscurity and poverty for another two decades.

*

In the summer of 1939, his welfare file notes, Davis had another opportunity to make records in New York. The file doesn’t specify with whom, although it’s very likely it was Long, who was having a dispute with Blind Boy Fuller over his contract. Davis explained to a welfare worker that Fuller had gotten $450 for a recording trip—­probably an inflated estimate—­and since Davis was only offered $40, or a possibility of $120, he had turned down the offer. “I try to make myself contented and satisfied with what I have,” Davis said.38 Around this time, Davis met Brownie McGhee, a Knoxville, Tennessee–­born guitarist who arrived in Durham after getting thrown out of Winston-­Salem for panhandling. McGhee, like Davis, had fashioned his first guitar out of spare parts, in his case a Prince Albert to55

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bacco can with rubber bands. About a decade Davis’s junior, McGhee walked with a slight limp due to a childhood case of polio that left him with one leg shorter than the other.39 McGhee recalled his first encounter with Davis on a Durham street corner, which showed that the recently ordained minister was missing no opportunity to cash in on his guitar playing, given his reduced viability as a party performer. “I asked him to play, and it cost me a dime, the first time I got to hear him play. He says, ‘A piccolo won’t play till you put some money in it.’” (Piccolo was local slang for a jukebox.) Davis played the spiritual “Meet You at the Station,” which McGhee would help him record in New York a decade later.40 After his arrival in Durham, McGhee found himself in the back of J. B. Long’s United Dollar store, where Long introduced him to Sonny Terry, the other half of what would become the most famous blues duo in history. Davis headed in another direction musically, spending more and more time at various churches in and around Durham and at revival meetings out of town. He couldn’t have known it then, but the vibrant church community in Hayti where he developed his religious repertoire would spawn some of the greatest African American music of the modern era. Rev. James Herndon, the pianist and chief composer for the Caravans, one of the most popular groups of gospel’s golden era after World War II, grew up in Hayti in the thirties. “Church was a central force of everybody’s Sunday,” he remembers. “You went, your parents went, your neighbors went, all of your friends went.” He adds that “in Durham, there were no kids hanging on street corners and that kind of stuff. There was nothing open on Sunday when I was growing up. Church was about the only thing open. Maybe a drug store and a hospital. Other than that, everything was closed.”41 Hayti had its older established churches like White Rock Baptist; Mt. Vernon Baptist, which both Gary Davis and James Herndon attended, first on Queen Street and later on South Roxboro; and St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal Church. As rural blacks arrived during the great migration, small congregations sprouted in homes and abandoned buildings, and they needed ministers whose sermons and spirituals could attract a crowd. These were both mainline denominations and the upstart Pentecostal/Holiness churches that would exert such a profound influence on American popular music. 56

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Herndon’s childhood friend Shirley Caesar—­later known as the First Lady of Gospel—­attended one of these newer churches, Mount Calvary Holy, which made up in fellowship and joy what it lacked in material comforts, as she recalled in her autobiography: “Paint peeled from the walls, and the thin wooden floor was filled with cracks. Looking down through those cracks, I could see rabbits and chickens running around underneath the floor.”42 Unlike the older Baptist and Methodist churches, which favored a cappella singing and more subdued piano and organ accompaniments, churches like Caesar’s both allowed and encouraged guitars, drums, tambourines, and other musical instruments in their rollicking services. Jazz, ragtime, and blues forms found their way into church—­a precursor of modern gospel and soul music. The small, poor Baptist congregations at which Davis would have been invited to sermonize undoubtedly took inspiration from their Pentecostal brethren, as they would later on in New York.43 Indeed, there was a fair amount of mixing going on between faiths. “I belonged to a Baptist church but I went all over town,” Herndon remembered. “I fellowshipped, I worshiped at every kind of church there was in the city.” The husband of Pearl Osburn, who ran the barbecue stand that Davis favored in his street singing, was a Holiness preacher, and he took Davis to a lot of churches where “they shout and have a hallelujah time and a whole lot of stomping and jumping,” William Amey recalled.44 For a man who was practically inseparable from his guitar, the addition of guitars and other instruments and a blues-­based music into the liturgy must have made the minister’s role more attractive as Davis began to commit his life to the church. Hugh Penn Brinton, for his classic study of black Durham in the 1930s, spent time in some of the city’s black churches. “The services are long drawn out, usually lasting more than two hours,” he wrote. “Besides the preaching, music plays an important part and there is much singing of spirituals. . . .”45 These lengthy and spontaneous worship sessions, with music as the backbone, would become Davis’s religious milieu for the rest of his life. They would contribute an improvisatory element to his performances that would be evident to those who heard him during the folk revival. The evolution of music in Durham’s black churches would mirror 57

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the changes that popular sanctified music underwent in the second third of the twentieth century. In the thirties, the all-­male vocal quartets that for decades had been integral to southern black life still predominated. As Brownie McGhee recalled of Durham’s music scene then, it was “blues and quartet singing, that’s all,” and Davis would go on to arrange a good many songs he first heard quartets perform. It’s worth noting that these harmonizing vocal groups, to be found in every black church, in barbershops or wherever young men gathered, prided themselves on the richness and variety of the chords they invented to give voice to spiritual feeling. James Weldon Johnson, in his first published collection of spirituals, recalled watching quartets at work during his youth in Florida: “I have witnessed some of these explorations in the field of harmony and the scenes of hilarity and back-­slapping when a new and peculiarly rich chord was discovered. There would be demands for repetitions, and cries of ‘Hold it! Hold it!’ until it was firmly mastered.”46 Davis would transpose the complex harmonies he heard from quartets and church choirs onto the guitar like no one before him, devising six-­string chords that rang forth with booming bass notes and bell-­ like trebles, thus greatly expanding the pallet of folk guitar. After World War II, gospel would take on its more modern form, with groups featuring female vocalists, sometimes with male backup musicians or singers. Mainstream gospel music would adopt the blues and ragtime-­inflected spirituals of the Pentecostal churches, as well as their liberal use of instrumentation, to create the sounds and rhythms that would provide the inspiration for soul and rhythm and blues.47 Hayti’s churches proved to be great musical incubators for both religious artists and those who would later choose to leave the church for the more lucrative world of secular music. Singing in the choir of Mt. Calvary Baptist (not to be confused with Shirley Caesar’s similarly named Holiness church), a young Clyde McPhatter sang with a silky tenor that would later make him one of the first R&B stars with the Drifters. His father, Rev. George McPhatter, and mother, Beulah, got to know Davis in Durham and would remain close to him once they all migrated to the New York area.48 Caesar would go on to join the Caravans in the fifties, electrifying the gospel world with her earth-­shattering alto. After James Herndon 58

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joined the group on Caesar’s recommendation, it would score a major gospel hit with “I Won’t Be Back,” a song Herndon composed based on an old spiritual he heard in Durham’s churches with the chorus, “Gonna sit down on the banks of the river and I won’t be back no more.” “It came from something I used to hear the elderly people sing years and years ago,” Herndon says.49 Davis would set his own version of the song to virtuoso acoustic guitar, calling it “Goin’ to Sit Down on the Banks of the River.” While the Caravans and McPhatter represented the future directions of black popular music, Davis would retain the solo unplugged style he honed as a minister and street singer. With his focus clearly on the church and not on a career in music, he remained immune to the stylistic innovations that transformed gospel performance in the coming decades. But Davis’s style, unchanged from the 1930s, would eventually put him in the ideal position to influence the future rock generation once folk music became fashionable. Meanwhile, a distant glimmer of Davis’s future life appeared, though he undoubtedly was unaware of it. In September 1940, Alan Lomax, a twenty-five-year-old folklorist working for the Library of Congress, compiled a list of important 78 rpm recordings of folk music that musicians and students should know. After sampling thousands of blues, hillbilly, and gospel 78s, Lomax chose 350 for his “List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records.” Two Blind Gary sides, “Twelve Gates to the City” and “I Am the True Vine,” were included with the notation “very fine.”50 In Durham, Blind Boy Fuller, suffering from bad kidneys, went into Lincoln Hospital around that time, but doctors couldn’t help him and he grew sicker. Davis recalled that “his shanks wasn’t as big as his guitar then.” Richard Trice visited Fuller in a second-­floor room, and the best-­selling blues artist on the East Coast declared himself ready to give up the devil’s music to get better. “He was telling me if he ever got out of that bed that he’d never put his name on another blues,” Trice recalled. “I knowed his nurse . . . she said he send for his guitar, they brought it up there and played Christian songs and prayed.”51 Fuller died on February 13, 1941, at the age of thirty-­three from complications of an infected bladder and kidney failure. He was buried two days later in Durham’s Grove Hill Cemetery, and Davis attended 59

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the funeral.52 After Fuller’s death, J. B. Long tried to capitalize on his popularity by tapping Brownie McGhee, whom he recorded as Blind Boy Fuller No. 2, jump-­starting McGhee’s long recording career. During the next couple of years, Davis went on more and more preaching trips and ministered at small churches. His blind grant was reduced from twenty-­four to twenty dollars due to budget cutbacks and he was “naked” for clothes, Mary Hinton told welfare workers. He still played for spare change on the streets, though he was forbidden from soliciting under the rules of his blind grant. Welfare workers visited him regularly, and their notations provide the only account of his activities, inclinations, and struggles during this period. Early 1941: “Mary Hinton .  .  . came in and spoke to worker. She complained of the heat and said that she believed she was going to die from it. That started Gary on a sermon about being prepared to die. He took his text from ‘Be ye also ready . . .’ and went into a detailed sermon on trying to stay ready so that when your time came you could take your flight to glory.”53 October 1941: “Mary told me that Gary could play the guitar quite well and that he did a great deal of playing in church. She remarked that people appreciated his music but never seemed appreciative enough to contribute a little to him.”54 November 1941: “I asked Gary about his guitar; I had seen him come in with it and wondered if he had been playing somewhere. He admitted that he had been out playing but wouldn’t say where. He said that he would play for me if I wished and I urged him to play me a number. His ability as a guitarist is unbelievable. I have never heard better playing.”55 April 1942: “His main interest in life it seems is religion and his main occupation is going to different missions throughout the state of North Carolina with the different ministers and preaching and singing to the congregations.”56 Late 1943: “It was with reluctance that he told anything regarding the financial side of preaching. He stated that he was more interested in saving souls than in money.”57 There can be little doubt that had Davis continued on that path he’d have met the same fate as so many other gifted prewar musicians who 60

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recorded a few impressive sides and vanished. He would have continued preaching and singing in churches around North Carolina, and occasionally on the streets, struggling to maintain even a bleak standard of living. His ministerial work had clearly become his chief concern, but with his financial situation so perilous, his life couldn’t have held much promise.

*

In the latter part of 1942, a savior arrived in the form of Annie Belle Hicks, a sweet, somewhat plain-­looking and devoutly religious widow from Raleigh. Davis often traveled to Raleigh or passed through on preaching trips and his guitar playing caught her fancy. She ran a six-­ room boarding house at 512 South Blount Street, near Shaw University, where she looked after young men training as barbers.58 “She said to me one day, ‘Reverend Davis, if you would like I can give you a place to stay.’ I said, ‘Well, the reason I didn’t say nothin’ to you about getting no place is ’cause I’ll be out late workin.’ She say, ‘Well, I don’t mind gettin’ up.’ One word led to another. So I first started roomin’ there.”59 “He was passing by my house,” Annie remembered, “and I had heard him play for somebody and I thought he played beautiful, so I asked him to stop and play for me sometime. Religious songs, sacred songs, he didn’t play any blues for me.”60 Davis’s choice of material was apt, as Annie abhorred the blues, deeming it the devil’s work. The eldest of six children, she’d been born around Fayetteville, North Carolina, on February 25, 1896.61 Her father had died a month later, and she lost her mother at thirteen. After that, she’d taken her stepfather George McDowell’s name. He met a grizzly death, sitting on a railroad track when an express train barreled over him. Annie was, by her own estimation, the type of girl who “never wanted to go to dances or gossip like other girls.” Despite her tragic childhood, her faith remained as strong as her devotion to the Baptist church. “I always go to bed pleasant and get up pleasant,” she would say.62 During their first meeting, Annie’s sister, who also lived in Raleigh, was there, and she sensed a spark or at least a devotional connection. “She said, ‘I think you all would be two good matches together,’” Annie 61

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recalled. Davis thought about it. “I do need somebody, a wife,” he offered. They very soon got engaged.63 For Davis the idea of marrying again filled him with trepidation. As he and Annie bonded over their religious faith, he asked God for inspiration: I stayed single 18 years. Said I wasn’t gonna never do that no more less’n God give it to me. I asked God this time could I have it? Was it pleasin’ to Him for me to have it? I told Him to show me a sign.

He showed me everything I asked him. . . . It was rainin’ that night. I told him to let me know by the changin’ of the weather. I told him I couldn’t see. Couldn’t look in the sky and tell by the look in the

sky. But I did hear the rain fallin’. I told him to let me know about makin’ a change. And the rain stopped before I ended my prayer good. Next mornin’ the sun shinin’ just as pretty and bright.64

Annie was unsure too. “I said to my sister, ‘Oh, man, a blind man. I don’t know how I would live with him, I never lived with a blind man before in my life.’ . . . So I was engaged to marry him over a year before I’d marry him. . . . I wanted to find out the type of man he was.”65 On November 13, 1943, Gary and Annie went before justice of the peace William O’Kelly in Durham and exchanged vows. It was Gary’s second marriage and Annie’s second or third. Mary Hinton served as a witness.66 Annie recalled that Davis’s Durham friends tried to talk him out of the marriage. “They didn’t want him to get married, they didn’t know how he’d live with anybody. . . . But they still didn’t stop it. We got married just the same.”67 Why would a Baptist preacher and his devout fiancée eschew a religious ceremony officiated by a man of the cloth in favor of a dry proceeding before a civil servant? One explanation is that from a religious perspective, they didn’t consider the marriage valid. Two anecdotes from Davis’s guitar students in New York decades later shed some light on the question. Alan Smithline recalled a chat with Annie around 1971: “I once asked Mrs. Davis how long have you been married and she said to me, ‘Actually, we never got married.’ And she kind of sheepishly or shyly blurted that out.” Another student, John Townley, wanted Davis to baptize his son from a second marriage, and the Reverend refused: “He didn’t recognize it. If you still have a previous wife 62

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who’s living, you’re still married to her. He did not believe in divorce. He made that real clear.”68 Legally, the marriage probably wasn’t legitimate since Davis hadn’t divorced Mary Hendrix. Unlawful second marriages were then commonplace in the South among poor blacks, who couldn’t afford the cost of a divorce proceeding. For Davis, this could have complicated his estate later on, especially given that he apparently had some heirs. But no one has ever come forward with a legal claim. Whatever the legal or religious ramifications, Gary’s and Annie’s lives were now entwined for the rest of their days. For Davis, that meant he would have someone who cared for his welfare—­a vital factor in his eventual success during the folk revival. A welfare worker reported that Davis married “because he felt he needed a companion just as other people do and someone to look after his clothing.” Annie now had a blind traveling evangelist for a husband whose talent as a musician was heavenly but whose income was much closer to the ground. “Nobody could say I married him for his money,” she would later say, “’cause he truly had no money.”69

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MEET YOU AT THE STATION (1943–­49) First of all, he had a guitar and he could play it. Secondly, he had a voice and he could use it. And thirdly, he was smart and you were in the presence of a person of some considerable intelligence. O sc ar Brand

O

nce Gary and Annie became a couple, she was anxious to move. “After we got married,” she recalled, “I didn’t stay there very long because everybody gave me the devil about marrying him because he was blind, all my friends.”1 Annie had a ready excuse to leave Raleigh. Two of her daughters, Ruby, now twenty, and Anne, about twenty-four, had followed the black migratory wave and made their way to New York City. Deeply worried about how they were getting on, Annie went to check on them shortly after her marriage and wound up staying. She moved first to Mamaroneck, a town in Westchester County about thirty miles north of New York, where she’d gotten a job cooking for a family. She told her new husband, “If things goes on alright, I’ll send for you.”2 Davis stayed behind for a few months, apparently spending most of his time in Raleigh, where he slept at the boarding house when he wasn’t on a preaching trip.3 It’s unclear why he didn’t join Annie right away, but their marriage would seem far from conventional during their early years together. He was still getting a blind aid check through the Durham Welfare Department, but that would soon become a dicey proposition after he moved. In January 1944, Annie sent for Gary and he headed to New York by train, with the Traveler’s Aid Society meeting him, probably at Penn Station. Annie was in church when he arrived and he waited a long while for her, thinking he’d have to head back to Raleigh. But she 64

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finally came and took him to a ten-­day revival meeting going on at her church.4 By April the Davises had moved to a three-­room second-­floor apartment at 405 East 169th Street in the East Bronx, paying twenty-­three dollars a month rent. They’d reside there for the next sixteen years. What was then known as the Morrisania neighborhood was an enclave in transition, with European immigrants and their children, mainly Russian and Eastern European Jews, beginning to move out and large numbers of blacks and Puerto Ricans moving in. The housing stock already was in a state of decay throughout the area when a 1939 study concluded that it did “not have the minimum standards for decent, safe and sanitary housing which are at present a legal requirement.”5 Now that he’d left North Carolina, Davis had a bigger problem as far as his welfare checks were concerned. On April 8, he sent a letter to Durham’s welfare office—­written in Annie’s angular, messy cursive—­ requesting that he still receive his monthly aid check of twenty dollars: “Please allow me a chance to live. . . . Don’t cut the little amount off as I need it bad to help myself.” After several months of corresponding with their counterparts in New York, Durham welfare officials soon determined that Davis had moved away permanently and asked that his case be transferred. By January 1945, he would begin receiving a monthly welfare check from the New York City welfare department that would continue until his music started earning him a regular income. While Annie worked occasional domestic jobs she obtained through church contacts, earning sixty cents an hour, Gary began traveling, with Annie’s help, twice weekly to the New York Association for the Blind on East Fifty-­Ninth Street in Manhattan. There he once again began training to make baskets. Although officials at the blind association noted that progress was slow, in September 1944 W. E. Stanley, the welfare superintendent in Durham, wrote the New York welfare office with a hopeful send-­off for Davis: “We trust that he is going to become self-­supporting and that he will no longer have need for public assistance.”6 Whether Davis had any designs on recording again is unknown, but unlike his Durham acquaintances Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, 65

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who’d been living in New York for several years, music wasn’t what lured him there. “I came here thinking sometime that I might could get some kind of work to do,” Davis told Durham officials.7 He was ordained a second time at the Missionary Baptist Connection church, presumably in Harlem or the Bronx, and became an assistant pastor there. However, he remained primarily an itinerant circuit minister who preached and sang at various churches around the city. These were mostly tiny storefront Baptist churches—­“a little mission,” in Annie’s words—­with poor black congregations of southern migrants like the Davises. Storefront churches were sprouting across the city as the black migration intensified, with more than 150 in Harlem alone by the late 1930s. Southern blacks often found the larger established churches in Harlem too subdued for the kind of emotional, elbow-­knocking, sweat-­on-­the-­brow worship they’d come to know back home.8 At the same time, middle-­class blacks tended to look down on storefront preachers and their flocks as hawkers of a spurious brand of Christianity that preyed on the less fortunate. James Weldon Johnson, one of the better-­known writers and educators of the Harlem renaissance, was openly skeptical: They are here today and gone somewhere else or gone entirely tomorrow. They are housed in rented quarters, a store, the floor of a private dwelling, or even the large room of a flat; and remain

as long as the rent can be met or until a move is made, perhaps to other quarters. Doubtless some of the founders of these excess

churches are sincere, though ignorant; but it is certain that many of them are parasitical fakers, even downright scoundrels, who count

themselves successful when they have under the guise of religion got enough hard-­working women together to ensure them an easy living.9

What Johnson’s analysis misses is that for many newly arrived southerners, the best of these small churches insulated them from the ennui of the concrete jungle and provided some of the spiritual comforts of home. “The southern preachers had a tune to their preaching style. They was in the field, they was workin,’ they was singin’ all 66

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day, and so when they went to church they carried that to the pulpit,” says Rev. Frederick Crawford, minister at the Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church in the Bronx. That contrasted, Crawford says, with the more established black churches, where “it was more like lecturing and talking and reading their manuscripts.”10 Crawford’s grandfather, Rev. Jeremiah Crawford, migrated from Alabama during World War II and set up a storefront church with a congregation of thirteen people on East Ninety-­Eighth Street in Harlem, later moving the church to a larger storefront in the Bronx. The congregation, under Crawford’s father, Fletcher, eventually purchased a former synagogue on Hoe Avenue, tore it down, and rebuilt on the site. Gary Davis preached at Union Grove a lot through the years to impoverished southerners looking to reconnect to their Baptist roots. It was a congregation that, unlike some of the more traditional Baptist churches, approved of the use of guitars and other musical instruments in the service. “My dad was the kind of guy that pretty much sung his way through a sermon and that was the way Rev. Davis preached too,” Crawford recalled. “He had a lot of tune to his sermons. . . . When people heard that, I mean they could hear it from outside, they would come inside the church. And I heard over and over again, they were visiting for the first time, they would say, ‘I want to become a member of this church because it reminds me of back home.’”11 The storefront congregations where Davis preached and evangelized, in Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, or elsewhere in the New York City area, often comprised little more than one or two dozen people, mostly women, and the services could last from early morning until evening and beyond. The Holy Spirit was a potent force in the hands of Davis and other ministers at these Baptist missions. Johnny Faulk, who knew the Davises in the Bronx after they arrived in New York, recalled: “I’ve seen people just bounce like electric shock was goin’ through ’em. Bounce six foot off the floor.”12 And Annie Davis remembered: “There’s a lot of people at our church, they holler and they shout, they tear off their clothes. You have to take ’em in the pastor’s study and let ’em stay there until it’s over. And the nurses be in there.”13 To their fellow church congregants, Annie was Sister Davis and 67

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Gary was Brother Davis, which Annie often shortened to the pet name “B. Davis.” In contrast to James Weldon Johnson’s dig at storefront preachers and their “easy living,” Brother Davis’s ministerial work could hardly be called lucrative, with “pass the hat” offerings rarely averaging more than three or four dollars per month, and usually less than that.14 Before long, to put food on the table, Davis was playing and singing not only in churches but on the streets, in violation of New York City law.15 Busking had been legal in New York until January 1936, when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, arguing that radio and regular concerts provided enough entertainment, placed a ban on the granting of licenses for street musicians, effectively making them outlaws. La Guardia, at his first press conference of that year, had made clear his feelings about street-­corner minstrels, saying: “I’m not going to license begging.” (The restrictions stayed in effect until 1970, when Mayor John Lindsay eliminated the need for licensing.)16 The ban on street music briefly became a cause célèbre in the New York media, with most sympathy focused on the hurdy-­gurdies—­ organ grinders—­ known for cranking out “Ave Maria” and “The William Tell Overture,” and “pleas[ing] both young and old with their melodies,” the Times reported. The ban was unevenly enforced, and in the first few years some magistrates who thought it harsh let off violators with a warning.17 But attitudes toward street musicians seem to have hardened in the ensuing years, perhaps as the performers themselves became a more desperate lot. Patricia J. Campbell, in her study of street singing in America, described how such entertainers were viewed in the years after the La Guardia ban went into effect: “By 1940, the street musician had become an object of pity and disgust. Only those who were truly desperate resorted to trying to earn a few pennies in the street. The legless, the armless, the blind or hopelessly maimed, would persuade a merchant to tolerate their presence at the door, and there they would saw away tunelessly at a cracked violin or squeeze doleful melodies from a shabby accordion.”18 Of course Davis had something these wretched figures lacked: immense talent. He’d already built up an exciting street repertoire and 68

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performance style from his decades playing outdoors in the South. From his own descriptions and those of the New Yorkers who remembered encountering him during his street-­singing days, it’s possible to paint a picture of him as he went about his craft. Dressed in a suit and tie, with a tin cup pinned to his overcoat or fastened to his guitar, and wearing dark aviator sunglasses over his eyes, he performed both spirituals and instrumental dance tunes—­but no blues, unless he was asked to teach a song. To keep his audiences planted he continued using his bag of street performer’s tricks—­making his guitar mimic the human voice, as when he slid his fingers up and down the strings to simulate shouting “good God!”;19 playing notes or entire chords with his left hand while keeping time with his right by snapping his fingers or beating on the guitar top or strings with his palm; and mimicking the sound of an entire band, using moving bass lines, counterpoint, rhythmic variations, and changes in timbre. With his thunderous, street-­coarsened baritone and breathtaking ability on the guitar—­and with the added mystique that all this musical virtuosity emanated from a slouching blind man with a little paunch—­Davis probably had little problem attracting attention. He later spoke of being able to collect fifty to one hundred dollars on a good day in New York. Other days, he’d come up with next to nothing but the satisfaction of maybe stirring a few souls.20 He described his approach to street singing a few years after his arrival in the city: I sing Christian songs, try to bring some brightness to the minds of

the people about how we should do, how we should live. First one song, then another. Sometimes, “Precious Lord, take my hand, lead

me on.” Just depends on what the spirit would give me to sing. If

the spirit give me a fast jubilee song, “Get Right Church and Let’s Go Home,” or “When God Gets Ready, You Got to Move,” I stand a few minutes and play those songs. People be standin’ listenin’

sometimes. Sometimes people call me to stop and play. “Would you mind playin’?” I tell ’em, “That’s the way I gets my little change.”

Don’t have no special amount. Anything they wants to give me for a selection.21

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Len Chandler, a black folk singer who would later watch Davis perform on the streets of Harlem, described the Reverend’s approach to the filmmakers Trevor Laurence and Simeon Hutner: Occasionally, I would come to watch him play and he would have his guitar case open in front of him, and Rev. Gary . . . would just

rock and play the guitar, and then he would be snapping his fingers. But it was his intensity and his enthusiasm and the whole quality of

his performance that was able to attract a crowd and keep ’em and make them give up a little money when they left.22

Despite the street music ban and the threat of arrest, other street musicians could also be found vying for people’s spare change. Atlanta native Parker Watkins earned his living by singing operas and classic vocal tunes in Italian, French, and German for pedestrians in Times Square and around Wall Street, occasionally getting cuffed and brought before judges who tended to have a soft spot for his talents. In midtown Manhattan, beginning in the late forties, a bearded, blind eccentric who called himself Moondog (born Louis Thomas Hardin) played homemade instruments and often wore a Viking helmet and carried a spear.23 No place had a larger contingent of street singers than Harlem, where an endemic music culture and teeming poverty combined to produce buskers of all stripes. When Davis began singing on the streets of Harlem, he had to share his territory with other blind performers. One was Blind Connie Williams, who was born in Florida, attended the St. Petersburg School for the Blind (Ray Charles’s alma mater) and later settled into life as a street musician, playing a mixture of blues and spirituals. He eventually made Philadelphia his home but took frequent trips to Harlem to play on the streets, where he teamed up with Davis for short periods.24 In Harlem, Davis was bound to run into two of his acquaintances from Durham, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. They’d both arrived in New York in 1942, first living with Lead Belly at his apartment on East Tenth Street, where their musical circle also included Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Sonny and Brownie moved up to Harlem by late 1943, just months before Davis’s arrival, and together 70

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they sometimes took in a hundred dollars on a good weekend from street ­playing.25 Davis began hanging out with McGhee,26 and the Reverend soon joined in on some of the raucous jam sessions at Lead Belly’s apartment with a who’s who of the New York blues and folk scene and any musicians traveling through. Notwithstanding his religious devotion, Davis apparently hadn’t given up his love of the blues, provided it was sung behind closed doors. As Lead Belly’s niece Tiny Singh (later Tiny Robinson) recalled, “Davis would visit Lead Belly on weekends. Wasn’t no drinking or getting drunk. At parties were Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, brother Stick McGhee, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Josh White, Cisco Houston, Big Bill Broonzy, all in [the] living room, all on [the] floor and in chairs taking turns playing all night long.”27 Although folk music wouldn’t hit the mainstream for more than a decade, New York already had an established folk music underground that included performers, record producers, and club owners. One important catalyst in the New York scene was the record producer Moses Asch. A Jewish immigrant from Warsaw, Poland, Asch had studied electronics but turned to recording during the Depression at the request of the Yiddish radio station WEVD. Branching out from Jewish music to all varieties of folk, Asch opened Asch Recording Studios in 1940 in an unassuming office building at 117 West 46th Street. The studio was bare bones: a ten-­foot-­square room lined with cork to drown out subway noise, with Asch’s desk a few feet away. “People used to come in and say, ‘I want to record,’” Asch recalled, “so all I had to do was get off the desk and put the equipment on and record. Nobody ever had to call beforehand to make appointments.”28 In the early 1940s, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie all recorded for Asch Records, a precursor to Folkways Records, helping Asch build a portfolio of artists who would help usher in the folk revival. Asch would explain to Time magazine that he was “not interested in hits. To me, a catalog of folk expression is the important thing.”29 Rev. Gary Davis’s artistry as a street performer couldn’t go unnoticed for long, and, according to Asch—­though the timing is sus­ pect—­by 1945 Davis entered his cramped studio to record for the first 71

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time in a decade. Just how Davis came to Asch’s attention isn’t known. It’s possible that one of the musicians in Lead Belly’s circle—­anyone from Guthrie to McGhee or Lead Belly himself—­introduced them. But Davis might have needed no introduction. One of his favorite spots to sing in Manhattan was at the corner of Forty-­Sixth Street and Sixth Avenue, a half block from Asch’s studio. Asch would have seen him on the way to and from his office and might have invited him up to cut some sides.30 With his wife, Annie, looking on and occasionally chiming in with advice, Davis recorded eight songs for Asch in a single session lasting less than an hour; all but one were religious numbers.31 They included songs that would later appear on Davis recordings issued by other labels, including “Lo, I Be with You Always,” “Time Is Drawing Near,” “He Knows How Much We Can Bear,” and “Crucifixion,” the latter Davis’s one-­of-­a-­kind song sermon set to virtuoso fingerpicked guitar. At one point during the session Asch asked, “Do you have something for children?” It was a question he’d put to many of the artists who recorded for him, from Lead Belly to Jean Ritchie to Peggy Seeger. But Davis seemed stumped by it: “You mean a song? That what you mean?” “One that you may remember from way back,” Asch told him. Davis responded that he had a hard time remembering much from his youth—­an odd statement given that he’d often recall songs he learned as a boy or young man, from “Children of Zion” to “Candy Man,” that would become integral to his repertoire. Annie suggested a march, and Davis, after trying to figure out what she meant, said: “You talkin’ ’bout that ‘Soldier’s Drill.’” And, unrehearsed, he performed a nearly flawless version of another of his remarkable compositions.32 Based on both John Philip Sousa’s “Semper Fidelis” march33 and on a traditional military song, the tune features Davis’s use of a six-­string guitar to imitate the instruments in a brass band and the sounds of war. We hear a trumpeter’s reveille, gun shots, soldiers marching in step, and a drum roll, all integrated into a complex ragtime fingerpicking arrangement that was light years ahead of what any other folk guitarist had previously put on record. The song even modulates keys, from F to C, a common jazz and ragtime technique but virtually un72

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heard of then in the folk idiom. (Inspired in part by Davis’s music, guitarists in the 1960s began arranging classic ragtime by composers like Scott Joplin for the guitar.) In the late nineteenth century, marches like Sousa’s “Washington Post March” had helped inspire the two-­step dance craze that swept the nation just prior to the mass popularity of ragtime,34 and Davis may have learned marches to perform for social gatherings when he lived in South Carolina. During the instrumental recorded by Asch, Davis can be heard shouting, “There’s the Jap. Shoot ’em! Hit ’em! Kill ’em!” One can picture the Reverend uttering these patriotic asides to keep his street audiences entertained in the era of World War II, although Davis recalled composing the piece “before I knew anything about marrying a woman”—­meaning prior to 1919. In later years, Davis would often sing lyrics such as “You’re in the army now, you’re in the army now / You’ll never get rich, you son of a bitch, you’re in the army now.” This places at least part of the tune in a World War I context, as “Song of the United States Army Bugle Corps” (1917).35 Davis wasn’t the first guitarist to try imitating a band. Henry Worrall’s landmark 1840 arrangement of “Sebastopol,” which became a standard for nineteenth-­century parlor guitarists, includes faux bugle and drum sounds, but the effect isn’t terribly impressive. Davis, in contrast, re-­created the interwoven voices of brass instruments and drums in a startling, realistic fashion, as no one had before him, at least not on record. As for Davis’s inspiration to mimic battle sounds, it might well have come from military bands of the World War I era, such as Lieutenant Jim Europe’s popular 369th US Infantry “Hell Fighters,” whose recording of “On Patrol in No Man’s Land” featured mock explosions, whistling shells, and machine-­gun fire.36 At the end of the Asch session, which comprised about thirty-­one minutes of recorded music, Davis asked, “How do you like those numbers?” It elicited a rather terse reply from Asch: “I like ’em.” But Asch’s actions speak louder than his words. Perhaps, given Davis’s relationship with blues and folk A-­listers, Asch had been hoping to record the Reverend’s secular material, which other musicians would no doubt have trumpeted. Asch would eventually release the only nonreligious tune from the session—­“Soldier’s Drill,” retitled “Civil War Parade”—­ 73

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on a 1967 Folkways collection of Asch recordings. Other songs from the session would be licensed to a British label for release in the United Kingdom.37 It’s unlikely that Davis received any money at all for the session—­ given his status as a musical unknown and Asch’s reputation for thriftiness—­and some of the recordings Davis made that day have sat in the Folkways archives for decades. Curiously, Asch later spoke about Davis as if he’d been more than just one of the hundreds of performers to pass through his studio, although that was from decades of hindsight. “We have let go Gary Davis” and others, he said, when asked why some of his early artists like Pete Seeger left for more mainstream labels. Whether his comment reflected an acknowledgment of a missed opportunity isn’t known.38 Asch’s career as a music producer represents one of the stepping stones on the path to the folk revival; another was the debut, on December 10, 1945, of Oscar Brand’s radio show, “Folksong Festival,” on WNYC in New York. Canadian-­born Brand, a handsome twenty-­ three-­year-­old folk singer with a pleasingly rugged tenor, featured live and recorded music and interviews with studio guests like Josh White, Lead Belly, and the Weavers singing to their own instrumental accompaniment. Brand opened and closed the program by picking and singing an English ballad, sea chantey, or folk ditty. By the time Brand went on the air, he recalled, the folklorist Alan Lomax had already urged him to go and hear Davis, who, Lomax said, played “Negro music” in an authentic style. Lomax may have met Davis through Lead Belly, with whom Lomax had a longtime association. “I think Lomax had come across [Davis] first and had told me he was a fine singer, fine guitarist,” Brand recalled. “He was everything we needed as an example of the other kind of music that was coming up.” Brand remembered having Davis on his show by early 1946. “He had a kind of winning personality. You were sure that he was having fun.”39 Once folk music began taking off later on and Davis got swept up—­ to a point—­in the wave, tales of his wicked sense of humor would become legion. Brand has the distinction of relating one of the earliest ones. Not long after Davis appeared on his radio show, Brand says, he invited the Reverend to appear twice at a folk music class he had 74

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begun giving at the New School in Greenwich Village—­a decision that cost Brand his teaching job. The first time, he introduced Davis as a blues singer to a classroom of around fifty students and onlookers, and Davis, appearing affronted, proceeded to play only spirituals, as a red-­faced Brand looked on. Davis continued performing well past the thirty-­minute class period, leaving the next class and an impatient professor to stand milling by the door. Davis returned a few weeks later, and Brand was determined not to make the same mistakes twice. He reminded Davis of the time limit and introduced him this time as a singer of spirituals. Davis proceeded to sing secular songs, telling the students, “Some of the songs I sing are gonna pull your ears back, but I’m gonna sing ’em.” The class period ended and Davis kept singing for another half hour, with the other professor now seething in the hallway. “That was the worst time I ever had standing in front of an audience,” Brand says. “He wasn’t going to let me, or anybody, especially white, but anybody, he wasn’t going to let them saw off the parts of the program they didn’t want. He was gonna sing his songs, he was gonna sing his program and he was gonna make that audience jump. And he did.” The teacher reported Brand and he was dismissed.40 Davis’s refusal to play the blues in public wasn’t immutable. In this instance he may have played secular songs because he was performing before a class of students learning about folk music—­and to mess with his young host. Whatever his motivations, the episode demonstrated Davis’s fierce independence. As Davis told an interviewer a few years later, “I act independent. Let people play with you too much, they’ll think you’re nothin’ but a play toy. Won’t respect you.” Brand notes that Davis played to his own drummer, a trait that did not always inure to his benefit. “He was not going to be a servant or a doll for anybody. It may have slowed him down, I don’t know.”41 Meanwhile, Davis’s abilities as a religious composer were attracting attention elsewhere. In 1946, the Watkins School of Music on 131st Street in Harlem published sheet music for a spiritual called “Message from Heaven”—­“lyrics and music by Rev. G.D. Davis.”42 The song, arranged by the music school for piano and gospel quartet, had been written by Davis around 1935 in the lead-­up to World War II. “There’s 75

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Destruction in This Land,” as the song came to be known, had themes that were common for Davis—­the evil in the world and the need to prepare for judgment: Now friends, there is no use of mourning, there is no use of crying Just set your house in order and prepare yourself for dying

You just keep this world behind you and get Jesus on your mind There’s destruction in this land, can’t you see, can’t you see

For street-­corner evangelists in the South, selling printed versions of their songs was a fairly common means of making money. Davis later recalled that he sold hundreds of copies of his song for thirty-­ five cents apiece. “I sold three hundred dollars worth of that music. . . . I sold every one of ’em.”43 Given the much-­needed economic boost that selling sheet music would have given him, it’s unclear why he didn’t publish more of his music. It might have ensured he was properly compensated for his compositions once the folk revival got under way and white artists began using his songs and arrangements. In February 1948, Davis traveled back to Durham by train to attend a revival meeting and to see an uncle who was seriously ill and soon died.44 Davis, staying with his old housemate Mary Hinton, tripped on a bank of snow and broke his right hand. “I was going along one night . . . and my foot slipped, and to keep from falling I was scuffling and I stuck my hand on an iron water dog. I didn’t know it was broke until I saw a doctor the next morning. . . . I thought I wasn’t ever going to be able to play no more, but I did.”45 Mary Hinton informed Durham’s welfare office that Davis was ill in addition to having suffered an injury and had huge running sores on his legs, accompanied by an odor. Doctors at the Duke clinic suspected Davis of suffering from syphilis. He was tested, but after Annie wired some money, he left Durham by train to return to New York before the results were released. Hinton immediately removed Davis’s clothing from her home.46

*

The Harlem where Davis spent much of his time preaching at churches and performing on street corners during the late 1940s was a dangerous and unforgiving place. Housing was overcrowded. Drugs like 76

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heroin ravaged neighborhoods, and homicides were routine.47 Once a multi-­ethnic enclave, central Harlem had become almost entirely black after the departure of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Irish, and Italians the previous decade. Though Harlem had a burgeoning black middle class, unemployment remained high even after President Franklin D. Roosevelt eliminated segregation in defense industries during World War II, which opened up a good many war-­related jobs. A survey of west Harlem had found that the vast majority of buildings had few working windows, no heat or hot water, and mice or rat infestations.48 The streets after dark were aswarm with illegal activity, as the writer Langston Hughes observed: In vast sections below the hill, neighborhood amusement centers after dark are gin mills, candy stores that sell King Kong (and maybe reefers), drug stores that sell geronimoes—­dope tablets—­to

juveniles for pepping up cokes, pool halls where gambling is wide

open and barbecue stands that book numbers. Sometimes, even the grocery stores have their little side rackets without the law.49

Harlem posed serious perils for a blind minister/musician trying to get out his message and earn his keep. Davis would tell an interviewer: “Every time somebody walk up close to you, you think they’re gonna kill you. You walk out with killing on your mind. That ain’t no way to live.”50 Davis told of being robbed of a guitar—­and fending off a further assault—­on Lenox Avenue one night around 2 a.m.: I’d just left from my friend preacher’s house. . . . Two fellows overtaken me. Thought maybe they was goin’ my way. Ask me would I stop on 113th Street with ’em. . . . Just good company, I thought.

Then I stopped, got upon the stoop, you understand, and one of ’em

started foolin’ round in my pocket. They have not git my money. I was turnin’ too fast for them to get that. Made me mad. That’s one night, if I’d a had me a pistol, I wouldn’t be settin’ here. I woulda killed both of them.51

The thieves slapped Davis in the face, cut the guitar off his back, and made off. Davis had been carrying a knife in his pocket but didn’t want his attackers to see it. He would later tell of having had guitars stolen 77

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“as fast as I could get them,”52 as well as his Braille watch, on Harlem’s mean streets. He also seems to have carried a pistol for protection at least some of the time as he did in Durham. On April 29, 1948, Davis was arrested in the Bronx for possession of a revolver. The Bronx Court of Special Sessions found him guilty a week later.53 Records of Davis’s sentence haven’t survived, but whatever it was it didn’t deter him from walking the streets armed. Once he got more comfortable navigating New York by himself, Davis would head out at all hours with his guitar. “Don’t have no special time,” he said. “Sometime ten o’clock up in the day, some time six o’clock in the mornin’. Sometime I spends the night out standin’ round by those business shops that’s open. I do that so I won’t wear out the patience of those that see me.”54 Davis always dressed in a suit and tie when he went out because he didn’t know where he’d wind up. “I try to go nice all the time, ’cause I don’t know where I’m gonna be picked up at. I’m liable to go out on Monday sometime and be picked up and carried away and be gone for a whole week. To a church. Somethin’ like that. I don’t even have to go back home.”55 In fact, Davis would stay away from home for far longer than a week during his early years in New York, as Annie Davis recalled in this exchange with Stefan Grossman: Annie Davis: You know, he’d go in the street, sometimes I know’d him to go off and stay, I believe. . . . seven months at a time before he’d come back home.

Grossman: Seven months?

Annie Davis: Mmm-­hmm.

Grossman: Where was this? Annie Davis: In Harlem.

Grossman: He wouldn’t come home for seven months? Annie Davis: Or stay as long as he’d want to.56

Davis wouldn’t sleep much out on the street, for fear of being robbed. He’d take cat naps wherever he could, in restaurants or the basements of Harlem tenements, if necessary. Without Annie around, bathing didn’t make it to the top of the priority list. Sometimes, fellow 78

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ministers found him out on the street looking disheveled and brought him home to get cleaned up. “I used to go in Harlem sometimes and he was so dirty I wouldn’t know him,” Annie Davis remembered. “I’d almost scream. Because I wasn’t around to make him keep himself clean.”57 It’s unclear why Davis stayed away from home so much during this period. No doubt he felt pressure to provide an income for his new wife. And New York had offered a new network of small Baptist churches in which to preach. His marriage and home life would begin to seem more traditional once he was able to stop performing on the streets. By then, he’d have appointments to keep daily with his visiting guitar students.

*

By 1948, Brownie McGhee had started a short-­lived guitar school on 125th Street, “Brownie McGhee’s Home of the Blues,” which attracted both black and white students. McGhee asked Davis to teach there. Davis may have been speaking about his stint as a teacher for McGhee when he said a couple of years later, “When people come to me for what they want, I teach ’em [sinful songs], though that has gone out of my life. But publicly, I play Christian songs. Fact, I don’t care so much about sinful songs no way, ’cause people might think I was talkin’ one way and actin’ another.”58 Davis and McGhee would never be close, and at times their relationship turned outright hostile. But McGhee is nevertheless one of the many musicians who helped Davis during his long struggle out of poverty—­or at least tried to. As McGhee put it to one of Davis’s students, Alan Smithline, many years later: “We tried to help Reverend Davis, but, no, he had to do it his way.”59 It’s easy to speculate that the experience at “Brownie McGhee’s Home of the Blues” made a lasting impression on Davis: A nascent market existed in New York for authentic teachers of traditional black music, with interest among white guitar players, a novelty for a black man who’d grown up in the segregated South. McGhee also landed Davis a recording session. In January 1949, Davis laid down six sides for Continental Records,60 a New York label 79

CHAPTER FIVE

that specialized in ethnic and regional fare, including jazz, polka, and western and Hawaiian music. Artists in its jazz catalog included Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Sarah Vaughan, and Dizzy Gillespie. McGhee, whose own recording career had taken off in New York, arranged for the session and accompanied Davis on guitar on several tracks. Continental’s sister label Lenox issued one 78 of Davis—­once again under the name “Blind Gary”—­a coupling of two spirituals, “I Cannot Bear My Burden by Myself” and “I’m Gonna Meet You at the Station,” the latter of which McGhee had asked Davis to record.61 In his first release since 1935 Davis sounds in better voice, but the recording quality is only adequate and the release seemed not to have garnered much, if any, attention. By then, the golden age of gospel music was in full swing. But the vocal quartets, gospel groups, and performers like Sister Rosetta Tharpe who came to define the genre had begun featuring bluesy electric guitar and other instruments in their recordings, so it’s not surprising that Davis’s solo “guitar evangelist” style failed to find an audience. Davis didn’t recall the Continental session more than two decades later, though he offered this observation: “You searching amongst leaves, sometimes you find a piece of gold every once in a while.”62

80

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WHO SHALL DELIVER POOR ME? (1950–­55) I’m trying to imagine what Davis’s ordinary life was. I mean, you get a little money at those [church services]. They pass the hat. So between that and begging in the streets . . . J ohn Cohen

I

n January 1950, Rev. Gary Davis’s triumphant appearance before a stunned crowd at the Lead Belly memorial at New York’s Town Hall represented his debut as a New York performer on the big stage. The audience that day was unaware that he did the vast majority of his singing in storefront churches and on city sidewalks, with perhaps an appearance or two at a union rally or a hootenanny—­an informal concert in which performers swapped protest songs, ballads, or other traditional tunes. People’s Songs, the folk activist organization founded a few years earlier by Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax, and others, hosted regular “hoots,” often to call attention to left-­wing causes.1 Davis’s Town Hall performance had gotten notice in the New York Times and the New York Age—­indeed, the raves from the press and fellow musicians were similar to what Sister Rosetta Tharpe had garnered for her foot-­tapping sacred songs at John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concert a dozen years earlier, helping her become gospel’s newest sensation. But the folk music boom that would embrace stripped-­down acoustic music and provide the Reverend with steady concert work in addition to his ministerial duties was still more than a decade away. As Time magazine noted, with a bit of exaggeration, a few months after the Lead Belly show, “Professional folk singing in the U.S. is mostly the province of a few long-­haired purists who rarely get a hearing outside the clubs and recital halls where their small but fervent public gathers.” Within months, however, the Weavers, a folk quartet featuring thirty-­one-­year-­old Harvard drop81

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out Seeger on long-­necked banjo, Fred Hellerman on guitar, and Lee Hays and Ronnie Gilbert on vocals, provided a taste of folk music’s future. They scored a number one hit with Lead Belly’s “Good Night Irene,” the B-­side of a single that also included “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” a Hebrew folk song that reached number two.2 Not long afterward, Davis and his guitar were captured in a recording that became the only audio documentation of his street performing. In the spring of 1950, twenty-­six-­year-­old Tony Schwartz set out to record the sounds of New York City on a portable machine he’d invented.3 Recording only in his own neighborhood, the postal zone then known as New York 19 (now the 10019 zip code), Schwartz would go on to release a series of albums on Folkways documenting street sounds—­everything from offbeat musicians to children playing jump rope. (Later, Schwartz would become a sought-­after political consultant, and he created the most infamous campaign commercial in American history: the “Daisy” ad, featuring a little girl and a nuclear mushroom cloud, which was run only once—­to devastating effect—­ by Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater.) For a Folkways album called Music in the Streets, Schwartz recorded various musicians he encountered on his walks, from a Salvation Army band to a Greenwich Village banjo and bass duo to Moondog, whom he found at Fifty-­Second Street and Sixth Avenue. A few blocks away, at the corner of Forty-­Sixth and Sixth, Schwartz pointed his microphone at Rev. Gary Davis. Schwartz’s original tapes can’t be located, so there’s no way of knowing how many songs Davis played for him amid the clamor of midtown traffic. But one tune by Davis did make it onto the album, and it continues to confound guitarists more than six decades later. Usually called “Twelve Sticks” (or “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl [and Playing Guitar at the Same Time]”), the song features moving bass lines, arpeggiated chords surging up and down the guitar neck, and a syncopated rhythm that’s nearly impossible to maintain at the speed Davis played it. He did it, as always, using only the thumb and index finger of his right, picking hand, while many modern fingerpickers use at least three fingers.4 Davis used the arrangement, based on the traditional “Salty Dog” ragtime progression—­E7, A7, D7, G—­as a challenge to other guitar82

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ists. And indeed, no other guitarist performing in 1950 was known to be playing the quality of ragtime that Davis displayed for Schwartz.5 Music in the Streets would be released in 1957, and though it can hardly have generated much of an audience, it remains an important document of Davis’s early period in New York. Still all but invisible in the popular music world, the Reverend in the early months of 1950 already had a champion who wanted to make his name better known: Alan Lomax, the thirty-­five-­year-­old former head of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress, who was the nation’s leading authority on traditional music. During his scores of folklore trips around the United States, Lomax had made life-­changing recordings of a number of musical giants, lifting them out of obscurity and elevating them to the status of icons. After Lomax and his father, John, had discovered Lead Belly, they had recorded an oral history of the singer’s life and music for what they called the first musical biography in America. A short time later, in 1938, Alan Lomax took a similar approach with ragtime-­jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton, helping cement Morton’s place as one of the founding fathers of jazz.6 Had Lomax completed a similar musical biography with Davis, the Reverend might have gotten the kind of attention that could have catapulted him into folk music’s upper echelons, along with the likes of Josh White, Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, Pete Seeger, Brownie McGhee, and Sonny Terry. But in 1950, Lomax found himself in hot water due to his suspected Communist sympathies. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had begun tracking him in the early 1940s, and by the summer of 1950, with the House Committee on Un-­American Activities ratcheting up its investigations, Congress was considering passage of the McCarran Act, which would greatly restrict the movements and travel of anyone deemed “subversive.” As anti-­Communist fervor grew in Washington, Lomax presented and performed at a two-­day event titled Song Festival of American Ballads on July 1 and 2, 1950, along with Seeger, Guthrie, and Davis at a brand new resort hotel, the Music Inn, in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. It was founded by a New York City couple, Stephanie and Philip Barber, who sought to create a kind of jazz-­folk salon on part of the former Wheatleigh estate of Countess Carlos M. de Heredia down the road from the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s home at Tanglewood.7 83

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About fifty people attended the inn’s first show, a Sunday afternoon concert in a renovated farm building. The Berkshire Eagle, a local paper, previewed the festival by reporting that “three outstanding singers” would accompany Lomax to present “the whole scope of the American ballad.” Davis was described, with some hyperbole probably supplied by Lomax, as “a blind Negro evangelist who has sung on the streets of half the cities of the Eastern United States.”8 The first night, the hotel’s rural pipes failed and guests, presumably including the performers themselves, had to use bottles of ginger ale to flush the toilets.9 Several photos survive from the event, including one that shows Guthrie performing in what looks like an old carriage house, with a harmonica in a rack and a guitar whose soundboard bears the hand-­scrawled slogan This Machine Kills Fascists. Seeger, who would soon be blacklisted because of his Communist associations, sits on a bench behind and to Guthrie’s right, accompanying him on a banjo; and Davis sits to the left, taking a snooze. (Out all night singing on the streets or preaching for hours at his many churches, Davis would often fall sleep, even on stage, at his early New York gigs.) Another photo captures Davis looking resplendent in a dark suit with a flower in his lapel, performing with a jumbo acoustic guitar. The combination of Davis with Seeger and Guthrie at a road performance—­probably Davis’s first since arriving to New York—­must have been heady for both the audience and for Davis himself. Sadly, Guthrie’s performing days were numbered. Two years later, doctors would diagnose the Huntington’s disease that gradually robbed him of his muscular coordination and ultimately killed him. Lomax had other concerns. By September, he would set sail for Europe on the steamer RMS Mauretania to begin an eight-­year self-­imposed exile that wouldn’t end until McCarthyism had begun to wane.10 One of Davis’s earliest and most enthusiastic supporters was thus temporarily out of the picture, although Seeger’s harrowing struggles with the blacklist ironically would play a positive role in Davis’s career later in the decade. Lomax did not abandon his plans to document Davis’s life. He’d recently divorced his wife, the former Elizabeth Lyttleton, but the two remained in contact via overseas mail and still cooperated on folklore projects. In one letter they discussed working together on the “great 84

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poets of the world,” meaning performers like Gary Davis.11 And Lomax began paying Elizabeth to conduct a taped oral history of Davis, which wound up being the most extensive interview he ever gave about his early life. During her marriage to Lomax, Elizabeth had accompanied him on folklore trips in the United States and Haiti, helping record musicians like Willie Brown, Woody Guthrie, and Son House. And she had a hand in one of the greatest blues discoveries of all time: Muddy Waters, the shy, shoeless guitar-­playing tractor driver they found on the Sherrod plantation in Stovall, Mississippi, in the summer of 1941.12 By the end of 1950, Lyttleton had begun hours and hours of sitting with Davis, occasionally accompanied by Annie and other acquaintances, to record his life story. As the transcripts show, Davis talks candidly at times, evasively at others, with his interviewer, whom he calls “Miss Lizzybeth.” He “hawks and spits continuously,” Lyttleton notes, and preaches or plays his guitar as the spirit moves him, his personal magnetism on full display. The interviews are important in several respects: For one, they contain the lengthiest descriptions of Davis’s life in the Carolinas—­though they fall short of a definitive narrative. Years removed from financial success and the adulation of scores of white guitar players, Davis talks far more bluntly about race than he would during the folk revival. Asked, for instance, about discrimination, Davis says: “A colored man ain’t got no state, no law, no government. Heap of times, a colored person feels like cryin’ when a white person speaks to him.” As Davis talks, Lyttleton notes: “He cries now. The tears pour down his sunken cheeks.”13 Davis has a prescription for what ails the world, one that would sound familiar to his later fans: “All nations, all colors, has got to get together and pray. Preacher has got to hold the gun.” The comment suggests that by then Davis had already written one of his most famous songs, “Let Us Get Together,” one of his signature tunes during the sixties. For a man who could be lynched in the South for showing interest in a white woman, the attentions of thirty-­three-­year-­old Lyttleton must have been novel and exciting. Davis’s affection for women would become fodder for a great many ribald stories later on, and Lyttleton may have been the first white woman to hear at great length tales of his sexual prowess and the innuendos he would sprinkle into conver85

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sations. “I would get you, too,” Davis tells her, “if I was long in my young days. You’d howl like a puppy and growl like a cat.”14 For her part, Lyttleton seems as intrigued by Davis and his sexuality as he is by hers, at a time when social taboos made mixing between white women and black men rare, even in the North. She poses dozens of questions about his views on women, love, comparisons of white and black men’s sexual natures, female orgasm. The result is one of the more explicit musical interviews of its day and certainly one of the raciest interviews of a working minister. For instance, at one point she asks, “Do you make love a long time, Rev. Davis?” He replies, in part: I got to take my time. Wait till the time comes for it to get here. Lay

and talk. Play with her. Hug and kiss her. Grab one of her titties, roll

it around in my hand[,] . . . bite her on the jaw once in a while. Play

with her. Lay her in my arms. Roll her about in my arms. Get her

dress up. Kinda put my hand on it. Rub it awhile. . . . Grrrrreat God! Mmmmmm-­mmmm! I’m just crazy about a woman. I could take

one right now. . . . Shucks, I whups one of them things, like playing the guitar.15

Lyttleton seems to have grasped the complex entanglements of Davis’s personality that would remain at odds throughout his life as a minister and musician. “I think,” she says, “the resemblance to the authoritative African wise man or witch doctor is striking. . . . He is also as bitter and grieved a ghost of human decency and dignity as ever haunted this weary strumpeted old earth.”16 And despite opening up more than he ever would again to an interviewer, Davis kept much of his life shrouded in mystery, although he would reveal bits and pieces over the years to students and confidants.

*

By the early fifties, a small wave of young folk music enthusiasts, led by John Cohen, took an interest in Davis and his music. Cohen, born in 1932 in Queens, had seen Davis perform at the Lead Belly memorial and a short time later, after getting involved with People’s Songs, he’d been asked to escort Davis and Sonny Terry by taxi to a hootenanny. Cohen began visiting Davis in the Bronx, along with other friends from Great Neck, Long Island, where Cohen lived. One friend 86

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was Ellen Stekert, a junior at Great Neck High School who had a later career as a folk singer and folklorist. Stekert recalled the Davises’ 169th Street apartment as a shoebox of a place, with a tiny kitchen and a main room about ten feet by ten feet. “About three or four of us were all crammed into this little room. And Davis sat there and played and kids kept crawling under the table and flew from one door to the other.” Like others who heard Davis perform, Stekert sensed she was in the presence of greatness. “His fingerpicking style was just so remarkable and his syncopations and elaborations were what most people liked, which is why bluegrass took off at that time too.”17 Cohen, who would cofound the old-­time revivalist group the New Lost City Ramblers and also become a noted folklorist, filmmaker, and photographer, on several occasions brought recorders with him on his visits in 1952 and 1953—­first, a primitive wire recorder and later on a portable Pentron reel-­to-­reel. His home recordings of Davis, not released for more than half a century, include a number of songs that would become important to his legacy: “If I Had My Way” (better known as “Samson and Delilah”), “Twelve Gates to the City,” “Get Right Church,” “There’s Destruction in This Land,” and a short instrumental version of “Cocaine Blues.”18 Davis wouldn’t sing “Cocaine Blues” in public for many years—­ probably to his detriment, for it was destined to become a classic. One morning about half past four

Heard somebody knockin’ on my door Cocaine done got all around my brain

He said he first heard the tune in his early days back in South Carolina, but he gave conflicting accounts as to the source. Davis told one writer he heard “Cocaine” from a female organist in Greenville, presumably around 1920 when he lived there. He told Stefan Grossman he learned it from the musician Porter Irving, whom he heard in Laurens as a boy.19 First used as a local anesthetic in the late nineteenth century, cocaine became an illicit recreational drug soon after, sold into the black market by unscrupulous doctors. During Davis’s youth, Laurens and many other southern localities grew alarmed at its growing use, 87

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especially among blacks, after local temperance laws went into effect in the early 1900s. “The negroes who are the most generally addicted call the drug ‘sniff ’ for the reason that the dry white powder is sniffed into nostrils, causing insensitivity to pain and producing hallucinations,” the Laurens Advertiser reported when Davis was a teenager.20 “Cocaine Blues” shares some lyrics and melodic phrasing with the old ballad “Take a Whiff on Me,” recorded by the Memphis Jug Band in 1930, and a similar song called “Tell It to Me,” recorded in 1928 by the Grant Brothers, a white hillbilly band. But it’s Davis’s seminal guitar version that, initially in the hands of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, would influence a generation of guitar pickers in Europe and the United States. The tune featured one of Davis’s trickiest fingerpicking arrangements, which displayed his genius for turning musical thinking on its head. He used what his later guitar students termed “back picking”—­ playing the bass notes on the second and fourth beats instead of the usual first and third—­to alter the song’s rhythmic emphasis. It was a technique that stride pianists employed, but one that would give Davis’s admirers fits trying to figure out. The folk singer Dave Van Ronk, who later studied with Davis, called his mentor’s guitar style “fantastically complicated,” and he had songs like “Cocaine Blues” and “Candy Man” in mind,21 in addition to Davis’s virtuoso ragtime and gospel arrangements. On some of the spirituals Cohen captured on tape, Annie Davis sings along with the spontaneity she’d display when Davis performed in church. Listening to the pair, it’s evident how integral their faith was to their bond. Also recorded along with the Reverend was McKinley Peebles, a fellow street singer and guitarist who went by the name Sweet Papa Stovepipe. Peebles, an ex-­prizefighter from North Carolina who was born in 1897, sang in a smooth tenor and, like Davis, played a mixture of gospel and dance music from the Carolinas.22 Peebles recalled meeting Davis in the early 1950s. “I was selling snowballs [flavored ices] on the corner of 143rd Street and Lenox Avenue . . . and he was playing and singing on the street.” The two began performing together on sidewalks in Harlem, Brooklyn, and across the Hudson River in New Jersey, riding the rails and offering their services to churches along the way.23 The partnership, however, didn’t last. For a dirt-­poor street singer, 88

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every nickel and dime helped put food on the table, and Davis felt as though he carried most of the load for the duo. As Annie Davis remembered, “I don’t care how much money people would give Reverend Davis—­and he had to do all the special requests and out on the street—­McKinley would always say, ‘I got to have half of it.’ So he would make money, but Reverend Davis would have to give him half the money. So one day he got out of that.” A similar falling-­out seems to have occurred between Davis and Blind Connie Williams, the Philadelphia street singer.24 That Davis allowed Peebles and Williams to share the spotlight—­ both on the street and, in the case of the former, in front of Cohen’s microphones—­is an early example of the kind of generosity he’d unfailingly show with his music, his most precious commodity.

*

After Lead Belly’s death, the raucous folk music jam sessions that had taken place in his sixth-­floor apartment on East Tenth Street moved one floor below to the residence of his niece. Queen “Tiny” Singh—­ whose nickname reflected her slight, five-­foot-­two-­inch frame—­had grown up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and had arrived in New York in 1941 at the age of eighteen to care for her aunt Martha, Lead Belly’s wife, who’d been having health problems. By day she worked as the head seamstress at a bathing suit factory in Manhattan, but she’d taken an interest in Lead Belly’s music, looking over his contracts and royalty statements to make sure he was getting fair treatment.25 One catalyst for the jam sessions at Tiny’s apartment was the entrance on the scene of Davis’s first one-­on-­one guitar pupil and “lead boy” in New York, John Gibbon. Davis by the early 1950s had long since learned his way around New York well enough that he didn’t need help getting from place to place in the city. On the subway, he’d count the number of stops until his destination, often playing in the cars for spare change.26 Davis’s lead boys would help get him to gigs on time and, once he started traveling on the folk music circuit outside of New York, they’d play a greater role in caring for him on the road. Gibbon was a nineteen-­year-­old student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, an experimental school favored by artistic and bohemian types, when he met Davis in 1953. Opting for a work semes89

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ter in New York, with a job at the public library in Tompkins Square, Gibbon ran into Brownie McGhee one night at a blues joint called Felton’s Lounge on Lenox Avenue and 125th Street. McGhee told him to go hear “the Rev,” who often sang and played his guitar on 135th Street and Lenox near the White Tower, a restaurant chain that sold inexpensive hamburgers. Sometimes Davis would take a nap in the back of the White Tower. Gibbon didn’t spot Davis on the street that night or the next. He looked him up in the Bronx phone book and tried calling, but it turned out the Davises didn’t have a phone, and the young woman who answered said she could get the Reverend a message. Gibbon and his girlfriend, Yaffa, decided to travel up to the Bronx, and late one night they found him. Davis greeted them by touching their faces and asked Yaffa if he could “touch anything he could on her, anything she would let him.” He played and sang for them until morning.27 Gibbon knew Fred Gerlach, an architectural drafter and twelve-­ string guitarist who played in Lead Belly’s style, through jam sessions he’d attended at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Gerlach, born in Detroit in 1925 to Yugoslavian immigrant parents, was dating Tiny Singh; with that connection, Gibbon made arrangements to take guitar lessons from Davis Tuesday nights at Singh’s apartment. “He loved to tell stories, loved to get a little drunk,” Gibbon recalled. “He required a cigar every time I met him. That soon escalated to two, one for now and one for later. But it was not manipulation, it was a love of good things. He loved to brag to us about all the young women he had had, and how he could tell by touching their faces how beautiful they were.”28 Those Tuesday night gatherings attracted a who’s who of folk and blues musicians, from Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Pete Seeger, and a declining Woody Guthrie to, a bit later, John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins. “They’d play for hours, hours, two o’clock in the morning,” recalled Dr. Alvin Singh, Tiny’s son from her first marriage, who was a teenager then. “My mother had to use the excuse that I had to go to school, otherwise they would play all night.”29 The jam sessions began attracting players of all stripes, famous and aspiring. One of the wannabes was Barry Kornfeld, a young banjoist and guitarist who later became Davis’s traveling and playing partner. 90

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He recalled sessions with Davis, McGhee, and Terry, in which “the three of them would sit around and play song after song after song.”30 Another young musician who dropped by the jam sessions was Dick Weissman, then a student at Goddard College and later a noted folk musician and music historian. “Gary was very funny around women: He was religious and he wasn’t religious,” Weissman recalled. “He loved to act like he was more blind than he was, if you know what I mean. He was very touchy with Anneke, who was Woody [Guthrie’s third] wife. And the other thing was, he would throw your name into a song, if you were a woman.”31 A pair of young Scottish aristocrats, Rory and Alexander McEwen, took lessons from Davis a few years later at Tiny’s. By then the brothers had already appeared on consecutive nights on the Ed Sullivan Show singing Scottish folk songs, and they’d go on to have a major influence on a new generation of European folk artists. Alex remembered accompanying Davis on the bus back to the Bronx after his lessons. “He always played on the bus, and once the driver could not bear to miss it, and we stopped for about thirty minutes while we listened to him.”32 In April 1954, Davis had what might have been a major break in his music career—­a chance to record for New York–­based Stinson Records, a label in the mold of Folkways. The session happened by accident when a young record producer named Kenneth Goldstein, on his way to a concert in Brooklyn one night, encountered Davis singing on a subway train with a tin cup attached to his guitar. Davis, it turned out, was on his way to perform at the same (unspecified) concert. “There was this blind black man singing with a 12-­string guitar on the train, and I thought Jesus Christ that’s great, I’ve got to get him to record,” Goldstein recalled. He spoke to Davis, who told him to contact Tiny Singh to arrange a recording.33 Goldstein, the twenty-­seven-­year-­old son of a Brooklyn cab driver, had worked as a theoretical mathematician and statistician in the research department at Fairchild Publications near Union Square in Manhattan. He collected folk music records voraciously and during lunch hours would wander into Herbert Harris’s Union Square Music Shop at 27 Union Square West.34 A member of the Communist Party, Harris had started the Stinson Trading Company during World War II to release recordings made in 91

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the Soviet Union. Its label, Stinson Records, had briefly been affiliated with Moses Asch until a falling-­out and still had old recording masters and mothers (pressing disks) in the basement. Bob Harris, the owner’s son and Stinson’s president, asked Goldstein if he’d go through the recordings and decide what music should be issued on the new LP format. Goldstein earned five dollars a record35 and issued albums by Josh White, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. The first original LP he produced for Stinson was The Singing Reverend, featuring Rev. Gary Davis backed by Terry on harp. The session was a shoestring affair, recorded at the Stinson recording engineer’s house, in mono (stereo recordings wouldn’t hit the mainstream until the late fifties). For the first time in his career, Davis’s voice was at full strength in the studio—­gruff but brawny—­ and his guitar playing was, as always, superb. The all-­gospel outing included “Twelve Gates to the City,” “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well,” “You Got to Move,” and “I Can’t Make This Journey by Myself.” But when Goldstein listened to the recording, he realized that the engineer had mixed his channels up, giving Terry’s blustery harmonica more of a presence than Davis’s vocals and guitar, which were all but drowned out. He was aghast. The engineer “just overloaded the mikes with harmonica, and . . . once you had it on the tape that was it.”36 The ten-­inch LP, with Davis’s name misspelled “Garry Davis” on the back cover, was released by the winter of 1954 but failed to attract much interest. Aside from the album’s poor sound quality, its title, The Singing Reverend, didn’t offer much of a clue about the monumental blues-­based musician who’d recorded it. Davis’s break would have to wait. Still, he’d begun a decade-­long relationship with Goldstein, who would become the most important music producer of the folk revival.

*

It’s uncertain exactly when Rev. Gary Davis acquired the first of the Gibson J-­200 guitars he would name, in succession, “Miss Gibson.” The J-­200, known as the King of the Flat Tops, was Gibson’s top-­of-­ the-­line guitar in the acoustic flat top category after its introduction in 1937, selling for $210 in the 1942 catalog. Cowboy crooners like Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and Ray Whitely (for whom it was developed) had long prized the guitar for its deep, resonant “super jumbo” body, 92

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pearl-­inlaid fingerboard and bridge, oversize pick guard featuring a flowers-­and-­vines decoration in relief, and back made of figured maple. One of the largest acoustic guitars on the market, it was easy to strum but difficult for the unskilled to control. As Davis would later tell Stefan Grossman, “You have to play the guitar or the guitar will play you!”37 Davis himself had average-­sized but muscled hands and deeply calloused fingertips from decades of picking his guitar around the clock in all weather. Through the force of Davis’s reputation, the J-­200 would become a must-­have instrument for the aspiring 1960s folk set, including Grossman, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, and David Bromberg. Davis bought some of his first J-­200s from Eddie Bell’s guitar shop at Forty-­Sixth Street and Sixth Avenue. In the early 1950s, he’d put the guitars on layaway until he’d saved enough nickels and dimes from his street performing and ministerial work to pay for the instruments. Davis would perform on sidewalks in front of the store, and Bell would allow him to come in and rest in the back of his small upscale shop, which mainly catered to jazz players.38 Happy Traum, a future fixture on the folk scene as both a performer and teacher, was in high school in the midfifties when he saw Davis for the first time in front of Eddie Bell’s. Traum had the Singing Reverend LP but hadn’t realized how impoverished Davis was.39 Traum’s description of his first sighting is one of the few firsthand accounts that survive of Davis singing on the streets of Manhattan, where most passersby were a bit standoffish: Standing on the sidewalk, in front of the shop was a shabby, stooped figure holding an old Gibson and looking very pathetic. A tin cup was attached somehow to a buttonhole in his overcoat, so I dropped

in a coin and asked him to play a song. He just stood there for a minute or so without moving. Finally, he fished out some picks and

started to move around the guitar, feeling his way as if it was all new to him. Suddenly, he launched into “You Gotta Move” and my

mouth dropped open—­I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. .  .  .

I kept throwing coins into his cup and he kept playing songs and picking the guitar in that cold wind and with people rushing by, scarcely giving him a glance.40

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The J-­200 was one of the keys to Davis’s sound, its thick tone and resounding bass rendering his piano-­like chords with great authority. It’s clear he considered “Miss Gibson” a mere conduit for God’s creation, often speaking to “her” as he played as if he was surprised by what she was saying: “Hallelujah, won’t you talk it now!”41 That Davis, barely surviving on welfare and donations, insisted on buying J-­200s even after being robbed repeatedly on the street is a testament not only to his tenacity but also to his self-­worth as a musician. “That’s a noble sounding guitar,” he once said. “I’m gonna tell you: I would only get the best for myself, you know. I don’t care what it be. Be a woman or what, I try to get the best for myself.”42 Outside a tight-­knit circle of folk enthusiasts, he remained unknown. In August 1955, the editors of Record Research, a Brooklyn-­ based magazine for record collectors, stumbled on a 78 on the Melotone label from Davis’s 1935 sessions, featuring “Lord, Stand by Me” b/w “I Saw the Light” (with an uncredited Bull City Red on vocals). The editors were flummoxed. “Who’s Blind Gary?” they wondered.43 Record collectors might have been baffled by “Blind Gary,” but “Reverend Gary” was about to get some major exposure. On Nov. 2, 1955, Art D’Lugoff placed a small ad in the Village Voice announcing a pair of midnight folk concerts—­the first, with Pete Seeger, and the second, with Earl Robinson and Sonny Terry—­at the Circle in the Square Theatre in Greenwich Village’s Sheridan Square. D’Lugoff, a New York University law school dropout and former newspaper reporter, along with his brother, Burt, who had worked as a researcher for the left-­wing journalist I. F. Stone, distributed leaflets and put up chairs for the first show. They were completely unprepared for the crowd that materialized. “We had about 199 seats and a couple of thousand people showed up,” Burt D’Lugoff recalled. “And we looked at each other and said, ‘We got something here.’ And we started to do a series.”44 Art D’Lugoff—­later the impresario behind the famed Village Gate nightclub—­didn’t originate the idea to hold midnight folk concerts in off-­Broadway theaters. The previous year, Irish folk singer Paddy Clancy and union organizer Lou Gordon, along with another partner, George Pickow, began putting on midnight Swapping Song Fair concerts at the Cherry Lane Theatre a few blocks from Sheridan Square, 94

WHO SHALL DELIVER POOR ME? (1950–55)

where Paddy and his brother Tom were acting in and producing plays. The concerts began as house rent parties for the struggling theater.45 D’Lugoff ’s Midnight Special concerts and the Clancy-­Gordon-­Pickow Swapping Song Fair shows would briefly merge for a time, using both theaters for their shows on separate nights. But it was D’Lugoff ’s name that would become etched in the memories of many young folk enthusiasts who saw the concerts. Bills featuring Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry with Rev. Gary Davis—­at least seven of them, between March 1954 and March 1957—­became legendary and attracted several people who would later play key roles in Davis’s career. Among them were Manny Greenhill, who would become Davis’s manager and song publisher; and Barry Kornfeld, the young musician whom Greenhill would briefly pair with Davis on the folk concert circuit.46 Lawrence Cohn, a future record producer and music writer, and later a confidant of Davis’s, also attended those gigs as a City College student. He recalled the scene—­including the Reverend’s habit of dozing on stage: Brownie, Sonny, and Gary all took turns. First Sonny would do one, and Brownie would back him, and then Brownie would do one and Sonny would back him. All this time, Gary would catnap. When it came [to] his turn, Brownie would give him a shot in the ribs, Gary

would startle awake, proceed to knock the audience out with some

incredible piece of music, and then go back to sleep until it was his turn again.47

Davis must have been exhausted from his other two jobs, preaching and street singing, and having to wait his turn at midnight concerts that sometimes didn’t get going until 1 a.m. had to have been difficult. Once Davis became an established solo act, things would change, for then he’d perform standing up and wouldn’t be trading turns on stage. But that was still a few years away.

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I’LL BE ALRIGHT SOMEDAY (1955–­57) As soon as we played back the first recording, Gary broke into a huge grin. There was no doubt about it. He was listening to himself the way he wanted it to sound. Ke nn e th G oldstein

I

n September 1955, a twenty-­four-­year-­old American troubadour outfitted in a Stetson hat and cowboy boots traveled by boat with his new wife from New York to Paris, then headed for London, planning to “sing for his supper” in England.1 Jack Elliott, born Elliot Charles Adnopoz in Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish doctor and school teacher, would soon be singing the praises—­and blues songs—­of Rev. Gary Davis in Europe. A disciple of Woody Guthrie, Elliott had learned some of Davis’s arrangements first hand, including “Cocaine Blues.” In Britain, wild excitement about American blues had helped inspire a folk music renaissance. Bluesmen Josh White in 1950 and Big Bill Broonzy the following year had toured, soaking up the kind of adulation that traditional black artists rarely received in the States.2 In early 1955, Lonnie Donegan had released a sped-­up version of Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line,” which would soon inspire Britain’s skiffle craze, leading a whole generation of young musicians to pound out country blues and folk on guitars and primitive instruments like washboards and tea-­chest basses. Not long after his arrival, Elliott appeared unscheduled at a London gig of Donegan and Chris Barber’s jazz band, making a big impression on the crowd, who thought him an authentic interpreter of American blues, hillbilly, and folk. After the gig, he gave an impromptu interview to Brian Nicholls, a reviewer for Britain’s Jazz Journal, and spoke with some reverence about Gary Davis, the first time most British fans would have heard his name. “He had a lot to say about the enormous number of great blues shouters who are virtually unknown outside 96

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their own small territory,” Nicholls wrote. “He particularly mentioned the Rev. Gary Davis, but didn’t think that he had made many records.” Elliott would later say that as he busked through Europe he relied on Davis’s “Candy Man”—­a risqué blues that Davis himself would then play only in private, but which Elliott learned from a tape given to him by Woody Guthrie. “That song got me all over Europe, everywhere I went,” Elliott recalled. As unknown in the States as Davis, Elliott quickly built a following in Britain, and so began the spread of the Reverend’s decidedly nongospel repertoire, whether Davis liked it or not.3 Back in the United States, the early stirrings of the folk revival were beginning to make a ripple in the media. In October 1955, the Village Voice sent a reporter out to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to interview Roger Sprung, a twenty-­five-­year-­old television repairman in Lake Mohegan, New York, who was one of a hundred or so musicians—­guitarists, banjoists, washtub bass players, fiddlers—­who congregated near the park’s fountain on Sundays to play folk music. The Washington Square scene had begun nearly a decade earlier when George Margolin, a commercial printer and member of People’s Songs, started singing on Sundays in the park, a cappella and with his guitar. Margolin attracted a small group of folk music enthusiasts who came to sing ballads like “Midnight Special” and “Cindy,” and also union songs and spirituals, using mimeographed song sheets. “In the early years there weren’t many of us,” Sprung, a banjo player, explained to the Voice. “But lately the number has grown so much that this year we had to get a music permit so that the police wouldn’t book us for disturbing the peace.”4 On this particular Sunday, a group of musicians piled into a car to head from the park to the Labor Hall at Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue, presumably for a hoot. The Voice reporter described the scene in the car: “In front with the driver were Mary Travers, 19, and Frederika Coigny, 15, who was carrying a guitar. Step-­sisters, they live on Charlton Street. Mary works as a dental assistant during the week. A vivacious blonde, she spent the journey alternately discussing the political convictions of certain well-­known folk singers and singing excerpts from Finians Rainbow.”5 Travers had grown up in the West Village, and Pete Seeger, a friend 97

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of her writer parents, sometimes used their basement to rehearse. “On an ordinary evening, I might find Brownie McGhee there, or the Reverend Gary Davis or Alex McEwen,” she recalled.6 The Washington Square folk scene would continue to build in the coming years, and later on Travers would make history as part of Peter, Paul, and Mary—­ and change Gary Davis’s life in the process. In the meantime, late on the night of January 29, 1956, Davis once again found himself recording for Kenneth Goldstein, a little less than two years after the Stinson fiasco. By this time Goldstein had moved on to supervise folk music recordings for Riverside Records, a three-­ year-­old jazz label whose most notable recording artist was the still-­ underappreciated Thelonious Monk. Goldstein had acquired tapes of the itinerant South Carolina songster Pink Anderson and wanted to issue them. But Riverside cofounder Orrin Keepnews told him the label was discontinuing ten-­inch records in favor of the newer twelve-­ inch format, and more material was needed to fill up the record. Goldstein, however, had no way of getting in touch with Anderson.7 So Goldstein contacted Tiny Singh and John Gibbon to reconnect with Davis for an album entitled American Street Songs that would feature Anderson on side one doing a mixture of blues, hokum, and medicine show tunes, and Davis on side two performing his rousing gospel repertoire.8 The session took place at Goldstein’s house in the East Tremont section of the Bronx, with Davis recording nine songs, including two retakes, in two hours ending past midnight. “As soon as the recording started, everyone in the room came to the immediate realization that this was going to be a great session,” Goldstein recalled. “Gary was at his best.”9 Davis reprised four songs from his 1935 ARC sessions: a sparkling rendition of “Oh Lord, Search My Heart” (spelled differently) and excellent takes of “You Got to Go Down,” “There Was a Time That I Was Blind” (“Lord, I Wish I Could See”), and “Twelve Gates to the City,” featuring the Reverend as he really sounded, unhampered by the audio deficiencies of the Stinson session. The record captured not only Davis’s sterling guitar work but also his raw, emotionally wrought singing, which suggested, at once, the wages of sin and the strains of earthly toil and temptation. 98

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The LP marked the first time Davis recorded “Samson and Delilah,” one of his best-­known songs, in the studio. Derived from Judges, chapters 13–­16, in the Old Testament, the spiritual celebrating Samson’s heroic feats against the Philistines had been recorded no less than ten times in various guises before the end of World War II, first (as “My Soul Is a Witness for My Lord”) by the Paramount Jubilee Singers in 1923 and later in slightly different form by three singing evangelists in 1927 alone: Rev. T. E. Weems, Rev. T. T. Rose, and, most famously, Blind Willie Johnson, who laid down “If I Had My Way I’d Tear the Building Down” in December 1927 for release the following year on Columbia and Vocalion.10 Broadsides of the song—­printed by singers or evangelists—­seem to have been in wide circulation around this time. One collected by the folklorist John Lomax in Texas contains an error in biblical transcription that shows up in both Weems’s and Johnson’s renditions, suggesting it as a possible source for both.11 Davis learned the tune at least in part from a Blind Willie 78, as he said on a number of occasions, and it was one he sang often to his congregations. Davis’s version made playful reference to Johnson’s but was a vastly more complicated arrangement.12 It began with one of the most devastating guitar introductions in the history of folk music, featuring partial G, C, G minor, D, and G7chords played up and down the neck in what sounds almost like the overture to an opera. Employing an impossibly difficult moving bass line and gimmicks such as slapping the guitar strings, hammering on chords with the left hand, and rhythmic slides up and down the strings, the song would long be one of Davis’s show stoppers—­a perfect blend of guitar pyrotechnics and sanctified shouting: If I had my way

If I had my way, in this wicked world If I had my way

I would tear this old building down

Samson, blinded and enchained by the Philistines before bringing their temple down, seems to have taken on the role of folk hero in southern black culture.13 In some ways, it was an unusual song for Davis. While Blind Willie Johnson often sang about the pain and in99

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equity of this world—­think of the divine retribution in the sinking of the Titanic that he celebrates in “God Moves on the Water”—­Davis usually set his sights on the salvation awaiting the righteous in the next. But Davis may have seen himself in the hero. As William Lee Ellis has pointed out, Davis turns the biblical story around, starting the song with Samson’s strength gone. He then kills ten thousand men with a jawbone and outwrestles a lion. In his own life, Davis began weakened by blindness, but used his prodigious guitar skills to overcome his handicap. The song itself, among his most difficult to play, is a demonstration of Davis’s superiority, so he and Samson shine simultaneously. It’s probably not happenstance that both Davis and Blind Willie Johnson omit the part of the story in which the Philistines gouge out Samson’s eyes with their swords.14 If Samson’s chief weakness was women, then Davis shared that trait as well. He would often discuss Delilah’s beauty with his concert audiences in the sixties: “The Bible tells me one of the most beautiful woman that ever have been mentioned. A Bea-­U-­ti-­ful woman. . . . You know, we men love good lookin’ women. That’s why we get hung up sometimes.” Whatever the motivation, “Samson and Delilah,” for its sheer power and breathtaking guitar acrobatics, must rank as one of the greatest songs of the folk era. As Brownie McGee would put it much later: “I haven’t heard anything that happened yet that’s better than ‘Tear the Building Down.’ What you gonna put in place of that?”15 For his American Street Songs session, Davis earned one hundred dollars and five copies of the LP, under an agreement signed three days after the session by Riverside’s Keepnews and Davis’s student John Gibbon.16 Davis was promised a royalty (2 percent) only on foreign sales, if Riverside managed to lease the record to a foreign manufacturer. There’s no evidence the label did so. Davis would fare better on his next outing. American Street Songs didn’t garner a lot of mainstream press. In a brief review, Billboard said that Davis and Anderson both “ply their wares in a lusty, enthusiastic and basic style.” In its “limited field,” the piece concluded, “it should be a very successful entry.”17 The street-­ singing label seemed to relegate the record to the realm of esoterica, a categorization that would bedevil Davis throughout his career. 100

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Academics and some of the new mimeographed folk magazines, however, took notice. “From the first to the last, these songs command high listener-­interest, for Davis knows that his audience is no captive lot,” Lillian Webster Jones wrote in the Phylon Quarterly. “He thus sings, shouts, moans, yodels, yells, and resorts to speech freely and interchangeably to present his ‘text’ with vividness and fervor.” Jones seemed to grasp that Davis was taking his guitar to places few had gone before, noting that he was “using his instrument not merely harmonically but with consummate skill in quite intricate melodic configurations.” Tristram P. Coffin of Denison University, writing in Midwest Folklore, called Davis “one of America’s leading guitarists,” and Dick Weissman, in the pages of the new New York folk magazine Caravan, called it “an absolute must for the lover of blues guitar.”18 Daniel G. Hoffman, who wrote liner notes along with Goldstein for the original LP, described Davis’s music as “holy blues”—­a term that would later stick, much to the dismay of some purists who felt it demeaned Davis’s spiritual message in an effort to make him more palatable to blues enthusiasts. Davis didn’t care much for the label himself, once telling a concert audience: “I never found nothin’ holy about the blues.” Still, the term probably helped bring much-­needed grassroots attention to his art. And that really began to happen with American Street Songs. “I think that was the first time that the revival heard how good Davis was,” Goldstein recalled.19 Davis was beginning to get more gigs, though nothing he could count on as a livelihood. His midnight concerts with Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry were growing more frequent, and on March 17, 1956, he made up part of the bill for Bound for Glory, a musical tribute to Woody Guthrie at the art deco Pythian Hall on West Seventieth Street. Guthrie, forty-­three, by then had become a patient at Brooklyn State Hospital, as Huntington’s disease began to ravage his body. A crowd of one thousand attended the Saturday evening show featuring Pete Seeger, Ed McCurdy, the Kossoy Sisters, and Davis (whose name was misspelled in the program, probably attributable to the gaffe on the back of his Stinson LP).20 Millard Lampell of the Almanac Singers wrote the script for the evening, which had Davis performing second, after Seeger, to what was undoubtedly his largest audience yet. He probably joined in as the 101

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entire cast finished up by singing “This Land Is Your Land,” which led to the most dramatic part of the evening, when a wobbly Guthrie acknowledged the performers from the audience: “The spotlight swung suddenly to the balcony and settled on a spidery little man with salt-­ and-­pepper hair who struggled to his feet and saluted the audience with a clenched fist.”21

*

When Rev. Gary Davis recorded American Street Songs at Kenneth Goldstein’s home, eavesdropping on the session from the kitchen was twenty-­five-­year-­old Israel Goodman “Izzy” Young, a garrulous, highly opinionated folk music and dance enthusiast from the Bronx. Young had met Goldstein several years earlier while perusing the folk music bins at the Sam Goody record store on West Forty-­Ninth Street and had become a constant companion and aide, driving him to concerts and folklore conferences in Young’s gray 1948 Chrysler New Yorker, which he’d purchased from the comedian Henny Youngman while working as a waiter up in the Catskills.22 Goldstein, who by then had perhaps the city’s most extensive collection of folk music and folklore literature, convinced Young to start his own folklore business, to the great benefit of Gary Davis and the folk movement in general. Starting with a home-­based mail-­order catalog, Young painted his name on the shingle at 110 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village and opened the doors to the Folklore Center on April 6, 1957. It was a long, narrow shop with ceiling-­high shelves crammed with books, instruments, sheet music, records, and periodicals on folk music and dance, some jazz, and the odd bit of Elizabethan music. One wall was plastered with concert announcements, legal notices, and the business cards of guitar and banjo teachers, and a back room officially given over to classical music provided a place for musicians to jam. Young called the up-­and-­coming folksingers and aficionados who began hanging out at the Folklore Center “folkniks,” and the term entered the popular lexicon to connote folk music fans and performers in ­general.23 Tall, bespectacled, intellectual, kinetic, and a bit verbose, Young had grown up in the Bronx on 167th Street. He attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science but couldn’t bring himself to follow an academic path that might lead to worldly success. “All my 102

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friends were mathematicians and physicists and all at Harvard and MIT getting their PhDs,” he recalled. “And they all said, ‘Izzy, what are you going to do?’ and I said, ‘I like folk music.’” Young’s Folklore Center, open 3 p.m. to midnight, became the hangout for folk music types in the city; to the folk revival, it served as a kind of Grand Central Station, a place where people congregated, paths crossed, connections were made and musicians began their journeys to stardom. “If the Village was folk singer’s heaven, then Izzy Young was certainly its god,” wrote Robbie Woliver, a historian of the Village folk scene.24 Young admitted being more interested in music than in running a successful business. Sometimes he reduced the price of merchandise after he’d made a sale because he felt sorry for a customer or suspected he couldn’t afford the purchase. He also had a soft spot for the less fortunate, taking out an ad in the Village Voice to object to the anti-­ panhandling signs other Village shopkeepers had affixed to their windows: “It is indecent to forbid giving. Everyone is told, everywhere, by every medium, to give, give, give. Then why, Gentlemen, do you suddenly tell us it’s wrong to ask? Human dignity is denied by these selfish protestations.”25 A square dance devotee, Young recalled first meeting Rev. Gary Davis in the mid-­1950s at some of the well-­attended Village parties thrown a few times a year by Margot Mayo and her American Square Dance Group. Young visited Davis in the Bronx, and Davis became a frequent visitor to the Folklore Center. “He would come in the store all the time. He would play any instrument I had in the store. ‘What’s that? That’s a nice guitar, Izzy.’ And he’d start playing some dance tunes from North Carolina, South Carolina, Appalachia, and he’d play it perfect. And kids would come in and they just couldn’t believe it.”26 When Young soon began staging 10 p.m. concerts in the store’s cramped back room, he booked Davis on one of the first bills, and the Reverend didn’t quite manage to get through the whole performance awake. “He fell asleep in the middle of a tune, so his wife nudged him a little bit and he started again from where he’d left off.”27 Young pretty quickly branched out to “off-­off-­off-­off Broadway” theaters, putting on Davis and a host of other performers, traditional and up-­and-­ coming, including, famously, a few years later Bob Dylan in his first solo concert, with fifty-­two people showing up. 103

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Young scribbled down all of the goings-­on in his shop and in folk music at large—­along with his voluminous opinions about them—­in his journals. He would become the folk revival’s chief diarist and moral touchstone, with his passion for traditional music—­and for the musicians who made it—­as well as his antipathy for money and commercialism informing his commentaries, which he reproduced in his gossipy “Frets and Frails” column for the folk magazine Sing Out! Young would not only issue a steady barrage of broadsides against the immorality of the folk music establishment of the 1960s, he would also do his own small part to help traditional musicians, Davis in particular. If someone came into the store wanting a blues guitar lesson, Young handed them Davis’s phone number in the Bronx, and later Jamaica, Queens, helping the Reverend pay his bills and build a roster of guitar students unequaled in the realm of folk music. By the end of 1957, with interest in folk music building at home, the talk among Davis and his musician friends had turned toward England. Fred Gerlach told Davis that the boat fare to England was $170. “Have you got $170, Gary?” he asked. “I ain’t got it,” responded Davis, “but you don’t know when you’ll see a dog that didn’t have no hair on its back but the next time you see him, you understand, he’s full of hair.” Davis predicted that he’d be big in Europe and hoped to get there one day. “More than a hog can spit! See I want to go somewhere before I die, you understand. I might be too old to travel after awhile.” Of England in particular, Davis ventured: “Yeah, I’d be a big thing out there too. I hope I will.”28 Davis turned out to be right, but first he’d have to get better known on both sides of the ocean.

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I CAN’T MAKE THIS JOURNEY BY MYSELF (1958–­59) Gary was about the greatest and most creative folk performer, folk talent, whatever you want to call it, I’ve ever heard. Barry Korn feld

I

zzy Young paired Rev. Gary Davis and Fred Gerlach for a midnight concert on March 21, 1958, at the Actor’s Playhouse on Seventh Avenue South. Seventy people showed up, and during the show Davis offered a glimpse of his hardscrabble life as a street singer, telling the audience that his guitar had been stolen again (they “cut it off my back”) while he was singing for change. “The concert he did that night was so inspired,” Happy Traum remembered, “that I nearly cried several times, and was very tempted to offer him my guitar as a replacement.”1 Over in England, Davis’s reputation was about to get a big boost. By early 1958, the British folk label Topic Records had released Jack Takes the Floor, a ten-­inch LP by Jack Elliott. Along with tunes by Woody Guthrie, Jimmie Rodgers, and Jesse Fuller, it featured Elliott’s recording of “Cocaine,” which he attributed to Davis in a Guthriesque spoken introduction: “I heard this from Reverend Gary Davis, blind street singer, preaches on the street corner, about 135th Street in Harlem.”2 Elliott played a slightly simplified version of Davis’s arrangement, without the Reverend’s command of the instrument, and added some new lyrics. Despite Elliott’s acknowledgment of his source, the tune was credited on the LP as a “traditional” song—­meaning in the public domain—­while bluesman Jesse Fuller received an author credit for “San Francisco Bay Blues,” another mainstay of Elliott’s repertoire. Issues of copyright and royalties weren’t yet prominent in folk music: record sales remained quite modest, and most of the companies producing folk records, like Folkways, Stinson, and Topic, were seat-­of-­ 105

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the-­pants operations that couldn’t afford copyright attorneys or copyists to set down arrangements in musical notation. But the copyright question would loom large after big record companies realized the financial potential of traditional music and began mining older material from black and hillbilly artists for popular consumption. Elliott’s recording of “Cocaine” was the first cover of a Davis arrangement during the folk era, and it soon landed in very influential hands. As the English folk guitarist John Renbourn later noted, Elliott became one of the most important American performers on the budding British folk scene of the late 1950s. Renbourn recalled: “His versions of Jesse Fuller’s ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’ and Gary Davis’s ‘Cocaine Blues’ were imitated widely by British pickers.” One was Ralph McTell, later a star on Britain’s folk scene, who was a teenager in South London when he heard Elliott’s rendition—­and who his apparent source was. “Immediately I was intrigued by a Reverend playing this sort of music,” McTell says. “And by 1962, I had heard him play and was quite dumbfounded by, you know, this incredible full pianistic style of his.” Another guitarist influenced by Elliott was the Scotsman Bert Jansch, who would later teach Davis’s “Candy Man” to the folk-­rock superstar Donovan.3 Keith Richards, the future Rolling Stones guitarist, would cite “Cocaine Blues” as “the song and that crucial fingerpicking lick of the period.” Years later, during Stones rehearsals at guitarist Ron Wood’s home in Ireland, Richards went further to say that it all began for him with “Cocaine Blues”: “‘Cocaine’ is the first song I ever learned to play properly on guitar. . . . I learned that in the john in my art school. . . . I thought it was the prettiest song. I had no idea what cocaine was—­I thought it was some grown-­up perversion.”4 Richards, later to become one of the more notorious cocaine addicts, learned the tune as a sixteen-­year-­old student at the Sidcup Art College outside London. It happened soon after he realized that the American rock coming over the Atlantic, from the likes of Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry, had sprung from earlier rural blues styles: “I heard these cats playing, heard they were layin’ down some [Big Bill] Broonzy. And I suddenly realized it goes back a lot further than just the two years I’d been listenin,’” Richards recalled. “And I picked up the nearest guitar and started learnin’ from 106

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these cats. I learned from all these amateur art school people. One cat knew how to play ‘Cocaine Blues’ very well.”5 Richards would long include the tune in his acoustic repertoire. Rev. Gary Davis was beginning to get some word of mouth in Europe, and at home the stars began aligning in Davis’s favor too. In August 1958, a group of recent college graduates in the Bay Area, playing two guitars and a banjo and singing in three-­part harmony, reached number one on the American Billboard charts with “Tom Dooley,” an old murder ballad. With their trademark striped shirts, lighthearted banter, and collegiate vibe, the Kingston Trio became an overnight sensation, unleashing a fury of excitement for folk music on college campuses. Elvis had gone into the army, the uncorked energy of the original rock ’n’ roll era was beginning to give way to derivative pop and manufactured teen idols like Fabian, while the nation’s culture as a whole had grown more standardized and predictable. America’s youth thirsted for something new. Like the Beatles six years later, the Kingston Trio had giant coattails, and record companies raced to find similar groups to capitalize on the popularity of traditional music. But as hot as the group became, they met with instant disdain among many of the serious folkies who’d already been listening to and in some cases trying to re-­create the old country blues, gospel, and Appalachian ballads they’d first heard on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, released on Folkways in 1952. These were the young people whom the cultural critic Greil Marcus had in mind when he described the folk revival as “a place of the spirit, where authenticity in song and manner, in being, was the highest value.”6 To this hard-­core group, the upstart Kingston Trio had bowdlerized and homogenized tradition to sell it to the masses. It was a tension that would only grow in the coming years, with artists like Rev. Gary Davis caught in the middle. Davis’s future manager, Manny Greenhill, placed himself squarely in the anti–­Kingston Trio camp. “I knew I didn’t like that sound,” he recalled. “I was searching . . . for a more rootsy sound.” Born Mendel Greenberg in New York City in 1916, Greenhill graduated from the City College of New York during the Depression and worked as an apprentice iron worker, a foreman in a tie factory, a fur worker, and a shipping clerk. He spent several years as a union activist, during 107

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which time he first saw pro-­union musicians like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and the Almanac Singers perform.7 After a stint in the army during World War II, Greenhill moved to Boston in 1950, where he started a company that booked ads for foreign language newspapers. His father, Morris, had been a cappellmeister—­orchestra leader—­in Russia who played a dozen instruments,8 so it’s no surprise that music was Greenhill’s true passion. Greenhill had attended some of Art D’Lugoff ’s midnight concerts in Greenwich Village, where he’d seen Rev. Gary Davis and others perform, and he decided to try his own hand at organizing folk music around Boston, at first without much success. Then in 1956, Pete Seeger performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s twelve-­ hundred-­seat Kresge Hall, with minimal advertising. The crowd comprised mostly college students, then just discovering folk music. Seeger had been suffering the effects of the blacklist, having refused to tell the House Committee on Un-­American Activities whether he belonged to the Communist Party. Backstage at the show, he told Greenhill that usually when someone arranged a concert for him around the nation, the American Legion or another organization would protest in the name of patriotism and the gig would quietly disappear. Greenhill offered to help, becoming Seeger’s New England agent, the first step in Greenhill’s long career as one of folk music’s top managers. “He needed somebody to follow through on this kind of thing,” Greenhill remembered. “That was my glimmer.”9 Over the next couple of years Greenhill put on folk concerts for Seeger, Josh White, and Odetta. A concert Greenhill organized for Seeger at Symphony Hall on December 5, 1958, didn’t go unnoticed by authorities. A sergeant from the Massachusetts State Police Division of Subversive Activities showed up soon after the concert ended to grill Greenhill on why he would promote an artist suspected of Communist affiliations. “Greenhill commented that there was no reason why he should not present Seeger to the public, Seeger being a very talented artist,” the police report noted. Greenhill himself denied any present Communist affiliations, but he refused to talk about any past associations. (The FBI would investigate Greenhill for subversion until the early 1970s.)10 With his dark, slicked-­back hair, olive complexion, and deeply 108

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creased face, Greenhill resembled a B-­movie tough guy, but his appearance masked a gentle soul and a soft heart. An acknowledged “gospel fiend,” he soon took an interest in finding gigs in New England for Rev. Gary Davis.11 Greenhill would also go on to manage another blind musician, the great North Carolinian guitar virtuoso Arthel “Doc” Watson. He once explained why he felt drawn to musicians in need of a leg up: Some of our most gifted singers were illiterate people. Some of our greatest performers and composers were illiterate people and needed some help along those lines to get out there and get things

done and have things happen for them. I’m speaking about [Gary] Davis for example and [Jesse] Fuller, people like those, who you

have no reason to expect that kind of flowering of music from, even poetry, and it comes out of these sources.12

If Greenhill was going to bring Davis up from New York City, then Davis would need help traveling north. On his preaching and street-­ singing circuit, the Reverend may have learned his way around the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, even over to New Jersey by rail, but New England remained unfamiliar territory. Greenhill called twenty-­ one-­year-­old Barry Kornfeld and asked if he’d be interested in leading Davis and performing with him. A music major at Queens College, Kornfeld was already an accomplished musician who could turn heads in Washington Square Park with his brilliant picking on both banjo and guitar. His letterhead at the time also served as his calling card advertising his folknik credentials: “Folksinger, Square Dance Caller, Guitar & Banjo Instructor.”13 Kornfeld and Davis’s first gig together took place on December 12, 1958, a week after the Pete Seeger show at Symphony Hall that had landed Greenhill in hot water. Kornfeld, driving a new black Chevy Delray, fetched Davis in the Bronx and drove him north, where they’d both spend the night at Greenhill’s home in Dorchester on Boston’s south side. For the young Jewish kid behind the wheel, suddenly ferrying around the sixty-­two-­year-­old South Carolina–­born Reverend, there were a few early awkward moments. “It took me quite a while until I understood what he was saying,” Kornfeld says. “He didn’t have all his teeth. And between that and the southern drawl it would all 109

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come out as basically one sound. And it was great that by the time we got to Boston, I could actually understand him.”14 As befitting folk music’s sudden cachet following the wild success of the Kingston Trio, two reviewers turned up for the 11 p.m. concert in the basement of the YMCA, which seated about four hundred people. With Kornfeld and Davis on stage together, Kornfeld opened the show, giving a banjo demonstration and performing songs on both banjo and twelve-­string guitar. Then Davis, dressed as usual in a suit and tie, opened his set with an instrumental march. Robert Gustafson, the music critic for the Christian Science Monitor, noted what happened next: “His raw, unpolished, vigorous voice shouted, ‘Right Down Here!’ as he began his program of spirituals [with ‘Let Us Get Together’]. He was repeatedly requested to do ‘Blow, Gabriel’ by Mr. Kornfeld and members of the audience. He finally yielded to requests and then followed by giving his most dramatic and exciting number, ‘Samson and Delilah.’”15 In a bluntly worded review for the British Jazz Journal, Jerome S. Shipman described Davis as “a thin, slightly stooped, cocoa brown man. His bald head and sunken cheeks give him a somewhat ascetic look, which makes his gold rimmed dark glasses seem a little incongruous.” In Shipman’s view, “the cold audience of young ‘folksong’ enthusiasts never did warm up to the Reverend, and he himself never got completely loosened up.”16 But Shipman was knocked out by Davis’s artistry on the guitar: “It is his terrific guitar playing which makes me consider him one of the great jazz performers. He employs thumb and fingerpicks with considerable digital dexterity to draw an astonishing variety of sounds from his instrument. He varies his playing style from piece to piece to suit the tune, in some of which he slaps the box with his palm, taps the neck of the guitar with his fingers and gets many other percussive effects. These are not mere stunts but are used sparingly and are always completely integrated into the melodic line of the song or guitar solo.”17 The pairing of Davis with Kornfeld marked the start of Davis’s long association with Greenhill, who would book gigs for him for several years before officially signing on as Davis’s first and only manager; it also served as a stepping stone to Davis’s career on what would become 110

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the traveling folk circuit. The Reverend would have to figure out how to translate his exciting church and street repertoire into an act suitable for touring. Kornfeld and Davis went on to do more than a dozen concerts together over the next two years, mostly during Kornfeld’s college breaks, while Davis continued performing on the streets of New York. “Long live Barry Kornfeld for leading Rev. Gary Davis around the city,” Izzy Young would write a few months later in the New York folk magazine Gardyloo. In late January 1959, the duo appeared for a week in Boston at the Golden Vanity, a new folk club with barrels for tables, netting on the walls and a ship’s wheel behind the stage. “Generally, we would both be on stage at the same time, even during each other’s sets,” Kornfeld remembered. “And he would nod out and I’d have to wake him. And then it would take him a while to get up to speed. And I would often feed him what tunes to play because I would know which ones were amenable for him to get warmed up.”18 Though he didn’t get formal guitar lessons from Davis, Kornfeld spent time with the Davises in the Bronx, enjoying Annie’s home-­ cooked chicken and dumplings and other southern fare. Once, Kornfeld brought the Davises to his parents’ house in Forest Hills for dinner and the Jewish couple seemed quite taken with the Reverend, even after he gave a ten-­minute sermonette while saying grace. “It was definitely one of the longest graces I have ever experienced,” Kornfeld says, “and I’m sure that there were copious references to Jesus as well as lots of ‘Praise Jesus!’ interjections from Annie in classic call and response form.”19 On Sundays, Kornfeld started taking Davis to get-­togethers in Washington Square Park, where Davis made quite an impression on the young folk musicians who by then had begun segregating themselves into blues, bluegrass, and ballad circles at various locations near the fountain. Lee Hoffman, a New Yorker who’d recently founded the mimeographed folk fanzine Caravan, first encountered Davis in the Square. “Barry’d brought him to one of the Village gatherings,” she recalled. “He was a hit with the pickers[,] who crowded around him to admire, and learn from[,] his playing.”20 One of those Washington Square “pickers” was Dave Van Ronk, who became one of the most influential Greenwich Village folk singers, 111

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earning the sobriquet “the mayor of MacDougal Street.” A born storyteller who sang in a whiskey-­soaked growl, Van Ronk began taking informal lessons with Davis in the Bronx or whenever he could get a few minutes before and after Davis’s gigs. “The first time I heard him was a shock I will never forget,” Van Ronk recalled in his memoir. “I still cannot believe the things that man could do. He was unquestionably a genius, and he became my idol, my guitar guru.” Davis, Van Ronk would say, “reshaped my whole approach” to the guitar by teaching him to think of the instrument as “the piano around my neck.”21 For the white kids who’d been straining to learn prewar blues from reissues of material from old 78s like the Harry Smith anthology, having Davis around in the flesh offered something special. It would be a few years before music enthusiasts ventured down South to pluck aging bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James from their southern hideaways. “In the midfifties, nobody [from the old days] was alive; it was all records,” recalled Terri Thal, Van Ronk’s first wife. “What did you learn from? There was a Furry Lewis record. There was the Library of Congress—­Jelly Roll Morton. There was the Folkways folk set [Harry Smith’s anthology], Alan Lomax’s stuff. . . . Gary was like one of the first people who was a live human person.”22 In the New England resort town of Newport, Rhode Island, known as a summer playground for the Vanderbilts and the Astors, plans were under way in early 1959 for the first Newport Folk Festival. The city had hosted a world-­renowned jazz fest since 1954, run by George Wein, a jazz pianist who owned the Storyville jazz club in Boston. He’d been hired by heirs of the Lorillard tobacco fortune to help liven up the stuffy enclave. With the Kingston Trio sending folk music up the charts, Wein had begun noticing the college kids from all over New England who were packing the new coffeehouses in Cambridge, where eighteen-­year-­old Joan Baez, the raven-­haired beauty with the hair-­raising soprano, began attracting a following.23 Wein had wanted to include a folk segment in the jazz festival, but he soon realized that the explosive interest in folk couldn’t be contained in a single afternoon session. He hired Albert Grossman, owner of one of the nation’s first folk clubs, Chicago’s Gate of Horn, and later the financially savvy manager of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary, 112

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to book artists for a full-­scale folk festival. At Izzy Young’s Folklore Center in the Village, Grossman ran into Barry Kornfeld and invited him and Rev. Gary Davis to perform at the inaugural event.24 The festival began on July 11, 1959, at Newport’s Freebody Park, attracting more than eleven thousand people over two days. From the festival’s inception, the question that hung in Newport’s salty summer air was what kind of folk music would take center stage. Would it be the new pop folk represented by groups like the Kingston Trio and young urban folk singers like Bob Gibson? Or the roots of that music from traditional artists like Gary Davis, the Alabama-­born folk singer Odetta, and the Kentucky balladeer Jean Ritchie? Festival organizers in good faith attempted to feature both, but as events played out, at times unpredictably, it was the newcomers who soaked up much of the spotlight. Pete Seeger opened the festival Saturday night under overcast skies, with Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Memphis Slim, Cynthia Gooding, and Odetta all taking the stage and Studs Terkel serving as master of ceremonies. The star of the evening turned out to be Baez, who became an overnight sensation after her vibrato-­laced singing captivated the crowd on several duets with Gibson. She’d arrived at the festival in a hearse with her name painted on the side and left as folk music’s darling.25 Sunday afternoon the rains came, and as about three thousand people gamely made the best of a wet afternoon concert, Barry Kornfeld arrived in the Bronx in his Delray to pick Davis up. Years later, Kornfeld didn’t recall why they chose to drive the nearly two hundred miles to Newport the day of their show and drive back afterward, but it’s possible they had few options for overnight accommodations. The jazz festival had taken place a week earlier, and it was clear that the town’s blue blood denizens still hadn’t entirely embraced the program and the black musicians and fans that came with it. As Nat Hentoff complained in the Village Voice: “If you’re Negro and are planning to go to the Newport Jazz Festival for the time over the Fourth-­of-­July weekend, you had better be sure of your room reservation. Again this year, applicants for rooms have received letters from Newporters saying they’d be welcome—­unless they’re Negro.”26 To make matters more difficult, Kornfeld and Davis both had nasty 113

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colds. “By the time we got there, we were spitting out the windows and my car was all phlegm on both sides,” Kornfeld says. When they finally reached the performers’ tent, it was a white southerner who immediately made Davis feel welcome. Earl Scruggs, the North Carolina banjoist whose three-­fingered picking style had become synonymous with bluegrass music, was sitting and waiting for his turn on stage. He saw Kornfeld lead Davis in and rose to give the blind reverend his seat.27 The evening concerts began at 8:30, with Jean Ritchie, Leon Bibb, Memphis Slim, the Stanley Brothers, Barbara Dane, and Davis performing during the first two segments. For Davis, on a big outdoor stage, probably for the first time, without the acoustics of a concert hall or small club to give him a sense of the crowd of six thousand, it must have been a disconcerting experience. The rain didn’t help matters, nor did the fact that many of the young people in the audience hadn’t heard of him. They’d come to see the Kingston Trio, and many probably sought shelter earlier in the program. “Even though the stage was covered,” Kornfeld remembered, “the dew was forming on our instruments. . . . Everybody was sitting out in the rain because there was no tent for the audience. And when you have a fairly empty house it sort of feeds on itself.”28 Reviews of Davis’s performance were mixed. “The Rev. Gary Davis, a blind blues singer and guitarist, was introduced by Pete Seeger and seemed to be a favorite of the audience,” the Newport Daily News said. Mark Morris, a scribe for Gardyloo, wrote: “Rev. Gary Davis . . . didn’t hit his stride, although Barry Kornfeld ably and modestly assisted him.” The New York Times music critic Robert Shelton was less kind: Shelton remarked that the “abrasive cries of the Rev. Gary Davis,” whom he identified correctly as a minister and incorrectly as a “former street singer,” would have been heard “to better effect in more intimate surroundings.”29 Perhaps Davis’s lack of a seasoned act—­something he would develop on the 1960s folk circuit—­was enough to turn some critics off. Curiously, Vanguard Records would later issue an LP called Blues at Newport, featuring highlights from the 1963 festival. However, the two Davis performances included on the album, “Samson and Delilah” and “I Won’t Be Back No More” (better known as “Goin’ to Sit Down on the 114

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Banks of the River”), had been recorded at the 1959 festival. In his review of the record, Shelton called the same Davis tracks he’d panned live “a special treat.”30 By then, Shelton had become one of Davis’s more ardent champions. The end of the Sunday night concert put the tensions between fans of new and old folk music in stark relief. Oscar Brand was the night’s emcee, “with the Kingston Trio audience in front of him: raffish college and camp kids,” Izzy Young wrote in Caravan. The schedule had the Trio closing the show, but the young crowd grew impatient with the late hour. Organizers decided to reverse the order of the last two performers, with the Kingston Trio coming on ahead of Earl Scruggs, who had to retreat to the performer’s tent. The crowd went wild, the purists didn’t. “What connection these frenetic tinselly showmen have with a folk festival eludes me, except that it is mainly folk songs they choose to vulgarize,” Morris, the Gardyloo reviewer, wrote. When the Trio had finished, their fans went ballistic. Scruggs came on, but he couldn’t quite deal with all the screaming, which had to be squelched so he could finally perform to a crowd whose attention was elsewhere.31 The festival piece in Sing Out! concluded that “audience reaction was mixed, ranging from wild enthusiasm to poorly disguised disdain. If the program seemed to be dominated by the ‘city’ folk-­singer with the traditional performer getting only an occasional look-­in, this was an accurate reflection of the current folk song ‘boom’ and the personalities who are dominating it.” Izzy Young sounded a disappointed but hopeful note. “We know that the Festival producers want to maintain an even balance between the high-­powered Kingston Trio type singers and the usually quieter ‘authentic’ singers,” he wrote. “Let’s hope they can present the Ritchies and the Davises next year in such a way that they are not lost in the thunder of the Kingston Trios.”32 Newport might not have done for Davis what it did for Joan Baez, but it began to raise his profile. The ranks of his guitar students and disciples were growing too. In 1959, twenty-­year-­old Dion DiMucci took some lessons from Davis at his Bronx apartment. Then one of music’s biggest stars with the doo wop group Dion and the Belmonts, Dion had what was then a secret love of the blues. “You’d go to his house, pay his wife ten dollars, and go sit in the living room,” he re115

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called. “He’d play, you’d watch, lesson over.”33 (Dion most likely misremembered the price of the lessons, as Davis would famously charge five dollars a lesson.) Besides seeking musical tutelage, Bronx-­born Dion may have craved spiritual guidance too. He was then in the throes of heroin addiction, and in February of that year he had narrowly escaped death by forgoing a thirty-­six-­dollar airplane ride after a concert in Clear Lake, Iowa. The plane crashed, killing three members of the concert tour, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.  P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson. Dion would later remember “visiting the blind bluesman Reverend Gary Davis in his home, talking with him and listening as he (and his guitar) cried out to Jesus.”34 At Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio—­the same school Davis’s first New York student, John Gibbon, had attended—­another young disciple of Davis’s was busy planting the seeds of his music among a new generation of musicians. On the bohemian campus, Ian Buchanan had become almost a mythic figure. His hair in a James Dean ducktail, a pack of Camels bulging from his rolled shirt sleeve, Buchanan oozed cool detachment whether playing country blues on the guitar or riding around town on a BSA motorcycle or in a black Aston Martin, when he could get the engine running.35 Born in 1939 in Ontario, Canada, Buchanan had been given up at birth and adopted by a family in Forest Hills, Queens. As a teen he’d become a guitar player and passionate collector of old 78s. After hearing Davis’s American Street Songs LP, he’d looked up the Reverend in the Bronx phone book and visited his apartment to ask for lessons, becoming one of the first students to grasp the subtleties of Davis’s intricate guitar style. Davis and Buchanan grew very close, with the Reverend later introducing him to his black church congregations as “my white son.”36 Arriving at Antioch in the fall of 1958 after transferring from New York University’s engineering school, Buchanan gave guitar lessons and played on Friday nights at a local bakery, providing free entertainment into the wee hours for the weary baker as he prepared the next day’s breads and cakes. As Buchanan’s musical reputation grew, students would come and perch on the floor to listen.37 By the winter of 1959, Buchanan was living in a shared house off 116

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campus with a group of Antioch students that included a nineteen-­ year-­old from Maryland then known as Jerry Kaukonen, and the seventeen-­year-­old John P. Hammond, son of the legendary record producer and talent scout. Buchanan taught them Davis’s picking style. “He was probably so irritated by my thrashing next door to his room that he took it upon himself to teach me the guitar,” recalled Kaukonen, who added in another interview: “Some of the first things he taught me were ‘Hesitation Blues,’ ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ and ‘Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning.’ Those were my departure points, and then I went off to learn from the recordings.” Kaukonen quit going to classes the next quarter, opting to play his guitar eight hours a day instead.38 He would gain fame, under his given name Jorma, as the lead guitarist for the psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane and, later, the acoustic-­electric splinter group Hot Tuna, which would help popularize Davis’s music for fans who never knew of the Reverend or his gifts as an arranger. Hammond, then just learning guitar, had trouble picking up Davis’s repertoire,39 and he turned instead to bottleneck guitar, becoming one of that genre’s premier stylists. Buchanan’s enthusiasm as a teacher owes much to Davis himself: Many of the Reverend’s students became teachers, in no small part because of the precedent set by their mentor. “I think Ian felt .  .  . that Davis had been enormously generous with him,” Buchanan’s ex-­wife, Kirsten Dahl, recalled. “And in that sense very much an inspiration. And Ian was very generous with other people, so he would sit and show people how to do all sorts of things.”40 Buchanan made only a few recordings himself before taking his own life, but his impact as a musical catalyst shouldn’t be overlooked. Aside from introducing many guitar players to Davis’s music (and the music of other blues and jazz artists), he also brought Davis to the Antioch campus during the 1958–­59 school year for what would be the first of Davis’s many college appearances. As the 1950s came to a close, music remained a sidelight for Davis. Gary and Annie lived in poverty in the Bronx, supplementing their welfare checks largely with the Reverend’s preaching and street singing and Annie’s domestic work.41 But Davis was starting to attract a following of musicians and fans who appreciated his genius. Future 117

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rock stars, including Jorma Kaukonen and Keith Richards, were cutting their teeth on Davis’s groundbreaking guitar arrangements, and Manny Greenhill was getting him occasional gigs, with the help of Barry Kornfeld. Davis’s musical circle still wasn’t large, but it was e­ xpanding.

118

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HE KNOWS HOW MUCH WE CAN BEAR (1960–­61) I remember thinking to myself: What an American shame that this genius, this is what he’s relegated to. He never complained about that. Lawr e nce Cohn

S

ing Out!, a ten-­year-­old folk magazine based in New York with a national circulation of roughly 10,000, featured Rev. Gary Davis on its cover in February 1960. Barry Kornfeld penned the cover story. “When I first heard Gary on record with his big guitar sound and expressive voice, I envisioned a rather tall, robust man,” Kornfeld wrote. “I got quite a shock when we first met, for Gary is rather small in stature. His hands are large and a thing of beauty as they fly up and down the fingerboard.”1 Kornfeld reported that Davis, “one of our greatest folk artists,” was preaching in the East Bronx and still singing on the streets of Harlem, concluding, with a bit of youthful naiveté, that “Gary rather enjoys it.” The magazine cover was a welcome bit of publicity at a time when Davis still lacked a manager who could find him regular gigs. Other writers soon began making a case for why Davis should be better known, including Robert Shelton of the Times, who appeared newly converted following the Reverend’s performance at Yale University’s Indian Neck Folk Festival in May. “The Rev. Gary Davis is not new to the folk community, yet he is still languishing without the sort of public acclaim he deserves,” Shelton wrote in the folk music magazine Caravan. “On Saturday evening, he gave a performance that may have been the highlight of the weekend. His raw-­boned song-­ sermons, blues and spirituals never seemed more powerful.”2 If the folk revival had begun shining a spotlight on traditional music, Shelton hoped that “the current boom of interest in the country blues singers Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker and Furry Lewis, 119

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will . . . turn to the great work of this titan of folk music.” In his “Frets and Frails” column for Sing Out!, Izzy Young echoed that view, lamenting that Davis’s recordings for Stinson and Riverside had gone out of print. “Despite all the renewed interest in the Reverend, no LP of his work is available today,” Young wrote.3 In New York, a new club that would assume an iconic place in the revival opened its doors. Gerde’s Folk City, at 11 West Fourth Street in the Village, had started life in January as The Fifth Peg, an evening folk venue in a funky Italian restaurant and saloon that during the day catered to factory workers, New York University students, and Italians from Little Italy. The initial co-­bill for the first two weeks after it was christened Folk City featured Davis and Woody Guthrie’s old playing partner Cisco Houston, who earned ninety dollars per week apiece for their services.4 It was Davis’s most regular concert work to date, at age sixty-­four. Around that time, Jack Casady, a sixteen-­year-­old bass player from Washington, DC, was in town visiting his childhood friend Jorma Kaukonen, with whom he’d later form both Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna. Casady attended at least one of Davis’s early shows at Gerde’s and regards the experience as transformative. “He was able to make the guitar sound so full . . . huge, as if he were playing in the approach of a piano,” Casady recalled. “Full moving bass lines, jumping from a rhythmic [approach] to linear melodies all up and down the neck. Just an amazing amount of musical ideas completed during one passage. . . . After that night I was never the same again.”5 To play at Gerde’s, which sold alcohol and operated as a union establishment, Davis had to obtain a cabaret identification card from the New York City Police Department, a procedure that required going down to the police license division at 56 Worth Street to get photographed and fingerprinted and to pay a two-­dollar fee. And he had to join the musicians union, Local 802. Charlie Rothschild, the club’s young booker and emcee, escorted him on both occasions, helping him fill out the various forms so Davis could sign with an X. Joining the union gave the Reverend deep satisfaction, and it’s easy to see why. His union card made him a member of a fraternity of other professional musicians—­few if any of whom were greeting most of their audiences from pulpits and on street corners. 120

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If Davis’s union card made his musical career “official,” not everyone thrilled to the prospect of a working minister devoting more of his time to the concert hall. “I didn’t want Reverend Davis to get in the music world, I did not,” Annie Davis remembered. “I pleaded so hard for him not to get in the music world. Because I know . . . he’d do a lot of numbers and things that he shouldn’t have did, him being a minister.” It wasn’t just the public performances, but also the private sessions with students that worried her. “They would have requests for different numbers,” Annie said. “It just made him kind of get deep into it.”6 At Gerde’s, Davis did two shows a night during the week and three on weekends, and Rothschild drove to the Bronx in his dark gray Volkswagen Beetle to pick the Reverend up at 1482 Brook Avenue, near East 168th Street, where the Davises had recently moved after sixteen years on East 169th Street. “When I booked him into Gerde’s Folk City, it was an ordeal,” Rothschild recalled. “I had to pick him up, drive him down there, then I had to introduce him, then I had to take him home after the show.” If that meant a little less imbibing on the nights Davis performed, Rothschild deemed the sacrifice worth it: “To me he was the real thing, and he was mesmerizing.”7 In June, Barry Kornfeld graduated from Queens College and moved up to Boston, which largely concluded his time as Davis’s playing partner and traveling companion. Kornfeld’s best friend, Peter Freedberger, a brash graduate of Hofstra College, began booking occasional gigs for Davis and leading him around in New York and New England.8 Davis now had a network of people willing to go out of their way to give him a leg up—­not out of pity, but out of respect for his stature as a musician. In July, Davis’s student Ian Buchanan showed up at the Caffè Lena, another new folk club, which had opened its doors two months earlier in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, about a three-­hour drive north from Manhattan. Pasqualina “Lena” Spencer and her husband, Bill, had seen the interest in folk music building, and their decision to open a coffeehouse in the small city once known as a haven for illegal gambling would soon be echoed around the nation as folk made its assault on the Billboard Hot 100.9 Lena recalled what happened when she spotted Buchanan in front of the coffeehouse on the morning of his scheduled gig: 121

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From a block and a half away I saw, sitting on the steps in front of

the door, a gaunt young man and a big black man, two guitars leaning against the building, a cane jutting out across the sidewalk. I

greeted them and the young man jumped up. ‘I’m Ian Buchanan. I’m supposed to sing here this weekend. This is Reverend Gary Davis. He needs the job more than I do. Hope you don’t mind.’10

Davis’s introduction to Lena Spencer, who shared his mother’s nickname, began a longstanding relationship with her and the Caffè Lena, at which he’d perform many times during the sixties. And it reflected one of the many ways Davis’s students tried to reciprocate his generosity through the years.

*

On August 24, Lawrence Cohn, a twenty-­seven-­year-­old agent with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics—­the forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration—­got out of his car in front of the Davises’ Bronx apartment. At six foot one and 190 pounds, Cohn had the strapping, athletic build of a classic G-­Man, but he was already dabbling in the music business as a critic for the Saturday Review and would later become a noted producer, best known for his Grammy-­winning box set of the complete recordings of Robert Johnson. A family friend of Lead Belly’s widow, Martha, he’d come to escort Davis to his first recording session in four years. Kenneth Goldstein had left Riverside Records to head up folk and blues recordings for Prestige, yet another jazz label aiming to capitalize on the budding folk craze, and he once again sought out Davis. On the way to the session, Cohn, Lead Belly’s niece Tiny Robinson (the former Tiny Singh, now married to a part-­time gospel singer named Jim Robinson), and Davis first headed south to Harlem, where they met Esmond Edwards, a photographer and future producer on the Prestige payroll. He snapped a classic portrait of Davis in suit, tie, fedora and dark sunglasses playing his guitar on the sidewalk for the cover of an album to be called Harlem Street Singer.11 Davis seemed happy to be recording again and the mood in the car was festive as they next headed over the George Washington Bridge to 122

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suburban New Jersey, where recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder had built a state-­of-­the-­art studio on a wooded lot in the town of Englewood Cliffs. Van Gelder, a former optometrist, already had earned a reputation as a master sound technician through his recordings of jazz artists Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane for jazz’s biggest labels, including Prestige, Blue Note, Riverside, and Savoy.12 Once again, Goldstein would be at the helm of a Rev. Gary Davis recording, only this time things would be different. For one, with hundreds of sessions under his belt Goldstein had become the premier folk music producer in the nation. And he now had at his disposal a studio with a cathedral ceiling and delicate acoustics and a sound engineer obsessed with transmitting the warmth and complex tonalities of any instruments set before him.13 Goldstein’s eminence and the fact that he commanded technology equal to the caliber of musicians he was recording may help explain some of the tensions that surfaced as soon as Davis lit into the magnificent fingerpicked C chord that begins the driving spiritual “I Belong to the Band.” Of course, buyers of the LP wouldn’t get wind of what went on behind the scenes. “As the first notes of his fabulous guitar playing came through the speaker in the control room, it was evident that this was to be Davis at his very best,” Cohn wrote in the album’s liner notes.14 He would tell a much different story when recalling the Harlem Street Singer session decades later. “The session was not very pleasant,” Cohn says. “The A&R guy [Goldstein] just wouldn’t let Gary play through. If he hit a bad note he’d have to start over and over and over.”15 This kept on until, as Cohn relates, Davis finally looked up into the studio lights and said from behind his sunglasses, “Is Larry out there?” Cohn, in the control room with Van Gelder and Goldstein, put on the speaker. “Yeah, what is it?” “Could you come out here a minute?” When Cohn got close, Davis grabbed him by his coat, pulled him down and whispered in his ear: “If he stops me from playing one more 123

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time, I’m gonna break the guitar over his head.”16 The message apparently got through. Goldstein would later offer his own carefully worded assessment of the session: “Gary did not like redoing [takes]. ‘I’m going to give you one performance of every song.’ And I didn’t object to that at all. . . . I would never, after Gary went three-­quarters of the way through the song, stop and say, ‘Sorry, you missed your riff there. Let’s take it over again.” Goldstein’s solution for dealing with Davis might surprise purists who ascribed a certain “unspoiled” nature to recordings of traditional artists. “Every song was done in one take, which meant . . . a helluva lot of editing. Okay a bad break that was better between two later verses I could copy that over, splice that back into . . . where the first verse was.”17 Davis, even in his sixties, was still at the height of his powers as a guitarist and capable of playing his songs through flawlessly, so Goldstein’s comment nearly two decades later must be taken with a pinch of salt. It nonetheless adds a new wrinkle to the history of the folk revival, as he recalled taking the same approach routinely with blues and folk musicians. The fact that he didn’t particularly get on with the Reverend didn’t surprise others who recorded for Goldstein. “Kenny just had a very New Yorky type of manner. He was not warm and fuzzy, let’s put it that way,” Dick Weissman recalled.18 For his part, Goldstein hints at the darker side of Davis’s character and his tendency to be less than accommodating with the folk establishment. As Goldstein recalled: “How do you work with a man who . . . had been so stung by people misusing him and ripping him off . . . a street singer who was stolen from and who had his instruments stolen when he would fall asleep on the train . . . He was a bitter man in a lot of ways.”19 Personal animus aside, the record Goldstein and Davis made together—­with the aid of Van Gelder’s aural wizardry—­proved to be Davis’s masterpiece and one of the most breathtaking recordings of the folk era. Playing his weather-­beaten Gibson J-­200, Davis recorded twenty songs in three hours, refusing to take breaks. The all-­gospel set included some of his most indelible classics, featuring soaring vocals and a remarkable interplay between voice and virtuoso guitar. Follow124

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ing “I Belong to the Band,” a definitive take on a song from his 1935 sessions, Davis recorded, in order, “I Am the Light of This World,” “Let Us Get Together,” and “Samson and Delilah”—­all performances that guitarists are still straining to copy decades later.20 “Let Us Get Together” featured a staggeringly difficult guitar part that amounted, in the words of Davis’s later student Ernie Hawkins, to “chords exploding out of the right hand.”21 It also contained one of Davis’s most uplifting lyrics, which could render the song as either a spiritual or a call for racial harmony. It would be one of Davis’s crowd pleasers during the sixties, and it might have become an anthem of the early, premilitant civil rights era had it been easier to play for the average musician. Let us get together right down here (×3) Oh, let us get together right down here

Let us walk together right down here (×3)

Let us walk together, little children, right down here . . .

“Goin’ to Sit Down on the Banks of the River,” a rollicking gospel number, featured Davis’s spectacular use of unorthodox chord voicings up and down the neck, which gave the tune movement and an orchestral quality. The song had been especially popular in the Carolinas and Virginia, showing up in the repertoires of the Carter Family (“We Will March through the Streets of the City”) and Pink Anderson, the songster from Laurens, South Carolina (“I’m Going to Walk through the Streets of the City”). Anderson’s rendition included a nearly identical lyric to Davis’s song, but was played at a dirgelike tempo, without Davis’s tour-­de-­force fingerpicking to drive it along. The tune is one of many examples of the Reverend’s seizing upon a church song common among musicians in the early 1900s and creating an unforgettable arrangement that gave it its full force as a spiritual. (Anderson’s version is all but forgotten, though Shirley Caesar and the Caravans would have a hit with “I Won’t Be Back” two years after Davis recorded it.) “Twelve Gates to the City,” another song from the ARC sessions, also received a definitive treatment and became one of Davis’s concert staples. “Tryin’ to Get Home,” recorded next, offered up one of the 125

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central themes in Davis’s life and religious message: the soul in the wilderness trying to find his way to heaven or back to some idealized reincarnation of his fractured family. Lord, I’m wading through deep water tryin’ to get home (×2)

Lord, I’m wading through deep water, Lord, I’m wading, Lord, I’m wading through deep water

Nobody knows the trouble I’m having tryin’ to get home (×2) Nobody knows the trouble I’m having, oh, Lord, yeah, Lord

It had first been recorded (as “Waded in the Water Trying to Get Home”) by the South Carolina guitar evangelist Blind Joe Taggart for Paramount in 1929, and again a few years later by Taggart’s young protégé Josh White. Though not an original song, it clearly spoke to Davis, sharing the theme of his trial sermon back in the 1930s. Davis rendered the tune in his own style, with a rhythmically and melodically complex arrangement and a shouted vocal straight from the pulpit. The last of the songs Davis recorded that day that would make it onto the Harlem Street Singer LP was perhaps the one he’d become best known for, in no small part due to cover versions by the Grateful Dead and Hot Tuna in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” seems to be based on traditional black spirituals. One version, “Death Come to My House, He Didn’t Stay Long,” collected by James Weldon Johnson in 1926, contains the almost identical chorus that Davis would make famous: Death come to my house, he didn’t stay long,

I look on de bed, an’ my mother [or father or sister or brother] was gone22

Another, “Death Ain’t Nothin’ but a Robber,” collected by John W. Work in 1940, adds more pieces that would show up, slightly altered, in Davis’s song: Death ain’t nothin’ but a robber, don’t you see (×3) Death come to my house, he didn’t stay long,

I looked in the bed an’ my mother [or father or sister or brother] was gone23

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Those spirituals would almost certainly have been largely forgotten outside the church if not for Davis’s brilliance as an arranger. He performs the tune in both the key of G and its relative minor (E)—­ which was then almost unheard of among traditional blues-­based guitarists—­and uses dazzling single-­string runs to heighten the song’s tension and pathos. For the Harlem Street Singer session Davis pocketed a $309 advance—­ triple what he’d gotten from Riverside. Davis represented himself, marking his contract with an X. Prestige promised him a twenty-­cent royalty on every LP sold in the United States.24 While the royalties would have been modest on a record that would likely have sold only a few thousand copies at the time, it nevertheless was a significant milestone for Davis, given his complaints about being denied royalties as far back as his 1935 session. The contract gave Prestige an option to record Davis again within the next year and the company would soon do so. That Davis was signing his own contracts once again points out how sorely he needed a manager to look after his interests, especially as young urban folk artists with real sales potential began looking for traditional material to “re-­interpret” for the mass market. Even though it contained not a single blues, Prestige would release Harlem Street Singer on its new Bluesville imprint in December. Unlike Davis’s previous records, this one attracted some serious attention from the mainstream press. Peter J. Welding, the Saturday Review music critic, praised the Reverend’s “harsh, rasping, powerful vocal approach” and declared him “the possessor of a stunning instrumental technique that many a blues guitarist might well envy.”25 Robert Shelton in the New York Times said that “while the sincerity of some people in the gospel movement can be questioned, the Rev. Gary Davis’s conviction cannot. He is foremost a distinctive, imaginative country blues guitarist and his singing voice—­rough, rude and primitive—­is capable of the most exultant type of statement.”26 The Little Sandy Review, a new and soon-­to-­be influential little folk magazine founded by University of Minnesota undergraduates, would estimate at year’s end that three hundred folk records hit store shelves in 1960. It called Harlem Street Singer “one of the greatest albums of the year—­a must for everyone!” “Let us fervently hope that it stays in 127

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the catalog longer than have Rev. Davis’s other recordings,” the magazine added.27

*

Despite his run at Gerde’s earlier in the spring, his phenomenal summer recording session, and a new crop of folk clubs opening their doors, Davis still counted mostly on his friends to get him gigs. Dave Van Ronk, in addition to making a name for himself in the Village, had begun booking acts at the Commons—­a “basket house” on Minetta Street, where musicians earned only what patrons felt compelled to toss into the wicker as it passed from table to table—­a slightly more dignified version of holding out a tin cup. Davis was among those Van Ronk put on the schedule.28 Some of the Village basket houses were practically walk-­in closets, twelve feet wide and fifty feet deep, with a small stage by a plate glass window to attract passersby. Jerry Rasmussen, then a twenty-­five-­ year-­old Columbia University doctoral student who frequented the Village, recalled seeing Davis at the basket houses on Bleecker and MacDougal Streets. On several occasions, Davis told his small audiences that he’d just had another of his J-­200s stolen on the street. “The thought of having somebody steal his guitars was really upsetting, and he’d break down, would just stand up there crying,” Rasmussen says. “That was heartbreaking to me to see somebody [with] that gift just struggling to get along.”29 Rasmussen also recalled the incongruity of seeing a preacher up on stage praising God to an audience that was indifferent at best to the religious content of his music. “He was out delivering a message to people who really weren’t interested in the message, they were interested in his guitar picking.”30 Davis’s magnificent picking might have been what filled the seats, but he had a spiritual calling and he intended to fulfill it. He sometimes showed up to perform at Gerde’s and the Gaslight, which began holding weekly hootenannies. These informal concerts, comparable to the “open mike” nights of a later era, weren’t paying gigs, but they increased Davis’s exposure. On nights when he wasn’t preaching, he became a regular at Village gatherings, including rent parties, where artists and singers each fished a dollar or two out of 128

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their pockets to help a fellow bohemian pay the bills.31 By virtue of his quick wit and guitar skills, Davis could command a room full of young folkniks and hold court for hours. “Honestly, he was like God,” Terri Thal recalled. “We worshiped him, musically. Because of Gary’s musicianship—­not his fame, he wasn’t that famous—­people were awestruck.” Davis also had a magnetism that was difficult to resist. “The man really was vibrant,” Thal says. “Despite the fact that he was in his, whatever age he was. Somebody of that age who could teach, and he could—­he taught quite well actually—­was still performing, was still accessible to kids, was funny, you know the sexual innuendos.”32 Davis had a sinister sense of humor, which he used to great effect, sometimes to make a point with the young folk crowd. At Izzy Young’s parties at his Abingdon Square apartment in the Village, Davis was sometimes the only black person there. “When he heard that we were having a really good time,” Young says, “he would sit down in the corner and start playing ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy.’ He knew what he was doing to get us white kids to understand that there was something else going on besides having a good time.”33 Meanwhile, in Boston, Manny Greenhill (through his management company, Folklore Productions) and Peter Freedberger continued finding work for Davis. Having made infrequent trips with Kornfeld and Ian Buchanan, Davis was still a novice on the traveling concert circuit. Performing his religious music solo on unfamiliar stages, the Reverend insisted on standing, just as he did during his long hours playing and preaching in churches and shouting the gospel on the streets. “It is very difficult, if not impossible, to sing these songs sitting or standing coldly still, and at the same time capture the spontaneous ‘swing’ which is of their very essence,” James Weldon Johnson observed earlier in the century. “The ‘swing’ of the Spirituals,” he explained, “is in perfect union with the religious ecstasy that manifests itself in the swaying bodies of the whole congregation.”34 For Davis, that swing resulted in a slight rock to the left when he performed. Sometimes, by the time he’d sung four or five songs he’d drifted considerably, and Freedberger, or whoever else was leading him, would have to rush up and whisk him back toward the microphone. During a concert around the end of 1960 at Harvard University’s 129

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Agassiz Theater, the unthinkable happened. Davis had been putting on a good show to the delight of the crowd of mostly students. But as the night wore on, he’d been slowly straying from the mic until at last he didn’t know where he was. He got turned around and did his last song facing the back of the stage.35 Then Davis finished his set and Freedberger was supposed to lead him off. But he had vanished. “Peter?” Davis called. “Peter?” “And then he figured he was on his own,” recalled the folk singer Tom Rush, who attended the concert as a Harvard student. “So he turned and walked toward the orchestra pit, and everyone in the audience just froze because they knew what was going to happen next, and it did.”36 Davis tumbled off the stage with his J-­200 around his neck. It could have been a disaster but he was extremely lucky, escaping with some minor bumps and bruises and his head and playing hands intact.

*

While the grassroots of folk music continued sprouting in Cambridge and New York, folk singing still represented a potential menace in some quarters. In late March 1961 the New York parks commissioner, Newbold Morris, successor to the imperious Robert Moses, denied permits to the folk singers who’d long been gathering in Washington Square Park on Sundays, in part because some of the minstrels had an unsavory appearance, according to the Times. Two weeks later, folk music fans, “many in Beatnik clothes and beards,” rioted in the park in one of the nation’s first stirrings of the sixties youth movement. Izzy Young acted as a spokesman, telling a crowd at the Washington Square fountain: “We have been singing here for seventeen years and never have had any trouble. We have a right to sing here.” Young filed suit against Morris in state court to try to overturn the ban.37 Morris would soon reverse course and allow folk singers back into the park. But while the battle continued, on May 5 Rev. Gary Davis and Bill McAdoo, a young black folk singer from Detroit who specialized in social protest songs, were booked at a community center in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, a working-­class neighborhood of mostly European Jewish immigrants. It had been nearly two decades since the blues130

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man Josh White had broken racial barriers in the New York nightclub world with his residency at Cafe Society,38 and though the Village was now a mostly welcoming place for professional singers of all races, the same couldn’t be said for the other side of the East River. Word had gone out from Brooklyn that Davis and McAdoo, part of the Washington Square crowd, weren’t entirely welcome. “The police [were] at the concert,” recalled Earl Jones, a black studies professor who was then a young folkie who accompanied the performers and helped set up microphones. “Trouble was expected.”39 On the day of the show, an incendiary column with racist overtones in the conservative New York World-­Telegram fanned whatever controversy the booking had stirred up in Brighton Beach. “Respectable citizens, take heed,” wrote Arthur Alpert. “The folk song cancer is spreading.” Alpert warned that McAdoo had recently released an album on Folkways with songs like “I Don’t Want No Jim Crow Coffee,” and he might try to sing labor songs. “They say that Mr. Davis is a blind Negro preacher who sticks to Gospel songs,” the column noted. “But he writes many himself. Who knows what social disorder may lurk under the protective cloak of religion?” Even the singers’ choice of attire was attacked as “dangerous”: “Davis wears old suits and cigar ashes and McAdoo is ‘very casual.’ . . . Did anybody ever make a good impression, find a decent job or a nice girl that way? It’s all very well to be broadminded, but tolerance can go too far. Respectable citizens of Brighton Beach, arise. You have nothing to lose but your heritage.”40 The article infuriated Davis, who took the stage that night and said, “I have my gun and I’m gonna sing my songs,” Jones recalled.41 McAdoo led the audience in singing an old nursery rhyme, seemingly aimed at soliciting donations for his concert partner: Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat Please put a penny in the blind man’s hat

If you haven’t got a quarter, a half pence will do If you haven’t got a half pence, God bless you42

In the end, the concert concluded without incident. But the experience left an impression on Davis, who would be sure to take a gun with him on future trips to Brooklyn. 131

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LET THE SAVIOR BLESS YOUR SOUL THE REVEREND IN THE PULPIT Asked if he was best at being a minister or playing guitar, Mr. Davis said: “God put his best into a person when he calls him to be a minister.” Detroit Fr ee Pr e ss

I

n the early sixties, the singer Maria Muldaur (then known as Maria D’Amato) was a pretty brunette just out of Hunter College High School who shared a Greenwich Village loft with an artist friend. “We used to have little hootenannies on Saturday nights,” she recalled. “Rev. Gary Davis would come over and drink whiskey and put me on his lap and tell stories and play and sing. We’d stay up all night, and then we’d drive him up to Harlem. And without going to sleep he’d deliver a sermon.”1 As Davis continued getting more involved in the “music world” that Annie so feared, he managed to maintain a double life of which few of his casual fans would have been even vaguely aware. Some folkniks and guitar students occasionally accompanied him to church in Harlem or the Bronx, where they glimpsed the other, somewhat peculiar world that he and Annie inhabited. The church remained Gary’s true calling, even amid the attention he’d begin enjoying during the folk revival. “Many souls have been saved under my preachin’,” he told an interviewer. “That’s the onliest way anybody will ever know what God has done for you: by your fruit. . . . I cannot number the people that have been converted under me since I been preachin’ the gospel. And that’s what makes me feel mighty good.”2 Nightclub emcees and folklorists might introduce him on stage as a storefront preacher, a reverend or minister, if they made reference to his religious work at all. But those labels barely hinted at his devotion to the Missionary Baptist Church and to the cause of saving souls. As Davis became known as a folk singer—­just as likely to appear during 132

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the blues or folk segments at a music festival as on the slate of religious music—­his spiritual objective would be marginalized. It was a different twist on the dilemma faced by gospel divas like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Clara Ward, who at one time or another battled accusations that they trivialized God’s Word by singing spirituals to suit popular tastes. In Davis’s case, his music would never enjoy mass appeal—­at least not as he recorded it—­but his evangelical mission was conveniently ignored or de-­emphasized since his concert audiences had other interests—­namely, his guitar wizardry. Had he been asked to comment he probably would have echoed Shirley Caesar, who once explained: “People have to understand that I am first an evangelist, then a singer.”3 Larry Brezer, who would live with Gary and Annie as a student and driver, remembered how difficult it was keeping up with the Davises and all their church commitments. “The churchgoing, it was a little bit of a drag to wake up early on Sunday morning,” he says. “And it was just as likely to be on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday or Saturday.”4 “He had his folklife,” recalled Alan Smithline, another of Davis’s later live-­in students. “But in his milieu, he was preaching, they were going to church a few nights a week, all day Sunday, were going all over the city from borough to borough for him to preach and play in the churches. What he did in the secular, the folk thing, was almost mild compared to what he was doing, the energy, in the church.”5 Alex Shoumatoff, who studied with Davis beginning in the early 1960s, described one of the churches where the Reverend preached, a gray wooden storefront on East 119th Street: It was a very small building in what seemed to be an unusually wide alley, but inside the cracked and stained ceiling extended far

enough back that there was room for ten rows of wooden folding chairs, an aisle between them, a table with a collection plate, a large

bouquet of red plastic roses, a lectern with a purple cloth draped over it, and off to the side a tiny room with a rusty sink. It was definitely a place of worship.6

When Davis brought a white student with him to church, he’d introduce his small congregations to “my humble white friend” or “my 133

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white son” or use some other coded honorific, which really meant, “Don’t worry, this one’s okay.” The visitor would sit on an uncomfortable chair for what seemed like an eternity and take in the scene, a bit embarrassed, often mesmerized at the theatrics of a crusading Baptist service, all the while feeling a certain privilege to be allowed in to what was generally a closeted society. Occasionally, the Reverend would spring a surprise, asking his student to come up and perform a spiritual—­a chilling, but often ultimately heartwarming experience. “I come from a background of doctors and scientists who don’t really believe in anything to speak of,” says Danny Birch, another guitar student, who accompanied Davis to church several times on St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem and performed for the Reverend’s parishioners. “To be in an atmosphere of people with such a strong faith and obviously having something of great meaning in their life that I knew nothing about really was important for me in being able to overcome the [religious] prejudices with which I was brought up.”7 Earl Jones accompanied the Reverend in 1961 to the Second Southern Baptist Church, a storefront at 1170 Thornton Avenue in the Bronx. As a black man, Jones blended in more easily, but he still found the service memorable enough that it remained vivid decades later: He came up and he had his guitar with him. He had his Bible, which was in Braille. It was big, it may have been fifteen inches by fifteen

inches, maybe six inches thick. And he went through the pages and he preached. .  .  . And he went back and forth from the guitar to

the Braille. His glasses were dropping down and his head was going back. It was hot, there was no air conditioning.8

Davis’s sermons revolved around his music. For some of his students, hearing the same or similar songs in church that they’d come to know on record gave them new insights into how the Reverend composed. “When the choir did their thing,” says Rick Ruskin, who began lessons in the midsixties, “what struck me immediately was that even though they weren’t singing any tune I recognized Gary having ever done, it seemed to me this choir could conceivably be singing what he plays on guitar, his guitar part on ‘Twelve Gates to the City.’” “On ‘Twelve Gates,’” Ruskin adds, “he broke every cardinal rule you learned when you were starting to play. . . . He doesn’t treat his guitar 134

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like a guitar. He doesn’t even treat his guitar like a piano. He treats his guitar like six voices he can manipulate. That was very eye opening.”9 Davis performed many of the same spirituals from the pulpit that he sang on the stage and in the recording studio. While his songs could be genuinely moving in concert, when he shouted them in a church setting, accompanied by his booming “Miss Gibson,” their power could get his parishioners feeling the Holy Ghost. Alex Shoumatoff remembered: Sometimes he was playing with his left hand alone, sliding up and down the neck while he snapped the fingers of his right hand or slapped them on the sound box. Moaning, shouting, squealing.

. . . Annie was clapping right hand into left, left into right, sway-

ing back and forth with closed eyes. Occasionally, she would shake and utter little screams as shivers of religion ran down her spine.10

Davis’s music often came to him in visions while he slept, and he would bring his congregations brand new songs, telling them once, “I got to sing a little bit of it. I know you don’t know anything about it, maybe you might catch on as I get started.” The piano player might comp a few chords to figure out the melody while the congregation sang along, tentatively at first, then growing more passionate as the words and cadences enveloped them and the hand claps and whoops intensified.11 For his sermons, Davis rarely prepared in advance, because he wanted his faith to guide him. “I never think nothin’ of a man settin’ down and preparing a sermon,” he explained. “He’s taking God’s job out of his hands. Lots of times I stood before a congregation I didn’t a bit more know what I was going to say than this guitar here. For the time come for me to stand, God give me a message.”12 In the same vein, the Reverend played his music in church and on stage “by the Holy Spirit,” even if that meant not necessarily giving the crowd what it came to hear. In the context of his church work, it’s easy to see why, when Davis started performing on the college circuit, he often chafed at the scheduling restrictions placed on his performances. The fifteen minutes allotted to artists at a university folk festival was hardly enough time to get his audience “stirred up,” especially for a minister whose spon135

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taneous sermons, with musical accompaniment, could last an hour or more if the spirit moved him. “Maybe the next time I come here,” Davis angrily told a crowd at UCLA in the midsixties, “I’ll have more time to spend.” Earlier during the festival, he’d complained on stage that his time was “rushable.”13 A handful of Davis’s sermons survive, on tape or transcription, and they reveal how little he deviated from the themes he returned to again and again in song: particularly, living a Christian life and preparing to account for your earthly deeds at death. In one sermon he explained what he meant by his driving spiritual “Sun Goin’ Down,” which isn’t about a sunset in the conventional sense, as a folk fan with a blues orientation might assume: We not speakin’ directly to the sun that hangs up in the element.

We’re speakin’ about the period of our life. We’re speakin’ about the time when we must meet death. We must get to the place where we

must quit the shores of time. When our voice fails us. Then we realize that the sun is going down. . . . If the end should come that we

have done all that we could do here on this earth, then we’ve fixed

ourselves and prepared ourselves to meet God because we realized the sun was going down.14

The theme is drawn from John 9:4, when Jesus says: “I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.”15 Davis frequently turned to John, chapter 9—­also the source of “I Am the Light of This World”—­and it’s easy to see why, given that it describes the episode in which Jesus gives sight to a blind beggar. “When Jesus brought daylight to my soul,” Davis told one of his congregations, “I said, thank God I’m free at last. People that I used to . . . hate—­Glory, Hallelujah!—­it make me love. That’s what made me know I got it. . . . The paths that I used to be walkin’, I changed my path when I got it.”16 They were lines almost verbatim from “The Great Change in Me,” which he’d first recorded back in 1935 and again for Harlem Street Singer. To his poor parishioners, mostly transplanted southerners aching for acceptance and economic stability, Davis counseled a mix of forbearance and action to improve their lot—­two of his own best virtues. 136

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He’d been working tirelessly in church, on the streets, and now on the concert stage to feed himself and Annie, and he lived by the words he cried out in “Lord, I Feel Just Like Goin’ On”: “I done come this far, I don’t find no fault, well I feel just like goin’ on.” When he sang the song in church, accompanied by tambourines and the fervent voices of his congregation, it was transformed from a weary traveler’s lonely manifesto into an entire people’s collective expression of the will to persevere. “You don’t have to tell nobody about how good you try to be!” Davis thundered to his flock. “God is looking every step you make. You don’t have to tell nobody how much you bear. God knows how much you bear.” And, then a little tough love: “We’re lookin’ for too much and don’t want to do nothin’ for it! You got to get up and do something! . . . Somebody is on their sick bed. Somebody need to be turned over! Somebody got dirty sheets in their home and they need to be washed! Somebody need to take the time!”17 In Davis’s focus on Christian behavior, one can’t help but see the mother and father who abandoned him in stark relief. He preached: Somebody have got to the place they know how to treat they fel-

low man this evening, ought to pick up something this evening, and then when you pick it up you ought to cry out and say you got

it, ain’t that right. If you got it, my friend, it will make you treat

your neighbor right. If you got it, it’ll make you talk right, ain’t that right. If you got it, you can find your home when the sun go down.

If you got it, you learn how to treat your family, ain’t that right, ain’t that right.18

Davis had his church family, and soon the ranks of his other family—­his guitar students—­would begin to multiply and bear fruit.

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CHILDREN, GO WHERE I SEND THEE (1961–­62) Children, go where I send thee, How shall I send thee? I’m gonna send thee one by one . .  Tradi tional African Americ an sp iri t ual

T

he annual Indian Neck Folk Festival was always one of the sixties’ more unusual musical events. Produced by students at Yale University, it kicked off with a public concert at Yale’s cavernous Woolsey Hall in New Haven, Connecticut, and then shifted to an invitation-­ only gathering the rest of the weekend at the Montowese House, an old, rambling three-­and-­a-­half-­story resort inn in nearby Branford on Long Island Sound. The private event always attracted the in crowd from the New York and Cambridge folk scenes. Musicians would perform set concerts, but most of the music happened in small groups and impromptu jam sessions around the hotel grounds. “There was something musical going on every minute in every nook and cranny of the big hotel,” Robert Shelton had written of the previous year’s outing. “A series of small parlors stretched along the front of the building between the ‘concert hall’ and the beer kegs. Anyone who traveled the route . . . would be exposed to a series of intimate musical sessions in one room after the other that would intrigue and/or assail the senses.”1 The day after the Brighton Beach concert, May 6, 1961, Manny Greenhill fortunately booked Davis at the festival, and it proved to be a much more welcoming session. Among the musicians who showed up to sing and soak up new material was Bob Dylan, a nineteen-­year-­ old from Hibbing, Minnesota, who’d arrived in New York at the end of 1960 in search of his idol Woody Guthrie and a career in folk music. Dylan had wasted little time nestling into the Greenwich Village folk 138

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scene, cementing a friendship with Dave Van Ronk and making the rounds of the Village hoots.2 If Dylan hadn’t yet run into Davis around Washington Square or Gerde’s or Van Ronk’s apartment, he surely did at Indian Neck. For many who attended the festival that year, one of the singular memories of the weekend was of Davis. Wearing a suit, fedora, and overcoat and chomping on a cigar on a spring day, the Reverend took a seat on the lawn of the hotel grounds and played and sang for three and a half hours without a break. For a street singer it was all in a day’s work, but for those lounging on the grass and on the hotel veranda, Davis’s focus and stamina, at age sixty-­five, was hard to fathom. “It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” recalled Robert L. Jones, then a young Boston folk singer. “Dylan and all these people were there and we all ended up sitting out there listening to him. I don’t think he even knew we were there. And if you’ve never seen him or haven’t heard that style of music, it’s quite alarming. I mean, you can be transfixed by it.”3 For the wide-­eyed Dylan, who’d recently left the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Davis seems to have made a big impression. Later that month Dylan returned home and appeared at a University of Minnesota hoot. “Dylan’s performance that spring evening of a selection of Guthrie and Gary Davis songs was hectic and shaky, but it contained all the elements of the now-­perfected performing style,” according to the Little Sandy Review.4 The review probably refers to a gathering at the Minneapolis apartment occupied by Dylan’s friend Bonnie Beecher, a performance later issued on a bootleg known as The Minneapolis Party Tape. The man who would go on to transform popular music sings a Guthrie’s “Ramblin’ Around,” then two of Davis’s songs, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” and “It’s Hard to Be Blind,” the latter a version of “Lord, I Wish I Could See.” Tapes would roll at yet another Minnesota party at Beecher’s apartment that year (known to Dylan bootleg collectors as The Hotel Tape). In two and half hours, fueled by an entire bottle of Jim Beam, Dylan sang twenty-­six songs, including four associated with Davis: “Candy Man,” “It’s Hard to Be Blind,” “Cocaine,” and “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.”5 139

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Years later, Dylan recalled what it was like to see musicians like Davis in the flesh: “The people who played that music were still around . . . and so there was a bunch of us, me included, who got to see all these people close up—­people like Son House, Reverend Gary Davis or Sleepy John Estes. Just to sit there and be up close and watch them play, you could study what they were doing, plus a bit of their lives rubbed off on you.”6 That fall, Dylan would accompany Davis to a concert at Bennington College in Vermont and would open up the show. Afterward, when it came time to pay the performers, Dylan was said to have been mortified when he received fifty dollars and Davis earned only seventy-­five dollars. “Reverend Gary Davis should never perform for less than a hundred dollars,” Dylan reportedly uttered before insisting that the Reverend take half his share.7 After immersing himself in the music of Davis, Guthrie, Jack Elliott, and other traditional musicians, Dylan went on to revolutionize pop songwriting with his fusion of poetry and blues, folk and gospel song structures. Tracing artistic influence is always tricky, but one aspect of Davis’s music, aside from its biblical themes, that might have rubbed off on Dylan was the sheer length of his songs. The Reverend had dozens of tunes that went on well past the conventional three minutes that had come to define pop radio. Playing “by the spirit,” he often ignored record producers and concert bookers who wanted to keep him to a schedule. Dylan famously pushed the boundaries of song length in popular music, beginning with the nearly seven-­minute “A Hard Rain’s A-­Gonna Fall” on his second album and the equally long single “Like a Rolling Stone.” “Where the hell else would Dylan be hearing songs of that length if it wasn’t from Davis?” asks the New York guitarist Phil Allen, who studied with Davis later in the decade. “He’s like the elephant in the room.”8 Davis, none too easy to please musically, would later tell his student Stefan Grossman that the young Dylan had a terrible voice. Toward the end of the sixties, however, Davis would pay Dylan the ultimate compliment, regaling his students with his own instrumental version of Dylan’s pacifist classic “Masters of War.”9 Dylan would continue to record Davis’s music intermittently throughout his career. 140

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Back in the Village, a twenty-­five-­year-­old comedian, poet, and raconteur named Hugh Romney had fallen hard for a French beauty named Elisabeth Djehizian, then studying at Hunter College. Romney had built a following at the Gaslight on MacDougal Street, another popular folk venue, where he mixed beatnik poetry with hilarious monologues, and he eventually became the club’s entertainment director. (Romney, who later changed his name to Wavy Gravy, would etch himself into rock music lore by his appearance in the documentary Woodstock, which shows him as a gap-­toothed, raspy-­voiced hippie telling hordes of festival-­goers waking up from a night of acid-­fueled revelry, “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000.”) Romney wanted to get married—­at the Gaslight—­and it’s a measure of Gary Davis’s growing influence in the Village that Romney turned to the Reverend to perform the ceremony. At about four in the afternoon on July 10, 1961, what could only be described as “a real scene, man” played out at the club. The folk singers Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, Dylan, and Len Chandler were among the guests. Davis came from the Bronx with Rev. Howard Oby, who would sign the license for him. The wedding took place on a wooden board—­which had to be supplied because Davis insisted that if the betrothed stood on the Gaslight’s concrete floor their children would be “born mad.”10 Davis was supposed to bring a religious text but, according to Gravy, he grabbed Peter Rabbit in Braille by mistake and had to improvise. After administering the marriage vows, Davis sang “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” then offered the young couple a bit of advice: “Sleep tight but don’t bite.”11 There can be little doubt that Dylan had Hugh Romney’s wedding in mind when he told his new girlfriend and muse Suze Rotolo that winter how their own nuptials might proceed: “We’ll get Reverend Gary Davis to perform the ceremony. Naw, he can just sing the ceremony. And we’ll have all the singers there.”12

*

On August 10, Davis returned to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs to record an LP that would be called A Little More Faith. In many ways the session followed the contours of the Harlem Street Singer session, with a few wrinkles. 141

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Lawrence Cohn, who once again fetched Davis in the Bronx with Tiny Robinson, recalled Davis and producer Kenneth Goldstein continuing to scrap over the need to do retakes. As before, though, the results were brilliant—­a dozen gospel songs that would burnish Davis’s reputation nearly as much as Harlem Street Singer. A definitive version of “You Got to Move,” which he’d sung at the Lead Belly memorial and recorded during the ill-­fated Stinson session, led off the set. Davis referred to “You Got to Move” as a jubilee song,13 which may place its origins during the heyday of Jubilee singing in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It showed up in the repertoires of other musicians, including (as we shall see) Mississippi Fred McDowell. Davis’s complex arrangements of traditional spirituals—­including “Motherless Children,” “I’ll Fly Away,” and “God’s Gonna Separate”—­ continued pushing the boundaries of what was possible on guitar. “I’ll Be All Right Someday,” based on the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” contained one of the Reverend’s most uplifting arrangements, and it was one of his most passionate statements of the belief that faith would eventually get him to a better place: I am going home I am going home

I’m going home someday

And in my heart, I do believe I’m going home someday

The centerpiece of A Little More Faith remains to this day one of the more remarkable pieces of music ever put on vinyl. Clocking in at nearly five minutes, “Crucifixion” is a song sermon—­telling the story of Christ’s betrayal and execution—­set to a driving counterpoint melody that Davis uses to create a stunning backdrop for his mostly spoken preaching: And the time that the Lord was settin’ down with his disciples.

Eatin’ supper together, you know. And they tell me, he looked over the crowd of his disciples. And he said, “Outta you twelve, there gonna be one of you who gonna betray me” . . .

To keep the song going for any length of time took tremendous concentration, given the difficulty of the guitar part and the vocal 142

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dialogue maintained throughout. If the spirit moved him, Davis was known to play it for ten or twelve minutes, a major feat of exertion, as he improvised the sermon. “You never knew how long it would be,” Ernie Hawkins recalled. “He didn’t really perform this song that much because it took a lot out of him.”14 Limiting the sermon to five minutes this session, Davis didn’t sacrifice any of the song’s emotion. Each verse is punctuated with the Reverend’s shout of “Hallelu!” which bounces off the studio’s cathedral ceiling and echoes into Van Gelder’s studio reverb. The last “Hallelu,” about four minutes and thirty seconds into the sermon, is followed by an ecstatic shout of “Whoa!” that, whether by Van Gelder’s or Goldstein’s manipulation or by virtue of Davis’s heightened spirituality, seems to rock heaven itself. He concludes the “service” by intoning, “Great God, talk to me” and playing a gorgeous syncopated chordal solo that seems to cascade off the fingerboard of his guitar, as if to say, “Here’s what it sounds like when God speaks through music.” It’s a spine-­tingling performance and one that the Reverend may have honed for both his street audiences and his storefront congregations. Released in September, A Little More Faith doesn’t seem to have attracted as much press as Harlem Street Singer, although the Little Sandy Review deemed it an instant classic, with reviewer Barry Hansen (later the well-­known radio broadcaster Dr. Demento) calling Davis “easily the best male religious singer since Blind Willie Johnson, and, as a guitarist . . . unexcelled by any living performer in any traditional style in America.”15 For the session, Davis received the same advance—­ $309—­and royalty he’d earned for Harlem Street Singer. But with Tiny Robinson on hand to sign the contract—­and presumably to make his case, as she’d done with her uncle Lead Belly—­Davis also secured a $500 advance for his third Prestige LP to be recorded later in the year.16 As Davis added to his studio résumé, other musicians were recording his songs or arrangements and performing them in Village clubs. On record, Erik Darling, then a member of the Weavers, had done a version of “Candy Man,” and Dave Van Ronk had covered Davis’s arrangement of “Twelve Gates to the City.” On stage, Barry Kornfeld was performing “Soldier’s Drill.” Jack Elliott, back from Europe, included “Candy Man” and “Cocaine Blues” in his sets. Len Chandler 143

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was singing “Samson and Delilah,”17 as was Danny Kalb, one of the Village’s hottest guitarists, who used the song as one of his showstoppers. Dylan was covering “Cocaine Blues,” albeit a version he probably copied from Elliott.18 And Van Ronk included “Candy Man,” “Twelve Gates,” and a few other Davis tunes in his sets. In Boston, the Golden Vanity, Club 47, Cafe Yana, the Unicorn, and other clubs anchored a folk scene that may even have outshone New York’s early on, thanks to Manny Greenhill’s thriving concert series, the rising stardom of Joan Baez, and an overflow of students from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, and Brandeis University. “At the hoots at Cafe Yana and the Unicorn, people were playing ‘Twelve Gates to the City,’ and ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy,’” recalled David Wilson, who founded Boston’s Broadside folk magazine in 1962. “It was pretty funny hearing some people trying to do that with the Gary Davis growl.”19 When Davis, led by Peter Freedberger, had gigs in New England, he sometimes stayed with Jack Landrón, a young black folk singer from Puerto Rico who performed under the name Jackie Washington. Landrón had started his career by playing hoot nights at the Golden Vanity and later took over Baez’s Tuesday night slot at Club 47, where he built a rabid local following. He lived in a large puddingstone house in Roxbury where Davis, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Jesse Fuller, and other black musicians on shoestring budgets stayed to make ends meet.20 Unlike Pete Seeger and Oscar Brand, Davis wasn’t yet a known quantity in New England. Fellow musicians had caught on to Davis’s music, but Boston University students would head to the Golden Vanity because it became the thing to do on a Saturday night, not because the Reverend was on the bill. In Landrón’s view, Davis and the other traditional black singers who played the Boston folk clubs for mostly white audiences got short shrift as far as their paychecks were concerned. “I am absolutely certain that guys like Gary . . . were paid differently and less than us ‘professionals.’ I believe they were exploited. . . . It must be said that Gary was crafty and smart. Patronizing him wasn’t as easy to do as it was with others like him. He did okay. But he still was on his own, and 144

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wasn’t paid like Oscar Brand, Theo Bikel, and even Jackie Washington. I just know this.”21 Despite having left the South behind, it’s clear that a certain amount of racism greeted Davis and other black performers on the folk circuit in the 1960s. Sometimes it could be subtle and hard to verify for sure, as in the reviews of his concerts by young folkies unfamiliar with the traditional African American music that had inspired the new urban folksingers. (One college student reviewer had complained of the Reverend’s “uncivilized manner, the result either of a monstrously poor attempt at comedy, or of some intoxicant, or perhaps of mere mental incapacity.”)22 Other times it was more blatant. The bluesman Bernie Pearl, brother of Ash Grove owner Ed Pearl, recalled taking Davis to a barber shop in Los Angeles for a shave in the early sixties and being turned away. Betsy Siggins, who worked as a waitress at Club 47 in that period, remembered that some of the Cambridge hotels wouldn’t allow black performers to stay, so club staffers opened their own homes to Davis and others.23 Both Landrón and Manny Greenhill’s son, Mitch, expressed doubts about any systemic racism in Cambridge, but Siggins backs up her memory with a story about the North Carolina guitarist Elizabeth Cotten, who was in town to play a show and was staying at the home of Siggins’s friend. Cotten went shopping one day, “and she went to buy a blouse in the regular ordinary department store in Harvard Square, and they said no. They wouldn’t sell it to her. And my friend, who’s a dignified woman, said, ‘Well, you’ll sell it to me!’”24 Landrón himself suffered a broken nose at the hands of Boston police late one night when he was stopped while walking near the tony brownstones along Commonwealth Avenue after visiting a girlfriend at Boston University. His case generated a storm of controversy in the local papers and charges of police brutality.25 It’s possible race played a role in a legendary—­though uncon­ firmed—­story about Davis’s getting stiffed after a gig at the Golden Vanity and showing up afterward with his cane—­and a gun. The story involved one of the real characters on the Boston folk scene, a young man by the name of Carl Bowers, owner of the Vanity. Bowers was a blue-­collar guy who spoke with a thick Boston accent 145

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and seemed more committed to “makin’ a dawlah” than to folk music or musicians, according to Landrón. The folk singer Tom Rush picks up the tale: Gary played there, and Carl paid him in ones and told him it was twenties. And Gary came back the next day, tap-­tapping down the street. And he tap-­tapped into the club and said, “Where’s Carl?” and he was told he’s in the back and he goes tap-­tapping back to the

office, and pulled a gun on Carl—­and got paid properly. That was when we figured out the Reverend was packing heat.26

Davis would carry a gun to road gigs throughout the sixties—­he affectionately called it “Miss Ready”—­and that made him seem, at times, un-­Reverend-­like, though his battles with muggers made his paranoia understandable. During his early gigs in Boston and Cambridge, when he went out on the road without Annie for the first time, Davis had other proclivities that made some question his commitment to the church. “Being a musician, especially a guitarist, and being a minister were jobs that a blind man in the South could get,” Landrón says. “And I think that that’s why Gary was Reverend Gary. He was not in private a religious man. His calling to the clergy was, you know, it was something I can do.”27 The reality is more complicated than that, as Davis’s adherence to his spiritual beliefs—­and refusal to sing blues—­would keep him from enjoying the kind of success commensurate with his talents. But to those who knew him when he began venturing away from home, Davis certainly left the impression that he enjoyed his Saturday nights as much as his Sunday mornings. The whiskey flowed before and after gigs, and the college coeds who hung around back stage seemed awed by the magnetic presence of an authentic guitar god. “He drank, he got drunk, some cute little girl would say, ‘Oh, I just love the way you play!’ and he would grab the girl and say, ‘Lord, let me have this woman!’” Landrón remembered.28

*

By the fall of 1961, Gary and Annie Davis had moved once again, from Brook Avenue three blocks north to 3826 Park Avenue, near 171st 146

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Street—­the Bronx apartment that most of his guitar students and friends would recall, with a mixture of astonishment and dismay. It was nothing if not unique: a squat wood-­and-­brick dwelling at ground level, with two rooms, each measuring about ten feet by twelve feet, plus a tiny kitchen and bathroom. It stood in the courtyard behind a square city block of tenement apartments, reachable only through the narrow alleyway where the bigger buildings deposited the week’s trash. The Davises lived surrounded by garbage and urban poverty as far as the eye could see.29 Lawrence Cohn described the apartment as looking “like a shotgun shack out of Mississippi. It was in a very dangerous place in the Bronx.” Inside, Davis had a big chair that occupied much of the living room, where he sat and listened to the radio and “watched” the color television he and Annie had won in a church raffle. A sign on the wall—­ no doubt posted by Annie—­said No Smoking, but the Reverend often sat puffing away on White Owl cigars.30 He gave guitar lessons in the adjacent room, which was crowded with instruments and everything else that wouldn’t fit in the living room. It was there, before year’s end, that Cohn and Tiny Robinson arrived as usual to drive Davis to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio for the last of Davis’s recording sessions with Kenneth Goldstein. Say No to the Devil would be released on Prestige Bluesville in 1962, and it was notable in several respects. It’s the first studio recording to feature the Reverend playing twelve-­string guitar and mouth harp in addition to his six-­string guitar. “Upon entering we heard some beautiful harmonica tones coming from one of the rooms,” Cohn recalled. “To be sure, it was Gary Davis, and his lovely playing was to continue in the car until we actually arrived at the recording studio.”31 The two harmonica tunes Davis recorded, “No One Can Do Me Like Jesus” and “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand,” are traditional spirituals that Davis may have learned as a little boy in South Carolina. His breathy, soulful harp playing is similar in style to Sonny Terry’s, though without the virtuosity Davis achieved on guitar. The twelve-­ string guitar tunes included “Time Is Drawing Near,” which appears to be an original song sermon drawn from Luke 21:28 among other biblical verses: “Now when these things begin to take place, straighten 147

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up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near”;32 and “Little Boy Lost in the Wilderness,” an instrumental whose title once again evokes Davis’s trial sermon theme in North Carolina. “I Decided to Go Down,” on six-­string guitar, features Davis’s harmonically complex playing in the key of F, a powerful and mysterious approach that no other traditional blues guitarists employed. Allan Evans, his later guitar student, would write: “Unlike many blues and gospel guitarists who formed patterns for the two or three keys they played in, Davis achieved a notable variety of melody and ornaments within A minor and major, C major, D major, E major and minor, F, and G: His pieces in F . . . dwell in a craggy harmonic landscape.”33 The album’s title song, “Say No to the Devil,” may encapsulate Davis’s theology—­and his contradictions—­as well as anything he ever recorded. The chorus could be interpreted as describing his unwillingness to have his life defined by either blindness or the degradation, deprivation, and violence of his childhood in South Carolina: Say no to the devil, say no (×2)

The devil is a deceiver, he won’t treat nobody right Say no to the devil, say no

It could also be read another way, of course: as a bit of prodding, to himself as much as his to flock, to try and remain true in a world of sin. It’s at least curious, given the enticements beckoning a traveling musician, that one verse in the song is written from the point of view of a scorned husband and not the other way around: He’ll make you leave your husband, say no (×2)

The devil is a deceiver, he won’t treat nobody right Say no to the devil, say no

The record marked the end of Davis’s collaboration with Kenneth Goldstein, who, feeling bitter at his treatment by the record companies for whom he’d produced more than five hundred albums since the midfifties, would soon get out of the music business to become an academic. Though he and Davis weren’t particularly close, Goldstein held the recordings they made in high regard. “The four records of Gary Davis are among the finest that I was ever involved with,” he recalled.34 148

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*

By early 1962 Davis added a new guitar student to his roster. Stefan Grossman, a sixteen-­year-­old Jewish kid with dark wavy hair and horn-­rimmed glasses, had been making regular Sunday trips from his Queens home to Washington Square Park to dig the blues and old-­ time music emanating from circles of guitars, banjos, and mandolins. One weekend, Grossman ambled into the Folklore Center, where Jack Prelutsky—­later a popular poet and children’s author—­sat with a guitar, picking “Goin’ to Sit Down on the Banks of the River.”35 Grossman had never heard a sound quite like what Prelutsky was making on his six-­string. “Who plays like that?” he asked. “Reverend Gary Davis,” Prelutsky replied. Not long after, Grossman obtained Davis’s phone number from a musician friend in Brooklyn and called the Reverend to ask for guitar lessons. “Come on over,” Davis said. “It’s five dollars a lesson.” The next Saturday, Herbert and Ruth Grossman drove their son to the Bronx. The Morrisania neighborhood had deteriorated a lot since the 1940s, a victim of urban decay and white flight. When they finally found the Davises’ apartment through the narrow rat-­infested alleyway off Park Avenue, Grossman knocked on the door and Davis appeared in his long johns, beginning a relationship that would reshape both their lives and legacies.36 At first it was simply a teacher-­student paradigm. They started with “Goin’ to Sit Down on the Banks of the River,” and then Grossman asked to learn every song on Harlem Street Singer. He proved to be an excellent student, going to the Bronx every weekend and spending eight hours at a time with the Davises. “I only had one grandmother [living], and Davis sort of became like a surrogate grandfather in a way,” Grossman recalled. “Besides doing lessons, we also spoke personally, or I spoke personally to him about my problems. I used him like a mentor.”37 They developed a special rapport. Rory Block, who dated Grossman a couple of years later and accompanied him to many lessons, remembered the get-­togethers as “more like . . . roasting session[s] . . . Gary Davis was like an easy personality and funny. And so they were . . . sparring the whole time. Gary Davis was like putting Stefan down and Stefan was answering back a little smart-­alecky thing.”38 149

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Grossman began recording his lessons on a bulky Tandberg reel-­ to-­reel that he lugged up to the Bronx on the subway, and the tapes—­ along with live recordings he made of Davis—­would form the basis for Grossman’s decades-­long campaign to keep Davis’s genius from being forgotten. “Here I was in awe of this musician, and he was like a teacher to me and I wanted to record him. Every time I kept recording him, he would say, ‘I have a surprise for you. Here’s another tune.’ He would knock me out with all these old tunes.”39 When Grossman later wanted to perform, he first sought Davis’s blessing. “You can’t perform in public until I say you’re ready,” the Reverend told him. “Why?” Grossman wanted to know. “Because you’re taking my name,” Davis said. Grossman represented the first wave of the new generation of folk music fans. Davis would come to regard many of his top students as his children, and he wanted them to carry on both his name and his music. North Peterson, a sixteen-­year-­old senior at the Brooklyn Friends School, befriended Grossman and soon began taking lessons with Davis. He and Grossman would often trek up to the Bronx together, and Peterson remembers Annie sizing the boys up one day with a quizzical look. “Are you beatniks?” she wondered aloud.40 “I think they were as fascinated by us coming into their world as we were to be there, and so they only vaguely understood why we were there,” Peterson says. “Because this was at the very beginning of [the folk boom]. Things changed, with the recognition, etc. I’m pretty sure our five-­dollar bills were very appreciated.”41 Sometimes when visiting Davis, Peterson found him in more of a preaching than playing mood. “He’d get ahold of some lesson from the Bible and just talk it through. And just listening to him preach was like listening to music too, because he had that wonderful voice.”42 Peterson’s diary entries in 1962 provide a snapshot of the boys’ budding relationship with the blind preacher:43

Mar 30 Go with Stef to G. Davis for first lesson Apr 6 Davis 1PM

Apr 15 Square w. Stef

Apr 21 Davis w. Stef. Samson and Delilah

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Apr 22 Stef. In Square

Apr 27 Go with Stef to Weavers Concert in Coney Island.

Apr 30 Go with Stef to Davis. Davis birthday May 5 Davis 11 AM

May 11 Go with Stef to School dance

May 18 Gerde’s w. Stef

June 2 Davis’s w. Stef

June 3 Meet Stef to buy his 12 string

June 4 Go with Stef and Francine to Davis

June 9 Stef to Gottfried’s (Davis in California) Jun 10 Stef over Watch Bertrand Russell

June 13 Stef over. Go to Sprung’s

June 25 Davis over. Call him.

July 6 Davis back for day. See him w. Stef July 8 Davis leaving for Lake George

July 18 Davis should be back

July 19 See Davis after work.

A ug 4, 11, 14, 23 See Davis

Aug 27 Gerde’s w. Stef

Sep 8 Take Davis to Philadelphia Folk Festival

Sep 12 Davis’s

Oct 25 Davis’s

Nov 24, 28, Davis’s w. Stef

Dec 3 Call Stef go to Davis’s

Dec 15 Davis’s w. Ellen

Dec 21 Davis’s for Christmas party. Get him presents.

Of course, Grossman and most of the other young white musicians—­ many of whom happened to be Jewish—­had a keen interest in learning blues and other secular songs from Davis, but they came to appreciate his gospel material as much or more as time went on. If Annie was in another room or had gone out shopping or to church, Davis could be persuaded to play some of the devil’s music, much as Annie had despaired. Once, Grossman’s tape recorder was running when Davis offered an X-­rated version of “Hesitation Blues,” which would become one of the songs most closely associated with him. Needless to say, these verses hadn’t been collected by W. C. Handy: 151

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Corn in the crib and it’s got to be shucked

But the women in the bed, I swear they got to be fucked Tell me, how long [do I have to wait?]

Can I get you now, [or do I have to hesitate?] If you wanna be a man, be a man in full

Let your nuts hang down just like a jelly bull Can I get you now, do I have to hesitate?44

After lessons Davis would go to his “other job.” He’d ask Peterson to walk with him a block east and deposit him under the elevated train trestle for the subway’s Jerome Avenue line at 171st Street and Claremont Parkway, where he’d stand playing and singing with his tin can as Peterson left to return to his life as a high school student a world away in Brooklyn.

*

Folk music was becoming a huge draw on campuses across the nation, as college students formed folklore societies and put on weekly and monthly concerts and yearly festivals that included shows and workshops. Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania began producing a folk festival in 1945; Oberlin College in Ohio, in 1957; and the University of California at Berkeley, in 1958. As other schools followed suit, it would mean lots of concert work for established white artists like Oscar Brand and Theodore Bikel, newcomers like Joan Baez, and traditional performers like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Gary Davis. Folk music was officially in. “Like, I mean, it’s not esoteric anymore,” Izzy Young told Newsweek.45 In February 1962, Davis performed at the second annual University of Chicago Folk Festival. At these early campus events, he tried to keep the focus on his gospel music. Archie Green, a folklorist at the University of Illinois, introduced Davis to the Chicago crowd and delivered a message from the Reverend to the students who might have come to hear virtuoso guitar picking. Davis “does spirituals, gospel songs, songs of faith,” Green said. “He asked that we comment on this facet of his work, quite apart from his playing. He composes songs, religious songs, and he wants to do some things of his own composi152

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tion tonight.” During his set, Davis performed a gorgeous slow waltz called “Soon My Work Will All Be Done,” explaining, “This song come to me when I was lying on my bed. I woke up cryin’ just like somebody beat me.”46 Related to the traditional spiritual “Soon I Will Be Done” that was made famous by Mahalia Jackson, it would become one of Davis’s concert staples. Significantly, he altered the lyric, reshaping the message from one of sorrow and escape (“soon I will be done with the troubles of the world”) to one of hope that his “work” on earth—­his calling to convert souls—­would earn him a place in heaven: Soon my work will all be done (×3)

I’m goin’ home to live with my Lord

Davis was a big hit with the crowd, which demanded two encores. “I don’t think the staff heard anybody play the guitar quite the way he did,” recalled Bob Kass, then a nineteen-­year-­old University of Chicago student and member of the university’s Folklore Society. “His stage presence was terrific. His singing was terrific. . . . He didn’t do the songs the same every time. He’d sometimes in the middle of a verse not sing a line and just play it. It was completely in the moment. Every performance was genuine, and it was how he was feeling and doing at the time.”47 For his Chicago performances, Davis received three hundred dollars, a healthy paycheck.

*

In March, Columbia Records released Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut album. Recorded the previous November, it contained thirteen songs, mostly covers of folk tunes and a couple of original songs, including “Song to Woody,” a paean to Woody Guthrie. Dylan had described to Columbia’s famous producer John Hammond the songs he wanted to lay down as “some stuff I’ve written, some stuff I’ve discovered, some stuff I stole.” He took Dave Van Ronk’s arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun” without Van Ronk’s knowledge, causing a rift with his Greenwich Village mentor.48 The second song on side two of Bob Dylan was a blues called “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.” It was a version of “Baby, Let Me Lay It on 153

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You,” a song Rev. Gary Davis had taught privately to Van Ronk, among others, in New York.49 Davis rarely if ever sang it in public at the time because of its unchurchlike lyric: Baby let me lay it on you (×2)

I’ll give you everything in this Godalmighty world, baby If you just let me lay it on you

The convoluted tale of “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” / “Baby, Let Me Lay It on You” offers a good introduction to the thorny issue of copyright that had already begun roiling the folk music world and would have a considerable impact on Davis’s fortunes. A month after the Indian Neck Folk Festival in May 1961, Dylan had traveled to Cambridge with the folk singer Robert L. Jones. In Cambridge, Dylan spent time at the apartment of Eric Von Schmidt, a bearded young blues and folk singer with an outsize personality. Von Schmidt taught Dylan a number of songs, including “Baby, Let Me Lay It on You.”50 In his spoken introduction to the tune on the record, Dylan says he “first heard this from Ric Von Schmidt. . . . in the green pastures of Harvard University.” Columbia credited the tune to Von Schmidt on the original pressings. The song’s chorus went: “I’ll do anything in this Godalmighty world, / If you just let me follow you down.” Von Schmidt, unbeknownst to Columbia at the time, claimed to have learned the song from another young folkie and Gary Davis student, Geno Forman, who told Von Schmidt he’d heard it on a Blind Boy Fuller record.51 While there’s no definitive proof, it’s likely that Fuller learned the song from Davis, rather than vice versa, since Davis was the clear source of other Fuller material. To complicate matters further in terms of provenance, Walter Coleman, a Cincinnati-­based guitarist and singer, recorded “Mama, Let Me Lay It on You,” with a similar guitar arrangement, for the Decca label nearly three months before Fuller’s 1936 session.52 And all the versions owe something to Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe’s 1930 recording of “Can I Do It for You?,” which has a similar melody and lyric, including the lines: “I’ll do anything in this world I can / I wanna do something for you.” With young folk singers searching for material to interpret and big record companies looking for the next folk act to ascend the pop 154

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charts à la the Kingston Trio, a key question became, who owns folk songs? No one seemed to have an answer, though almost everyone had a point of view, including the aspiring folk musicians, the folklorists (or “song collectors,” as they were often called), the copyright lawyers working for the record companies, and the music publishers on Tin Pan Alley. “Today the folk song world is in a ferment over the problem of copyrights,” the editor of Sing Out!, Irwin Silber, had written in 1960. The issue was coming to a head because, as the singer and song collector A. L. Lloyd wrote in early 1962, “at present . . . every other folknik and citybilly who makes a record is claiming copyright on the items he sings, even if he ‘collected’ them from a library book or off someone else’s record.”53 The thorniness of the issue stemmed in part from the difficulty of determining when a song became a unique property worthy of copyright protection. In traditional music, including hillbilly, blues, and gospel, lyrics often migrated from song to song—­so-­called floating verses—­sometimes over vast geographical and cultural distances. Melodies, too, were often “in the air,” spread by itinerant musicians, traveling minstrel and vaudeville shows, and, later, records. The other thicket was copyright law itself. The Copyright Act of 1909 gave composers the right to distribute and sell their recordings but said nothing about others profiting from use of the music captured in the recorded performances. In the 1960s, obtaining copyright on a piece of music still required submitting a “lead sheet”—­a copy of the song in musical notation, along with lyrics—­to the US Copyright Office. (In response to widespread copying of vinyl records on magnetic tape, Congress made sound recordings themselves copyrightable in the Sound Recordings Act of 1971.)54 If a song was copyright protected, record companies had to pay “mechanical royalties” to the song’s publisher for each record they (mechanically) pressed of the song. The standard songwriter’s contract in the 1960s had publishers buying a song from the composer for “one dollar and other good and valuable considerations,” and agreeing to pay the composer 50 percent of all income derived from sheet music and record sales. The statutory royalty rate at the time was two 155

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cents per record,55 meaning that a million-­selling record would generate a royalty of $20,000 (about $150,000 in 2014 dollars) to be shared by the composer and publisher. Songs that had never been copyrighted or whose copyright protection had lapsed after the then-­maximum fifty-­six years (including one renewal) were considered in the “public domain”: they were owned by everyone, and no royalty had to be paid. Copyright law, however, offered a loophole that record companies exploited to avoid paying for the use of copyrighted music: it allowed “adaptations” and new arrangements to be regarded as “new works subject to copyright.” The law was subjective enough that unprincipled lawyers could claim that a highly derivative song contained enough new material—­either lyrically or musically—­to be considered a “new work.” Irwin Silber, writing in Sing Out!, had called attention to examples of suspect copyrights then being obtained on traditional material: the Kingston Trio had claimed authorship of “Shady Grove” and “Worried Man Blues”; the Tarriers had copyrighted “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Bale of Cotton”; and the Weavers (using the pseudonym Paul Campbell) had claimed “Rock Island Line,” “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore,” and other songs.56 Over in Britain, the “King of Skiffle,” Lonnie Donegan, claimed to have written “Rock Island Line” and other songs from Lead Belly’s canon, while the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group, with singer Nancy Whiskey, had a million-­selling hit with Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train” and later settled a copyright infringement claim out of court.57 The folk singer Cynthia Gooding summed up the problem of determining a song’s true author for the purpose of paying a royalty, even for young, idealistic artists like herself who wanted to honor tradition: “Folk songs, by their very nature, have no known original author. The nearest we could come to an author would be the original field informant who sang a variant.” She added, “But we’ve all heard stories about the mills where businessmen copy out and copyright folk songs whole and entire so that if one of them becomes a popular hit, the businessman makes a lot of money. This is called opportunism and is often justified by the immortal phrase, ‘If I don’t do it, someone else will.’”58 So who deserved the writing credit and royalty for “Baby, Let Me 156

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Lay It on You”? Eric Von Schmidt? Rev. Gary Davis? Blind Boy Fuller? Memphis Minnie? Dylan himself? By Von Schmidt’s own admission, Dylan altered the tune’s chords—­from what Von Schmidt taught him and from what Davis played, perhaps taking a cue from Dave Van Ronk,59 who often changed Davis’s arrangements, much to the Reverend’s chagrin. Was the change in this case great enough to constitute an entirely new song or arrangement? As it turned out, Dylan’s first record sold only about twenty-­five hundred copies upon release, although it would eventually reach number thirteen on the UK charts. At some point after Dylan’s second record came out the following year and before Von Schmidt had gotten any of the royalties he was owed, Von Schmidt acknowledged in a letter to Dylan’s publisher, M. Witmark and Sons, that he thought the song had been a Blind Boy Fuller tune. Witmark wrote back and told him he was right that he had no claim on the song and would therefore get no royalty.60 Von Schmidt would grow close with Gary Davis in Cambridge, and after hearing him play “Baby, Let Me Lay It On You,” he eventually concluded that the Reverend had indeed written it. Many years later, Manny Greenhill would protest to Dylan’s publishers that Davis deserved the writing credit. By the time Dylan’s electrified version of “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” appeared on the Band’s 1978 Last Waltz set—­seven years after Davis’s death—­Davis would be cocredited as the song’s author along with Von Schmidt.61 Because of its particularly muddy history, “Baby, Let Me Lay It on You” wouldn’t wind up being a typical example, but it certainly pointed out the complexity of the copyright question. Cutting through the confusion, if original songs and adaptations were indeed worthy of protection under federal law, then most of Rev. Gary Davis’s startlingly unique arrangements certainly qualified. Many of his songs borrowed from folk traditions, to be sure, but they became, in his gifted hands, as original as the compositions of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, or Louis Armstrong. And if song collectors, folkniks, and music publishers were copyrighting folk songs, Davis would seem to have an even stronger case for doing so. In 1962, however, Davis had no one looking out for his business interests. Manny Greenhill was by then getting him bookings farther 157

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and farther afield from New York, and their relationship was deepening, but Davis hadn’t copyrighted a single song or arrangement from his vast repertoire, and the rush was on. If he didn’t, someone else would. It’s doubtful Davis knew about any controversy over Bob Dylan’s use of “Baby, Let Me Lay It on You.” Had he been aware of it, he might have been able to clear up the opaque picture of the song’s origins, perhaps securing an author’s credit much earlier. But a quarter-­century after his ordination as a minister, Davis wasn’t interested then in being known for risqué material—­at least publicly. Nevertheless, Davis could take solace in his expanding reach as a guitar teacher and his growing influence on the young folk set. Back in the Bronx, Stefan Grossman came to see Davis for a lesson around the time of the Dylan release and brought with him a childhood friend, Tom Chapin, and Chapin’s elder brother Harry, then about nineteen, to learn Davis’s two-­fingered guitar style. “The thing that impressed me was the energy the old man had,” Harry Chapin recalled. “The reverend had a delightfully ironic sense of humor that managed to prevail in his over seventy years”—­Davis was actually about sixty-­six—­ “worth of stories, scrapes, and life on the street.”62 Both the Chapins became famous folk singers, and Harry, who went on to take another lesson from Davis, wrote the song “Bluesman” about the experience: But there the old man stood by the store front, With his white cane hanging from his belt.

And he was bending the steel of his guitar strings So it seemed like the metal had to melt.

He was the last of the street corner singers Paying his final years of dues

The voice in his throat was like a bullfrog croak Yes it’s he who invented the blues.63

158

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LORD, STAND BY ME (1962–­63) Lord, you’ve always been my lawyer, stand by me Lord, you’ve always been my lawyer, stand by me Re v . Gar y Davis

B

y the early 1960s, the old order among music publishers that had their roots on Tin Pan Alley—­West Twenty-­Eighth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues—­was collapsing, in no small part due to the arrival of folk music as a popular movement. At the corporate offices of Warner Bros. Music on Madison Avenue and Fifty-­ First Street, worried executives came up with a plan to try to keep up with the times. Warner’s music publishing arm, with the ponderous name of Music Publishers Holding Corp. (MPHC), included M. Witmark and Sons—­the original Tin Pan Alley firm—­and other old-­line publishers like Harms Inc., which had built their reputations selling sheet music for ragtime and vaudeville tunes and the music of composers like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. The time had come to head in a new direction. “We had a project called the Folksinging Project . . . to supplement the classics, classic popular music of Gershwin, etc., that we had at that time,” M. William Krasilovsky, then MPHC’s copyright lawyer, recalled. “People said, You’re moribund. You’re not getting new songs. You’re not keeping up with the tastes.”1 To break into folk music, Warner would need someone who knew the genre and could gauge the public’s appetite. That turned out to be Albert Grossman, the portly music impresario who owned the Gate of Horn folk club in Chicago and had helped fashion the Newport Folk Festival. Grossman would soon parlay his economics degree and cutthroat business acumen to become folk music’s ultimate mover and shaker, with the most impressive client roster in the business. At the height of his power, the Saturday Evening Post would describe him as 159

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“a tall, heavy, graying man who looks like an immovable object and acts like an irresistible force.”2 In 1961, Grossman had begun scouting around for a group to duplicate the success of the Weavers and the Kingston Trio, and he soon set his sights on Peter Yarrow, an earnest twenty-­three-­year-­old Cornell graduate from New York, who had a winning tenor and substantial skills as an acoustic guitarist. Yarrow had been earning $125 a week in places like the Gaslight Cafe when Grossman, after watching him perform for a CBS television special called Folk Sound U.S.A., suggested they build a trio around him.3 They auditioned several girls for the group before Yarrow and Grossman happened into Izzy Young’s Folklore Center one day, where they glimpsed a photo of Mary Travers, a sexy and spirited bleached blonde, on the wall.4 Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Travers was by then a fixture on the Village scene and knew many of its players, including Rev. Gary Davis, by virtue of her parents’ connection to Pete Seeger. She became a regular in Washington Square Park on Sundays and, while still in high school, joined a group called the Song Swappers, with Erik Darling, that sang backup for Seeger on a series of Folkways albums. The third slot in the fledgling group was offered to Dave Van Ronk, who turned it down. Then they settled on Noel Paul Stookey, a Maryland-­born singer and comedian who’d been performing with Mary at the Commons and the Gaslight, where he too crossed paths with Davis. In May 1961, the trio began rehearsing—­on the song “Mary Had a Little Lamb”—­in Mary’s Greenwich Village apartment. Grossman hired the song arranger Milt Okun, who dismissed the group as hopeless when he first heard them sing together.5 Okun labored through months of vocal coaching to get them to mesh their voices into what would become their signature soaring three-­ part harmonies. After rejecting names like the Willows, the group opted for the vaguely biblical Peter, Paul, and Mary, with Noel using his middle name. Peter, Paul, and Mary made their formal debut the first week of September at the newly opened Bitter End, a brick-­walled club across from the Bleecker Street Cinema. With their high-­energy renditions of folk songs, Peter and Paul’s beatnik goatees, and Mary’s sex 160

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appeal—­some inside the music industry would dub them “two rabbis and a hooker”—­the group generated a tsunami of excitement. Tom Murray, a New Yorker who attended their debut gig, had what can only be described as a transcendental experience. He took out an ad in the Village Voice the following week urging folkies to flock to the Bitter End. “Peter, Paul, and Mary are headed for the sky,” Murray presciently wrote.6 On their opening night they sang “If I Had My Way,” a song they’d heard Gary Davis and others perform in the Village, and one that from the very beginning brought out the trio’s fire. If God was ready to work miracles for the three young performers—­and for Davis—­perhaps He let it be known that night while they sang on stage. As Stookey remembered: “Mary was waving her hands like a madwoman, Peter and I were strumming like hummingbirds, and I was shrieking and stomping my foot till my calf was burning up. And as we hit the climax—­‘If I had my way in this wicked world, I’d tear this building down’—­there was a crack and a roar, and the stage collapsed with us on it.”7 With Albert Grossman guiding them, Peter, Paul, and Mary signed with Warner Bros. in January 1962 and began preparing material for a debut album. Of the songs they chose, Peter Yarrow would say: “It had to move us; it had to be something that would excite us in some way or delight us; and it had to resonate when we tried to sing it.”8 Their rousing success would make them the focus of immediate scorn in traditionalist folk circles, but Yarrow maintained the group had pure motives. “We’ve got only three things to contribute: our musical taste, our regard for the folk tradition and our ability to communicate something in our singing,” he told a reporter. “If we’re show business, we’re show business with morals.”9 Among the dozen songs that would appear on Peter, Paul and Mary was “If I Had My Way,” which Davis had first recorded six years earlier, introducing it to the Village folk scene. MPHC invited Davis to its offices early in 1962 to discuss the song’s publishing. What followed has become a widely repeated—­and usually exaggerated—­tale. In Dave Van Ronk’s telling, Davis and a bunch of executives are sitting around a long table, with reporters from all the trade papers scribbling away and flashbulbs going off when he’s asked whether he wrote “If I Had My Way,” known in his repertoire as “Samson and Delilah.” 161

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“No, I didn’t write that song!” Davis replies to audible gasps. “It was revealed to me in a dream!”10 Krasilovsky, who as MPHC’s copyright lawyer handled the entire transaction, confirms the essence of the story but with significant details corrected. “I remember exactly the scene and scenario,” Krasilovsky says. “He was not an honored guest.”11 Davis showed up alone, aided only by his walking cane, and met with Krasilovsky to discuss the song. He had no attorney or even manager to advise him. Krasilovsky asked him whether he’d written “Samson and Delilah.” “He was very, very aggressive in saying, ‘I didn’t write it, I didn’t write it, I didn’t write it.’ And my heart went out to him because I knew that any Peter, Paul, and Mary credit song would bring in tens of thousands of dollars. And so I said, ‘Who did write it?’ and his answer was, ‘God.’ He was militant about the fact that he didn’t want to trample on God’s creation. I was able to say, ‘That’s all right. If it was inspired by God, that’s what we want.’”12 Davis learned the song at least in part from Blind Willie Johnson’s 1927 recording, although Davis’s arrangement owed little to Johnson’s or any of the other versions recorded by singing evangelists in the 1920s or 1930s. It’s highly unlikely Peter, Paul, and Mary would have recorded the song had they not been inspired by Davis or someone imitating him. However, their strummed guitars and blended voices on “If I Had My Way” bore only a passing resemblance to Davis’s “Samson and Delilah.” They legitimately could have claimed their own arrangement of a traditional song. Instead, in March 1962, MPHC applied for a copyright for “If I Had My Way”—­words and music by Rev. Gary Davis. It gave him his first legal protection for his music just shy of the age of sixty-­six.13 Peter, Paul, and Mary themselves made out okay in the deal; Grossman, their manager, had seen to that. In signing Peter, Paul, and Mary, MPHC had formed a jointly owned publishing company, Pepamar Music, with the trio and Grossman.14 (“Pepamar” was a contraction of the first two letters in Peter, Paul, and Mary’s names.) Pepamar would publish all of the group’s music, so the three young folk singers who were about to take the world by storm also became Rev. Gary Davis’s first music publishers, giving them a share of the royalty on “If I Had My Way.” 162

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Warner Bros. released Peter, Paul and Mary in May 1962, with “If I Had My Way” leading off side two. The album reached number one on the Billboard album chart and stayed there for seven weeks in the fall. It would eventually sell more than two million copies, going double platinum. (“If I Had My Way” would also appear on the million-­ selling Peter, Paul, and Mary LP In Concert, released in July 1964.) Their recordings made them rich, and within a few years they had two personal managers, a producer, press agent, music director, road manager, and three full-­time bookkeepers.15 If the Kingston Trio had shown the potential for folk music to enthrall the masses, then Peter, Paul, and Mary represented the fulfillment of that promise. The floodgates had opened. Their success was life-­changing for Davis too. He applied for his first Social Security card and began showing up quarterly at the Warner offices to collect the biggest checks of his life. Krasilovsky would lead him from the fifth floor down to the Chemical Bank on the ground floor. “He would come to our office asking for money as fast as possible,” Krasilovsky recalled. “I would accompany him and vouch that this is really Gary Davis. He can’t sign more than an X. Then I’d watch with interest that he put his cash into his wallet in a manner in which he could fold it and know what was a dollar bill and what was a five.”16 Davis, unused to being handed thousands of dollars at a time, seemed nervous. He didn’t want Annie knowing exactly how much he was suddenly earning. “He didn’t trust anybody,” Krasilovsky says. “He was worried about giving his wife any incentive to hasten or encourage his death.”17 The royalties from “If I Had My Way” would soon mean the end of Davis’s street singing days. “I was glad to get away from it,” he said. “I had more done to me than anywhere I’d been in my life—­you don’t have to go to sleep, you just sit down, and you’re outta something.” It would also mean the beginning of an improved quality of life for a man who still retreated back to what he called his “little hut” in the Bronx and who was still complaining of not having enough good fingerpicks to use on stage. Davis was probably able to get off welfare around this time and, proud as he was, he must have relished the opportunity to make it on his own. “After he got doing good,” Annie recalled, “then he told them to take him off of welfare.”18 163

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Not that he became a household name. His student North Peterson took the Reverend to a Jewish deli in the Bronx after Peter, Paul and Mary had climbed up the charts and the experience drove home that point. “Davis had a corned beef [sandwich] and potato salad,” Peterson remembered. “Peter, Paul, and Mary had just done his song. I felt really proud: here I am with Reverend Davis. And the owner comes up to me as we’re leaving and he says, ‘God Bless You,’ as if I’m taking this homeless guy and getting him a sandwich.”19 Yet for all his refusal to play the blues, Davis would now be able to provide for himself and Annie. And it was one of his spirituals—­sung with fervent passion and played like no one else on earth—­that would deliver him from the hell of urban poverty. Back in 1935, in the song “Lord, Stand by Me,” Davis had sung that he only needed the Lord as his lawyer—­indeed, in the Bible Isaiah had dubbed Jesus the “wonderful counselor”—­and now it had come to pass that Davis’s invocation of God had gotten him his first royalty. He hadn’t compromised his religious beliefs to record music that might have offered a quicker path to success. Instead, he’d been chosen, just as he’d been called to the ministry. Once, when Stefan Grossman had asked him when a guitar player ought to play in public, Davis had offered his own view of worldly success: It’s no use offering yourself to somebody. If they want you, they’ll call you. You can go find a lot of puppies, you understand. They all

belong to the same dog. When you lay eyes on one of those puppies you can tell which one is going to be on top. You can pick that

one out. You can see something in that one you don’t see in the rest. Don’t you go picking yourself out to people. It’s them that pick you out.20

Other performers wouldn’t follow Peter, Paul, and Mary’s lead when it came to the use of folk songs. Two months after their record hit the shelves, the popular crooner Bobby Darin went into the studio for Capitol Records to record an LP entitled Earthy!—­his foray into folk, the music industry’s new cash cow. On the LP, he did a version of “Samson and Delilah” that he called “The Sermon of Samson,” with the writing credit on the record going to himself and his arranger, 164

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Walter Raim. They registered a new copyright, claiming authorship of both the words and music.21

*

In the late spring of 1962 Manny Greenhill booked Davis on his first West Coast trip, and Annie went along. The first stop was the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, for a two-­week pairing with Barbara Dane beginning June 5. A young guitar teacher and folk music enthusiast named Ed Pearl had started the Ash Grove four years earlier in a converted furniture factory on Melrose Avenue just as the Kingston Trio started to burn up the airwaves. Pearl might have filled his coffers by focusing on the new wave of young white folk singers beginning to have commercial success, but he committed himself to showcasing, whenever possible, traditional artists like Davis, Fred McDowell, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, even if that meant smaller crowds. The artists usually needed a place to stay, and Pearl put Davis and the others up at his Hollywood home or at an apartment he rented near the club.22 Dane, a thirty-­five-­year-­old white blues singer from Detroit with short blonde hair and a booming alto in the great tradition of prewar blues shouters, had attracted rare notice from the black press and a following that included jazz luminaries Earl “Fatha” Hines and Louis Armstrong. “She is singing the blues—­just as Bessie Smith sung them, and Mama Yancey and Lizzie Miles and Ma Rainey,” Ebony noted. “But she is white.” Dane had also gotten attention—­not all of it positive—­ for her outspoken commitment to integration in the music business. She’d lost a chance at landing a big Las Vegas show by insisting that black musicians be included in the backup band.23 She considered her bill with the Reverend as part performance, part cultural outreach. “It was a case of educating white audiences to understand that they had something very rich and valuable to gain from paying attention to the black performers,” Dane recalled. “It was not a time when America understood that as a whole. So pairing me up with [Davis] would bring in people who would already get what I was doing and then they’d say, ‘Oh, there’s that too. Oh, my God, he’s really great.’”24 A reviewer from Variety showed up one night, apparently unfamil165

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iar with Davis’s music or his guitar style. Davis “offers a mixture of gospel tunes, some blues, and occasional light-­hearted observations. He sings, with a feeling that makes up for his untutored delivery.” It’s unlikely Davis actually sang the blues with Annie in the room. But he did attract a following at the 250-­seat club. “There was always some kid in the back room learning something from him during the break,” Dane says. “Amazingly so. I don’t know who’s fault it was: the kids wouldn’t let him alone or he just so loved doing it that he made that clear and it came across.”25 Ed Pearl had installed a counter by the stage for food and drink service, but it quickly became the favored vantage point for budding guitarists. One was Ry Cooder, who was thirteen and already a guitar fanatic with considerable ability. His mother, Emma, who nervously dropped him off at the club every night, extracted a promise from Pearl that he would safeguard her son. “Ry, being a musical genius, would sit there and watch people’s hands, and then he would go home and he would spend two days practicing, figuring out what he saw on that stage,” Pearl says.26 Cooder recalled his interactions with Davis: “Between gigs, he just sat in a rented room with his wife and smoked cigars. . . . And you could pay him five dollars and either talk to him or sit quietly—­he would play or you would play. . . . You could take a close look at some of these tunes and some of these moves on the guitar.”27 Cooder became one of the great guitar virtuosos of his generation, able to perform the most intricate songs of Blind Blake and the great Bahamian guitarist Joseph Spence that remained well beyond the abilities of most of Cooder’s contemporaries. But he never could master Rev. Gary Davis’s style. “I used to love to play his tunes, but I didn’t play them with any deep satisfaction because I realized it wasn’t working. This is not doing what he’s doing.”28 Still, Cooder would record one of Davis’s arrangements a few years later with his group Rising Sons. One night at the Ash Grove, a union organizer who was a club regular approached Dane about appearing at a rally in a Los Angeles park to support the unionization of day laborers, ditch diggers, and unskilled construction workers. The laborers were black men, most newly arrived from the South, and Dane feared she wouldn’t be able 166

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to reach them. In the dressing room, she asked Gary and Annie Davis to go with her, and they readily agreed.29 At the rally, things got off to a bad start. There was little cohesion, and the event was in danger of fizzling. “The organizers didn’t have a sense of how to pull things together, being a bit intimidated by the rough look of these men who had led the roughest of lives,” Dane recalled. That’s when Annie Davis, the polite and proper church lady that the Reverend’s students had come to know, surprised Dane. “Sister Annie took over with the authority of a street corner practitioner. She jumped onto the table nearby and began to preach, not about pie-­ in-­the-­sky, but about beans tomorrow. Without a need to consult the meeting organizers, she was telling the men just what they needed to hear; someone cares; you are important people; you will be strong if you are united.”30 To drive home that message, Gary sang “Let Us Get Together.” For him, it was a rare political act, though in private he could still seethe about the treatment of blacks and his own harrowing experiences down South. From Los Angeles, the Davises headed South to San Diego for a two-­night stint at the Sign of the Sun, a bookstore near the campus of San Diego State College, where the owner, Harold Darling, had recently begun catering to the popularity of traditional music by putting on folk concerts, with tea, pastries, and Mexican chocolates served during intermission.31 Tapes of the concerts survive. Davis performed on six and twelve-­ string guitar, five-­string banjo, and harmonica. Unlike his New York crowds, this one even seemed to relish the religious songs, singing along on “Old Time Religion.” “That kind of seem like we gettin’ along pretty well, don’t it?” Davis told them. “You know, I love to meet a little crowd like this because you can get a little joy playin’ for a crowd like this.”32 Annie can be heard singing along to many of the spirituals, and Davis called her to the stage to help him sing “Soon My Work Will All Be Done.” At one point, Annie offered a spoken hymn that she dedicated to the Darling family as Gary strummed a melody behind her. It was an expression of the faith the Davises shared, which had uplifted them during difficult times. Annie read from notes in her sweet-­natured North Carolina drawl: 167

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When your heart is filled with trouble inside, You must always trust in the Lord,

And look to him from the heart and testify. Carry your burdens with a smile. Trust in Jesus all the while . . .

For the Lord will carry you through.

He will carry you through with a smile.33

Darling owned an old Victorian boarding house where several of the bookstore’s employees lived on the cheap and where traveling musicians stayed when they came to town. Elizabeth Ratisseau, a feisty Texan who worked at the Sign, ran the boarding house. Michael Cooney, a twenty-­year-­old living in the attic, wandered by the Reverend’s bedroom one night, and asked to learn “Candy Man,” which Cooney had probably first heard on an Erik Darling LP. Davis obliged, but learning from a blind man wasn’t always so straightforward. “He played it over and over,” Cooney says. “It was nighttime and the bedroom was dark. I should have turned the light on, but I didn’t. And his wife came in and said, ‘Shame on you, Reverend Davis, sitting here with that poor boy in the dark where he can’t see what you’re doing.’”34 After the Davises returned home, Gary headed off the first week of July to play for two weeks in Lake George Village, New York, about a two-­hour drive north of New York City. He would be the third performer at the Cosmic Coffee House on Ottowa Street, which had just opened its doors the previous month and was run by two young sisters, Shirley and Joyce Caple, the mayor’s daughters.35 As Davis would later tell a concert audience, it was while sitting out by the lake during his stay that he had a vision for a new song that would become one of his all-­time classics. “I had done been all in California, stayed there a whole month and had to come back here to Lake George, New York. And I was settin’ down by the lake one Sunday morning, the sun was shining bright, I was knockin’ on my guitar, didn’t know what I was playing. . . . The words come to me just like that.”36 The song was “Oh Glory, How Happy I Am,” and it contained one of Davis’s most beautiful arrangements, in which he displayed his genius for translating a spiritual feeling onto the fretboard of the gui168

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tar. There was something about the unorthodox fingerings he used up and down the neck and the mighty bass notes of his big J-­200 resounding against trebly full-­bodied chords and plaintive open strings that seemed to make the guitar cry out with the ecstasy of a church chorus as he sang with great passion about his own religious conversion, coming after his mother’s illness and death left him alone: Oh, when I was out in the world of sin I had no one to be my friend

Jesus came and he taken me in Glory, hallelu

And he taken my feet out the miry clay He placed them up on the rock to stay I thank God that I can say Glory, hallelu

Oh Glory, how happy I am (×2)

My soul is washed in the blood of the Lamb Glory, hallelu

Actually, not all the words had “come to him” just then. An old spiritual collected by the Federal Writers Project in South Carolina during the Depression included the lyric “took my feet out de mirin’ clay” and “placed dem on de rocks of eternitay.” But aside from its autobiographical religious message, the song could easily be read as a commentary on Davis’s present life. With Peter, Paul, and Mary’s recording of “If I Had My Way,” Davis was finally taking home a steady paycheck and earning a measure of recognition, even if the man behind the deli counter didn’t know him from a beggar. He was getting off the streets, students were seeking him out in the Bronx to learn his sophisticated guitar style, and his bookings had increased, thanks especially to Manny Greenhill. Whatever the reason, Davis was clearly inspired when he wrote “Oh Glory.” As his student Ernie Hawkins would later say: “You really want to play and sing this song, I think. When you’re playing this song and it’s rolling along, and you are singing ‘Oh Glory, How Happy I Am,’ you get happy. The song works.”37

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*

Manny Greenhill, a folk music enthusiast first and businessman second, had been working without a formal contract to get Davis bookings. His heart had gone out to Davis, blind and struggling. When a few years earlier the Reverend had shown up in Wurlitzer’s, a Boston guitar shop, and fallen in love with a particular Gibson J-­200, Greenhill had helped out, cementing their bond. “He had tried all the guitars but he had no money to pay for it!” Greenhill remembered. “Mr. Wurlitzer said he was prepared to give a twenty percent discount on the $500 guitar, but how could it be financed? So I went down to the store, which was nearby, and as soon as I arrived Rev. Davis came close to me and whispered in my ear, ‘You know I’m worth it,’ and of course he was, and over the next few months he paid off his guitar.”38 Early in 1963, Greenhill formally became Davis’s manager, adding to what was fast becoming a large portfolio of artists, starting with Baez, now a huge star. Despite his heavy load, Greenhill would work tirelessly on Davis’s behalf, using his growing network of folk music contacts across the nation to get him gigs on the club and college circuits. For his services, Greenhill would take a 20 percent management fee, which was the high end of the standard range of 10 to 20 percent.39 Of course, as a blind, semiliterate musician, Davis presented challenges that other artists did not. Greenhill never had the business instincts of Albert Grossman. Charlie Rothschild, the former Gerde’s emcee who became the longtime manager of the folk singer Judy Collins, says of Greenhill: “He was a very nice guy. I would compare him to Albert, who I worked with. And Albert was a very astute businessman and Manny Greenhill was a nice guy.” Greenhill himself would later admit his shortcomings as a businessman. “I never learned the record business. I learned about publishing, and I do some of that. But the record business has always eluded me.”40 Indeed, most of the “rediscovered” bluesmen who would join the folk circuit in the late 1950s and early 1960s were managed by folk enthusiasts like Greenhill who didn’t necessarily have the business acumen—­or the backing of a major label—­to help shape their elderly clients’ careers beyond finding concert work and perhaps landing a few recording sessions. Davis clearly needed Greenhill’s services, but the relationship would 170

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have its limitations. Greenhill copyrighted one of Davis’s songs—­ “Soon My Work Will All Be Done”—­in November 1962, and by late January of 1963 he was encouraging Stefan Grossman to record Davis in concert so that his other work could be published. But Greenhill’s publishing arm, Chandos Music, wouldn’t apply for another copyright for Davis until 1968, and the vast majority of Davis’s compositions and arrangements wouldn’t get protection until 1970.41 Along with Annie Davis, however, Greenhill must be considered the person whose kindness and dedication made possible Davis’s late career as a concert performer. In March 1963, Annie wrote to Greenhill, thanking him for sending a check and some photographs of the Reverend: “Mr. Greenhill, iam so Happy to have a fine person lake you for Rev Davis mgr. He pleased as can Be. . . . i wants you to know how greatful iam for all the work that you get for Brother Davis.”42

*

The February 1963 edition of the Jazz Journal in England included a review of the newest release by 77 Records, a small British record label. The LP was Pure Religion and Bad Company by “Blind Gary Davis.” Not only was it the first record of Davis’s to come out in the UK, it also was unlike anything he’d released in America since he’d become a m ­ inister. Based out of Doug Dobell’s hip London record shop, 77 Records specialized in blues and jazz. The releases were available only at the shop or by mail order, and pressings were limited.43 Pure Religion and Bad Company comprised recordings of Davis made privately by Fred Gerlach and Tiny Singh circa 1957, with Davis doing a mix of secular and religious tunes. The LP opens with Davis speaking an introduction to the song “Pure Religion”: “John say, ‘You must have that pure religion, pure religion in your soul converted.’” Davis’s ingenious and intense rendition of the song once again had him taking an old spiritual—­“You Mus’ Hab Dat True Religion,” collected by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson in 1926—­ and creating a blues-­based arrangement that translated the song’s fire squarely into the folk idiom.44 But though it comprised mostly religious tunes, Pure Religion and Bad Company also included what were, among Davis’s acolytes, some of his most beloved blues songs. They included “Mountain Jack,” 171

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an instrumental version of “I’m Throwin’ Up My Hands,” one of the two blues he’d recorded in 1935; and instrumental run-­throughs of “Cocaine Blues” (here called “Coco Blues”) and “Hesitation Blues.” Most notable, however, was Davis’s sung version of “Candy Man,” a tune he first heard, courtesy of a carnival show, around 1905. It was destined to become one of his most celebrated guitar arrangements, with a deceptively complex rhythm and fingerpicking approach similar to “Cocaine Blues.” Stefan Grossman has described the dialogue in “Candy Man” as decidedly unreligious: that between a pimp and a prostitute, and Dave Van Ronk made the mistake of telling Davis it was a children’s song, to which Davis replied, “Yeah, you get lots of children from songs like that.”45 Candy Man, Candy Man

Candy Man, been here and gone (×2)

If you can’t be my Candy Man, you can’t be my fattenin’ hog

The Pure Religion LP helped solidify Davis’s reputation in England. Finally, British blues pickers could hear the source of Jack Elliott’s “Cocaine,” with the exquisite counterpoint of the bass and melody lines fully realized. Derrick Stewart-­Baxter, a Jazz Journal reviewer, could barely contain his enthusiasm for the record, calling Davis “a truly remarkable folk artist” and noting that “as a guitarist, he is one of the finest I have ever heard.” Noting, perhaps belatedly, that Davis spent most of his days singing and preaching the gospel on the streets of Harlem, Stewart-­Baxter assumed that Davis had been “persuaded to include such items as ‘Candy Man’ in this album.”46 However, it appears that Davis had no idea the recordings he’d made in private with friends would wind up on vinyl for public consumption. Paul Hostetter, a young guitarist from Detroit, spent time with Davis after the record came out, taking him around the city during Davis’s visits to the Midwest, and he recalled the Reverend being displeased about the release of his secular material: When I mentioned the album to him, he seemed disturbed about it. I was instantly embarrassed to have even mentioned it. Ian

Buchanan explained to me on the side that it had been an affront to him because it contained some stuff he would play among friends

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after hours, but never would have permitted to be released publicly. At that time he was recording exclusively for Prestige and it was all

sacred material—­this is how he wanted to be known publicly. After-­ hours party stuff was among friends, on the QT.47

The record wouldn’t become available as a US release for nearly three decades, but as Hostetter remembered, “if you were properly connected to a good source, it was available as an import.”48

*

On June 27, 1963, Blind Gary Davis, a short documentary by Harold Becker, premiered at the Murray Hill Cinema in New York. Becker was a major studio photographer in Manhattan, and at the age of thirty-­ five the future Hollywood director was just beginning to dabble in film, with one documentary to his credit, Eugene Atget, on the work of the French photographer.49 A fan of Davis’s from his records, Becker called him up to ask if he could make a short film. When he’d arrived with his crew to spend the day with Gary and Annie Davis late in 1962, it was a challenge to fit everyone in the Bronx apartment, along with two big rack-­over Mitchell cameras, the kind with the film reels mounted on top. “My total crew was four people, including myself—­and we were crammed into that tiny little apartment. And [Davis] was sitting in that chair that we filmed him in,” Becker recalled. “The whole thing was improvised.”50 Becker made sure to do a panning shot of the tiny living room, showing the claustrophobic space and worn-­out linoleum on the beat-­ up wood floor. He cut between the bleak images and shots of Davis performing “Lord, I Feel Just Like Goin’ On.” “There was no question I had a social context—­this great folk singer in this little tenement in the East Bronx. He certainly was poor.” When Davis performed a moving rendition of “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” Becker got the idea to film some street scenes in Harlem as a backdrop. He used a Volkswagen bus with the camera panning the spectral faces of men, women, and children, buttoned up against the chill. Their weary visages, paired with Davis’s mournful shouting and brilliant fingerpicking, provided the film’s emotional finale. 173

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Back then, theater managers called short films “seat changers,” hardly a term of artistic praise. But Becker’s film would find its audience, screening on college campuses across the nation during the folk boom. Bosley Crowther, the New York Times movie critic, called it “an affecting short in which a Negro guitarist, Blind Gary Davis, runs through a couple of sad songs while the camera of Harold Becker scans him, his modest apartment and the faces of people passing in the Harlem streets.”51 “It was a great experience,” Becker says. “He was not what you expected, which was a blind man who was kind of helpless. And he was not helpless at all. There was nothing obsequious about him. I mean, he certainly dealt as an equal.”

*

A couple of months before Blind Gary Davis opened, a young blues enthusiast named Tom Hoskins had traced the songster Mississippi John Hurt from an old 78 to the little hamlet of Avalon, Mississippi, where he was working as a farm laborer, and ferried him from oblivion into the outstretched arms of the folk revival. Soon after, the bluesman Bukka White was found in Memphis, working in a tank factory. And the following year, Dick Waterman, Phil Spiro, and Nick Perls located Son House working for the railroad in Rochester, New York, and the musician John Fahey and others tracked down Skip James in a Mississippi hospital bed.52 The “rediscoveries” added a new dimension to the folk movement. House would get a write-­up in Newsweek, but in July 1963 at the revamped Newport Folk Festival, Mississippi John Hurt, with his goblin face, gentle demeanor, and engaging fingerpicking style, emerged as a huge star. “There is only one person who suddenly became big as a result of a Newport appearance, and that is Mississippi John Hurt,” Manny Greenhill recalled. “Bang, it happened right there, just like that.”53 Hurt, until his death three years later, became a top draw on the folk circuit, playing regular gigs at the Gaslight and college folk festivals, where he pulled in five hundred to six hundred dollars per show. Rev. Gary Davis lacked some of the qualities that made Hurt so big: Hurt’s easy disposition, which ruffled no feathers; his designation as 174

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a bluesman, even though his repertoire was much more varied; and, of course, his re-­emergence, apparition-­like, from the mists of time. Davis didn’t get “rediscovered” since he’d been living in New York since 1944. As Barry Kornfeld recalled, “We never really appreciated what we had because he was always there. You could just pick up the phone and go over to his house and hang out. It’s the old blues line: you don’t miss your water ’til the well runs dry. And the well was always full.”54 Davis, who didn’t make the bill at Newport again until 1965 and indeed remained somewhat on the margins of the folk boom, might be forgiven for feeling competitive with folk’s new “overnight” star. Despite being from Mississippi, Hurt played guitar in the alternating-­ bass fingerpicking fashion usually associated with East Coast Piedmont style. Davis loosely played in that style too, though his musical technique and conception far exceeded Hurt’s. Even so, Hurt had a knack for creating simple but beautiful arrangements of blues, folk, and gospel tunes that are still prized by guitarists. When Hurt was in town performing the year after his rediscovery, Stefan Grossman would bring him to see Davis at home. “They spent a wonderful afternoon playing music together. I was just listening,” Grossman recalled. “The next day I went back up and said, ‘Reverend Davis, wasn’t that just great?’ He said, ‘You like that type music?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I like it. I love it.’ He said, ‘That’s old-­fashioned pickin’.’” Davis then played “Cocaine Blues” and his version of “Candy Man”—­which were like John Hurt tunes run through an Escher painting. Davis would disparage Hurt’s guitar playing in private on more than one occasion by saying, “What Mississippi John Hurt knowed at, I know. What he knowed at, I know.” (Davis expressed a similar sentiment about Blind Willie Johnson, who he said “played at” “Samson and Delilah.”)55 Davis disparaged most of the rediscovered bluesmen. Of Bukka White, who played guitar in open tunings with a bottleneck, Davis would say, “That’s cheating.” He dismissed the eerily brilliant Skip James, declaring, “Nobody would ever hire him for a dance.”56 Strictly speaking, Davis may have been right, but his need to deride his contemporaries probably says more about his own insecurities than it does about the relative merits of the other musicians. With Davis’s increasing concert work and the royalties from “If I 175

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Had My Way,” Gary and Annie by the middle of 1963 had purchased their first car, a two-­tone Ford Fairlane.57 Now students could either pay for lessons or trade guitar instruction for driving the Davises around. Eighteen-­year-­old John Townley became a student and driver around this time, with the Davises even paying him a few dollars a day to chauffeur Annie to hair appointments, to go shopping for the ingredients to make a head cheese, or to deliver the Reverend to gigs. Townley, a Philadelphian of slight build, recalled driving Davis to out-­ of-­town concerts as tests of endurance: Davis had trained himself to take quick catnaps on the street, rarely slept for more than a few minutes at a time and had a guitar around his neck almost constantly, noodling, composing, singing for pleasure. He could need attention at any moment around the clock. “He’d either sit down in a chair or he’d lay down for 10 minutes and by the time you were asleep he’d be up again puttering around.” To stay awake, Townley began popping speed pills, with the lack of sleep and prescription stimulants leading to some terrifying drives, rolling up interstates in the fog or making tight turns on coastal roads in New England.58 At places like Club 47 and Cafe Yana, Davis was always surrounded by adoring fans. Occasionally, he’d ask them for a favor: “Do you think you can get me a pistol?”59 Even when he was led, the road must have presented a new and scary scenario for a blind man who had mastered the unforgiving terrain of New York City. Having a gun or a knife gave Davis a sense of security. Prayer helped too. In late October, he traveled to Ottawa, Canada, for a four-­day stint beginning on Halloween at Café Le Hibou, a coffeehouse then on Bank Street above a Sherwin-­Williams paint store. Davis stayed with William Hawkins, an aspiring poet and musician; his wife, Sheila; and their children. “Drank a mickey of rye every night and prayed himself to sleep,” Hawkins recalled, referring to a small bottle of liquor. “I remember how he prayed, fiercely, often frightening my young children.”60 The Le Hibou concerts are notable for the curious write-­up that appeared in Variety in the “New Acts” section. The reviewer called Davis an “extraordinary performer,” comparing his singing to Bessie Smith’s. His guitar playing was “highly skilled and inventive” and he was “also a harmonica whiz.” Manny Greenhill, for one, wasn’t 176

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amused. He clipped the article and typed out a press release dripping with sarcasm: “Rev. Gary Davis, having played and sung for two generations—­a living legend in the world of folk music—­has finally garnered a review in Variety under New Acts. . . .” He underlined the last two words for emphasis. Greenhill apparently missed the Variety review from the Ash Grove the previous year, but his point—­that Davis was still woefully underacknowledged by the national press—­ remained true.61

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ON THE ROAD AND OVER THE OCEAN (1964) I remember thinking what a scruffy man he was. It looked like he slept in his suit. . . . and then he went into some incredible thing, some ragtime piece. And it knocked you off your seat, really. Robert Tilling

A

s 1964 got under way, Davis, at the age of sixty-­eight, was going ​out on the road more and more, performing in folk clubs and at universities across the nation and in Canada, thanks to the folk boom and Manny Greenhill’s ongoing efforts. That time away from home may have played a large role in Davis’s decision to finally assert himself publicly as a master of both religious and secular music. In March, Gary returned for the fourth time to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio to record The Guitar and Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis, the last of his classic records for Prestige. The track list probably came as a surprise to his fans: all instrumental and without a single gospel number. With Kenneth Goldstein now out of music, Samuel Barclay Charters had arrived at Prestige to produce folk and blues. At thirty-­four, Charters had already made seminal recordings of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Furry Lewis for Folkways and authored the classic blues history The Country Blues. He and Davis quickly established a good, easygoing rapport. “It was spring, and I often drove him up the East River Drive in New York,” Charters remembered. “He liked the window open in the car; we could feel the warmth in the air, and it brought back memories of his life on the small farm where he’d grown up.”1 The pleasant vibe and recollections of the days when he was still a “blues cat” did not mean the Reverend was ready to record a blues album. Charters describes a “game of cat and mouse” during a two-­or three-­hour session, beginning when he picked Davis up to take him to 178

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the studio: “We knew that I would try to get him to sing some blues and he knew he was going to tease me and he wouldn’t.” But egged on by Charters, who encouraged Davis to record some tunes on the six-­ string banjo, hearkening back to the music of his youth, there’s little doubt that Davis did decide to officially leave his mark in the realm of secular music.2 His sophisticated arrangement of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” which was the first time a solo guitarist had recorded classical ragtime, became the first of the eleven songs on the LP. The same year, Dave Van Ronk would record “St. Louis Tickle,” a ragtime guitar arrangement that he said was based on Davis’s playing and teaching. That song, according to Van Ronk, spawned an entire school of classical ragtime guitar, with practitioners like David Laibman, Rick Schoenberg, and Ton Van Bergeyk.3 Davis’s only studio recording of a folk rag known as “Cincinnati Flow Rag” or “Slow Drag” followed. A slow drag was a popular dance among blacks during the early blues and ragtime eras, in which partners slowly ground one another in place to the beat of the music, or what the bluesman Johnny Shines called “just dry screwin’.”4 With the third and fourth songs on Guitar and Banjo, Davis finally recorded two of his most popular secular pieces, and in top form: one was “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (and Playing Guitar at the Same Time)”; the other was “Candy Man,” the song so many of his students had cut their teeth on in private, though he clearly still refused to sing its sexually provocative lyric in a recording studio. “Please, Baby,” on the six-­string banjo, was the instrumental version of “Baby, Let Me Lay It on You,” the song Bob Dylan had adapted on his first record, and “Can’t Be Satisfied” was Davis’s take, without words, of one of the two blues he’d cut for ARC, “I’m Throwin’ Up My Hands.” “Fast Fox Trot” (also known as “Buck Rag”), an impossibly difficult ragtime dance tune, probably harked back to Davis’s stint in the Greenville, South Carolina, string band. “The Rev was astonishingly agile for any age,” Charters says. “He was just without hesitation making great leaps all over the fingerboard.” Davis once again pocketed a five-­hundred-­dollar advance, and this time his royalty would be a career-­high 5 percent of the list price 179

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for each LP sold domestically.5 He wasn’t going to get rich selling a few thousand records, but he was being treated with the respect his talents deserved. After the session Charters drove Davis home to the Bronx, and what unfolded provides an insight into Davis’s struggles and his fortitude: There had been heavy rains the night before and the walkway to his

house was flooded. A drain had clogged, and four or five inches of muddy water had backed up over the pavement. As we made our way over an improvised path of soaked boards and parts of an old

iron stove, he kept putting his cane down in the water and laughing, while I was too concerned about keeping my feet out of the water

to do much more than say unpleasant things about the owner of

the building. Then in the house he sat down in an old stuffed chair and started to play a harmonica that he’d found in the pocket of his coat.6

It would turn out to be one of the Davises’ last nights in the Bronx. In the February–­March issue of Sing Out! Izzy Young reported: “Peter, Paul and Mary have sold a million copies of their first record.” Rev. Gary Davis’s share of the royalties by then for “If I Had My Way” amounted to about $10,000 (around $74,000 in 2014 dollars). With steady money coming in, not only from Warner Bros. Music but also from Davis’s increasing concert work, he and Annie became home owners for the first time. On March 26, 1964, they purchased an attached brick bungalow with five rooms and a basement at 109-­42 174th Street, in Jamaica, Queens. They paid a little more than $17,000 for the house, with a mortgage of about $14,500.7 Davis was bursting with pride that after a lifetime of living hand to mouth and playing for spare change, the son of South Carolina sharecroppers had earned enough money from his music to buy a piece of property. The first night in the new house he used his hands and feet to get the lay of the land—­his land. “He’d feel around and he’d say, ‘I’m so grateful, I’m so happy,’” Annie recalled. “He wouldn’t even go to bed after he came in. He sat up and felt things in the house. That’s the way he would get used to it. He’d feel it, then he’d know where the next thing was.”8 “I got this home by pickin’ a guitar, you understand,” Davis would 180

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tell visitors. “Being poor most of his life and blind and to finally become recognized and make some money from what he liked to do—­ that was one proud moment,” recalled Jim Robinson, Tiny’s husband.9 The Davises had talked about saving up to move back South. “He often say a lot of times, everything I have when I get it paid for I’m going back South,” Annie remembered. “Where I wanted him to buy a house was in Raleigh, North Carolina, because the houses was cheaper.  .  .  . He had planned to maybe some day go back and buy there, but it didn’t work out.”10 Instead, they would live for the remainder of Gary Davis’s life in Jamaica, a black neighborhood of well-­tended lawns and gardens and barbecues in the backyard. “It was working class,” recalled Doris Houston, who, along with her husband, Peter, sold the Davises the home. “Everybody was very proud of their homes, kept their property up, hard-­working people.”11 Jamaica would never be confused with Addisleigh Park in nearby St. Albans, a more upscale black enclave where entertainers like Count Basie, Fats Waller, James Brown, and Billie Holiday lived at one time or another. But it was big step up from the roach-­infested tenements the Davises had long called home. Shortly after the sale went through, Davis and Lawrence Cohn met with the contractors who were fixing up the house. The blind Reverend had some definite ideas how he wanted it to look. “He was describing to the head painter the tone of white that he wanted the interior done,” Cohn says. “And of course the guy was rolling his eyes.” And about three weeks later they returned to check on the results. “Gary runs his hands over the wall and he turns to the guy and says, ‘This is not the shade of white that I asked for.’ And he was right, by the way. They got the shade wrong.”12 Though not large by any means—­the home sat on a twenty-­by-­ one-­hundred-­foot plot—­it was comfortable. It had two bedrooms and a small living room where Davis often gave lessons sitting by the door. Davis’s new phone number may have been divinely inspired, given that it belonged to one of the world’s great guitar virtuosos: AX-­ 1-­7609. He began announcing it at gigs, telling students to call him if they “want some of my stuff.”13 That summer, the Davises would purchase a second home in rural, wooded Newtonville, New Jersey, halfway between Atlantic City and 181

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Philadelphia. A ranch house with three bedrooms in a small residential neighborhood, it was five miles from the nearest developed area and might have reminded Davis of his backcountry childhood. The Davises paid about $11,700 for the home, subject to a mortgage of $8,690, using it as a weekend getaway. After two years, the Davises would take in tenants, making a man who once held out a tin cup a landlord for the last six years of his life.14 In concert, Davis began integrating more secular music into his sets, no doubt in response to the many requests for tunes from students and young guitarists before, during, and after gigs. Performing on a bill with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott at Indiana University in early February, Davis’s act included a stage routine that would become a staple through the latter part of his concert career. Before playing “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (and Playing Guitar at the Same Time),” Davis would introduce it by telling the story of how as a boy he learned to pick his guitar with his left hand while hugging a girl with his right, fooling her mother as she eavesdropped from the next room. Davis would invite a girl up from the audience to stand beside him so he could demonstrate the technique to the delight of the crowd. On this particular night, after the Reverend called for “the bravest girl that’s not so quick to blush to come up on the platform with me,” a young lady named Glenda climbed on stage. Davis got into a long back-­and-­forth with her boyfriend, Charlie, sitting in the audience. Since he planned on hugging Glenda, Davis allowed that he was worried the young man had a gun and might use it in a fit of jealousy. “Please! Don’t slip in my room and kill me in there,” he pleaded to howls of laughter. And he added, “I ain’t lookin’ for nobody’s girlfriend tonight, you see. Cuz I ain’t here long enough, you understand, to tarry with anybody.” Finally, after milking the threat and playing along for several minutes with the Reverend—­who may or may not have been entirely kidding around, given his experiences with the tinderbox of race relations down South—­Charlie promised not to retaliate and Davis performed the instrumental to raucous applause. After several years on the college folk circuit, he’d become something of a seasoned showman, capable of holding a crowd in his palm. However, he was prone to getting off topic and sermonizing—­often about women—­to the detriment of his musical act. Indeed, the Indiana 182

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Folksong Club newsletter, in its review of the show, noted that some audience members became impatient with his “long-­winded philosophizing.”15 At the UCLA Folk Festival in March, Davis performed even more of his secular repertoire. Though he started his first concert off by asking the crowd of students to help him sing “Old Time Religion” as “a brace,” his second night at the university’s Royce Hall auditorium he opened with the spiritual “You Got to Move” but told the crowd to cheers that he wanted “to get it out of [the] way quick” so that he could play some songs more in tune with the evening. And he did, giving them “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (and Playing Guitar at the Same Time),” with a giggly Barbara Dane joining him on stage for the latter.16 The next evening he concluded his show by singing a version of “Candy Man.” He’d rarely sung blues in public, but the combination of his increasing time on the road away from Annie and his brilliant studio session with Sam Charters seemed to loosen him up. It’s probably no coincidence that Davis emerged as one of the festival’s stars, performing four times in five days, more than any other artist. Roy Book Binder, who would become a student and confidant of Davis’s toward the end of the decade, says the Reverend’s view of his stage show evolved over time: “At the early gigs, he was a street preacher and an evangelist who was converting souls full time and lived for God, who gave him the great gift. And as time went on he knew it was show business.”17 The life of a folk troubadour out on the circuit had its share of challenges and pitfalls. One challenge was the care required of a blind musician so far from home. That fell to whoever was leading him at the time. On his West Coast swing, Davis did a weeklong stint at the Ash Grove with Doc Watson, where he met an eighteen-­year-­old guitarist born Nick Gerlach, but by then going by the name of Jesse Lee Kincaid. A nephew of Fred Gerlach, he’d already studied twelve-­string guitar with his uncle and six-­string guitar with the teenaged Ry Cooder, who by then had a reputation as one of the hottest players in Los Angeles. Hearing that Davis was in town, Kincaid went to the Ash Grove and invited the Reverend to stay with him at his Hollywood apartment.18 Davis always dressed in suits on the road and probably didn’t want 183

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to impose too much on his hosts by asking for help keeping himself clean in a strange place. After a few days Kincaid and his girlfriend, Delores, gently insisted that he have a bath. “He was a little reluctant to do that,” Kincaid says. “I guess we just said, ‘Gee, it’s been a few days—­you got to wash yourself, man. You can’t just sit around and smoke cigars . . . in your suit.’”19 Aside from dipping into his nonreligious catalog, the Reverend couldn’t always resist the allure of the young women who came to watch him perform. By the time he left Los Angeles, Davis had taken a girlfriend. “I guess he picked up on a few different women,” Kincaid recalled. “And I remember there was one woman who was hanging out with him when we took him to the airport—­he had to give me his money so she couldn’t pick it off of him. He was pretty concerned this gal was gonna take his money from him. So when we went to the airport he said, ‘You hold the money, and when we get on the plane . . . give the money back.’”20 Davis would entertain women in several cities during the sixties, though none of the relationships appear to have been serious. Whispered tales on the gospel music circuit have long included transgressions involving sins of the flesh. In the Reverend’s case, he seems to have kept the affairs private, only rarely allowing his students in on that part of his world. In both his preaching and in casual conversation, he adopted the paternalistic view of women prevalent in the early black Baptist church. When a very upset female parishioner called him up once in the early sixties to tell him her husband was standing over her with a gun, the Reverend told her: “Now, you just calm down and pull yourself together. If your man gonna kill you, you probably deserves it.” Before marrying the Detroit folk singer Loring Janes late in the decade, Davis would quote verses from chapter 3 of the first letter of Peter: “Wives, be in subjection to your own husbands” and “ye husbands, . . . giv[e] honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel.”21 Whenever Annie tried to micromanage his lead boys on the road, he had an answer that seemed to cover a multitude of sins: “When we’re home, we’re home, and when we’re on the road, we’re on the road.”22 In his fiery spiritual “Pure Religion,” Davis would enumerate some of the fleshly misdeeds that would prevent a soul from crossing the 184

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threshold into heaven. Adulterers get no mention, but liars, drunkards, and even tattlers do:23 Where you goin’ old tattler?

Goin’ to break up somebody livin’ in peace.

Where you goin’? Stop your tattling because you can’t cross there.

While the Bible does proscribe gossip (or tattling), it’s also a convenient target for someone who has sins he wishes to conceal. During one of his concerts at the UCLA Folk Festival, Davis may have inadvertently offered a hint about what fueled his sinful side. It came during a rare performance of “Lord, I Wish I Could See” during the festival’s gospel concert, when he’d been unusually candid with the audience about the song and his condition: I hardly ever sing it, but I hardly ever think to sing about my condition either. I used to keep my head down all the time. When did anyone care a thing about a blind man, but something raised up

my head one day and I can be just as much as anybody. . . . I had a woman ask me one time, you see, “Reckon you’ll ever marry?” Another said, “Oh, no. What would he do with a woman, him blind and can’t see. I wouldn’t want that responsibility.” I cried over that

many times. I want you all to hear me, please listen to me. I cried over that.24

If Davis had despaired of being looked down upon by women, he’d found a way to get the upper hand through his musical gift. As he’d said when he returned to the stage to play an encore at one of his UCLA shows, “I want to kiss the prettiest girl ever walked in California when I get off ’n this stand. That’ll make me a little sleep better and live longer, you understand.”25 In the spring, Kincaid accepted the Reverend’s invitation to visit him in New York, driving his 1953 Pontiac cross country to stay with Gary and Annie for a couple of weeks. For his solo trip, Kincaid’s brother had given him a BB pistol for protection. Davis took a liking to it and asked Kincaid if he could have it. He began shooting it all over the house, making his students more than a little nervous.26 Kincaid stayed with the Davises for a couple of weeks, taking Gary to gigs and Annie on errands. Escorting Davis to a festival at the Uni185

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versity of Massachusetts at Amherst, Kincaid met some people who invited him to Cambridge. He soon left New York, and, playing his twelve-­string guitar at an open mike night at Club 47, Kincaid met the Harlem-­born guitarist Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, who used the stage name Taj Mahal. They started performing together, and by the fall they decided to drive to Los Angeles, where their duo act caught the attention of Ry Cooder. The three formed the Rising Sons and built a rabid following at the Ash Grove, the Whiskey a Go Go, and other clubs; after a bidding war they landed a record contract with Columbia records, for whom they’d soon record Davis’s “Candy Man.”27

*

While young people in the United States paid their respects to American roots music, their European counterparts were enthralled by it. The Fisk Jubilee Singers had paved the way, bringing their dignified a cappella Negro spirituals to London in the late nineteenth century, but it was the 1950s tours of Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy that sparked the modern blues revival in Britain, amid the dark shadows cast by World War II. “The post-­war generation needed to carve out something distinctive for ourselves,” recalled Richard Noblett, then a young British music journalist. “You have to remember we were taught by people who may have killed during the war . . . and we often felt a pressure to apologize for not being old enough to have been in the war.” Digging the sounds of authentic American blues, he says, “was the start of having tastes that your parents didn’t understand.”28 By the early sixties, with British R&B bands like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds beginning to carve out their own niches, the thirst for authentic blues from across the ocean peaked. The traveling American Folk Blues Festival by German promoters Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau did exceedingly well in 1962 and ’63, giving performers like Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Memphis Slim, and Muddy Waters the kind of reception they could only dream about at home. That success spurred the British promoter Harold Davidson to try duplicating it.29 In the spring of 1964, he teamed with up with George Wein, the Newport Folk Festival impresario, to promote the American Blues and Gospel Caravan, featuring Waters, McGhee and Terry, Sister Rosetta 186

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Tharpe, Pleasant “Cousin Joe” Joseph, and Rev. Gary Davis for two weeks of concerts across Britain. For Davis, it would be his first taste of the star treatment accorded to the likes of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan back home, with adoring crowds and prominent press coverage in every city. But first, he’d have to obtain a passport, and he lacked a birth certificate. Mitch Greenhill recalled that his father, Manny, “had to find a couple of people who would attest that [Davis] was who he said he was and probably was born at this time or other.”30 Mississippi John Hurt had also been booked on the tour, but Hurt was ill on the day of departure, having had a bad reaction to a polio injection and possibly a slight seizure. To manage the tour, Wein had hired Joe Boyd, a twenty-­one-­year-­old recent Harvard graduate. In late April, the musicians met at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport to fly across the Atlantic. Davis and Joseph sat together in the front of the plane, with Waters, Tharpe, McGhee, and Terry in the back. Davis had never flown over the ocean and was understandably a bit nervous. Cousin Joe remembered this exchange:31 “Cuz?”

“What?”

“Are we over the ocean now?”

“Well, Rev., that’s just where you are at.” “How far down is it?”

“Well, Rev., I’ll tell you. The captain says we are thirty-­seven

thousand feet up. That’s the closest you are going to get to heaven alive.”

“How deep is it?”

“You ain’t got to worry about nothing, Rev. You ain’t got to worry

about a thing. If anything happens, just stick your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye!”

When they arrived in England, Boyd discovered something he hadn’t expected: tension. Brownie and Sonny famously loathed one another off stage for much of their celebrated career as a duo. “The one thing they agreed on was that, owing to some ancient feud, they wanted nothing to do with Reverend Gary,” Boyd recalled. Some of 187

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the ill will Boyd remembered may well have emanated from the Reverend himself: Davis was furious at McGhee. As he’d been telling students back home, during a recent gig together on the road, Davis had seen a guitar he’d wanted to buy and had asked McGhee to lend him the cash, which McGhee had flatly refused to do—­a clear affront to Davis’s honor. An unconfirmed and possibly embellished story also had Davis pulling a pistol on a knife-­wielding (and also blind) Terry during a heated argument at a Cambridge, Massachusetts, party in the early sixties.32 Aside from whatever bad blood boiled among Davis, McGhee, and Terry, the other members of the tour also proved to be a motley crew from different musical and cultural universes. A case in point was Davis and Tharpe, the exuberant, wig-­loving gospel guitarist and singer who’d become a crossover pop star—­much to the dismay of her Pentecostal church—­performing at New York’s Cafe Society and singing and playing with the likes of Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, and Benny Goodman. Boyd thought that at least Davis and Tharpe would get along, both being gospel-­singing southerners whose repertoires overlapped. But that assumption exploded on the first morning when Tharpe, in fur coat, sat across from Davis for breakfast. “Gary orders two fried eggs and he kind of feels the plate—­he’s blind—­picks up one of the fried eggs and has yolk spilling down his front and it drops out of his mouth,” Boyd recalled. “Sister Rosetta went, ‘Puhlease!’ She said, ‘I don’t ever want to sit at the same table as that man again.’”33 Privately, Davis didn’t think much of Tharpe’s musicianship, even if she’d built a reputation as a female guitar slinger who could outplay many men. “I don’t like her playing at all,” he’d told Fred Gerlach. “One reason I don’t like it is because she seems to play it more jazzy, and a sacred song’s don’t supposed to be played jazzy.” Davis was echoing debates that had raged in the black press and the black church over her swinging renditions of spirituals. He seemingly remained unaware of the irony of his criticism, given that he himself made frequent use of blues and jazz chording in his arrangements. One can only speculate about whether Davis harbored any professional jealousy of Tharpe, given that she’d won acceptance from both popular audiences and traditional gospel fans—­indeed, she’d helped define the modern gospel 188

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sound along with Mahalia Jackson—­while Davis remained a folk performer outside the mainstream.34 However the musicians on the tour felt about one another, they would encounter huge, passionate British audiences, beginning with their first stop in Bristol on April 29. “The most impressive thing was that they were mostly sold out,” Boyd says. “And these were big halls. I mean, we’re talking one-­thousand-­to two-­thousand-­seat halls. And so coming from a world where you’d be thrilled to pack two hundred people into Club 47 or the Golden Vanity to hear Gary play solo, the fifteen hundred in a hall all coming to see this show, and giving huge ovations at the end, was great.”35 British musicians and blues fans already were familiar with Davis’s work—­particularly the influential “Cocaine Blues”—­through the play‑ ing of Jack Elliott and from Davis’s unauthorized Pure Religion LP. Like their counterparts in the United States, they seemed less interested in the Reverend’s sacred material. “The dilemma was that he was singing about Jesus all the time and I was not of the same persuasion really,” the singer Ralph McTell recalled. “So I didn’t feel I was able to sing his songs. I just loved the way he played the guitar.” With Davis three thousand miles from Annie and getting more comfortable with the idea of performing his secular repertoire, he would not disappoint his new fan base.36 That’s not to say that Davis’s religious songs made no impression. Even young Brits who’d heard Tharpe’s impassioned gospel singing during her 1957 tour weren’t quite prepared for the intensity of the Reverend’s spirituals in a live setting. “It is important to remember that religious education was/is compulsory in the UK, so there was nothing unfamiliar being expressed, just the fervor,” Noblett recalled, adding: “I don’t think Gary converted anybody. When he talked it was more advice than scripture . . . it was more that he was authentic and indeed not particularly judgmental.”37 With two blind musicians on the tour, Boyd knew he’d have his hands full. Since John Hurt’s manager, Tom Hoskins, had gone on the trip without his client, Boyd gave him the task of taking care of Davis. The twenty-­three-­year-­old Hoskins had a reputation as a somewhat aimless southern charmer. Hurt’s biographer would describe Hoskins 189

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as “a likable hippie with no permanent job and a fondness for girls, alcohol and drugs, in no particular order.” Hoskins and Davis became inseparable, and it was Hoskins who discovered that the Reverend liked a little marijuana in his pipe. “Tom would often be sort of ostentatiously walking with Gary through the lobby or backstage or inviting people backstage and eyeing up the best-­looking girls and saying, ‘Gary’s gonna play some more back in the hotel room; wanna come?’” Boyd says. “So Gary would set up in his room with a bottle of whiskey and whatever and start playing. And there would be like half a dozen kids sitting on the floor and playing until two o’clock in the morning. And he loved that.” Eventually, even Hoskins would tire out, and he and Boyd would call a halt to the sessions—­practically dragging Davis to bed—­so that they could get some sleep.38 As the tour went on, Boyd tinkered with the show’s running order before finding one that provided the most bang for the buck. Brownie and Sonny opened, followed by Cousin Joe, with Sister Rosetta closing the first half. Otis Spann began the second half with his brilliant solo blues piano, followed by Davis, with Muddy winding up the night. Davis’s position, right before Waters, may also have caused some friction with Brownie and Sonny. “It was sort of Muddy and Rosetta and Gary were the big acts,” Boyd says. “And it was sort of my own prejudices about what I thought was musically the strongest.”39 The Caravan hit Portsmouth on April 30, Liverpool on May 1, and Birmingham on May 2. At the Hammersmith Odeon on May 3, the Daily Telegraph sent a reviewer, who saved his highest praise for Davis and Joseph, notably classifying them both as blues artists. “The newcomers, Cousin Joe Pleasant and Blind Gary Davis, were impressive . . . and between them they gave an indication of the vast range of expression possible within the blues idiom.”40 The tour bus became a moving gab session, with Cousin Joe reading the International Herald Tribune aloud and provoking lively debates on the news of the day. Davis told earthy stories, keeping everyone in stitches, including one about a duck, a goose, and a chicken who see a preacher and deacon coming down the road and argue about which one of them is going to be lunch.41 (Davis probably left out his childhood memory of the visiting churchmen getting all his grandmother’s good food, leaving the children to eat scraps.) 190

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On a rainy May 7, the group arrived in the suburbs of Manchester to film a show at an abandoned railroad station for what would become a legendary program for Britain’s Grenada TV. Producers had outfitted the deserted platform with crates, chickens, goats, and sacks to make it look like a southern rail. They built stands for a live audience and hired people to sit in trains to add to the set’s authenticity.42 Davis seemed to want no part of it, perhaps turned off by the campy theme. “I ain’t playing in all that rain and cold,” Cousin Joe remembered him saying—­an odd complaint for a former street singer. But the producers insisted that Davis come out. Davis practiced for the show with the others that morning, but when it came time to film after lunch he was sacked out in the tour bus. Boyd remembers Davis’s having a cold that day, but that appears to be only part of the explanation. “We treated the tour bus as a dressing room,” producer Johnnie Hamp recalled. “There was a lot of booze on the bus. When the production assistant went to collect  Davis she found that he was in no condition to appear.”43 On the concert stage, however, Davis seemed to be having a great time and even relished the excitement over his blues material in a way that he’d rarely do back in the States. Still, he wasn’t quite prepared to forget that he was a minister. For a pumped-­up audience in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, he introduced “Cocaine Blues” by saying, “I’m gonna play you what you want now.” He then talk-­sung the song, which was his way of singing it without really singing it, a loophole he often employed with students. After another brilliant talk-­sung blues with virtuoso guitar flourishes called “I Got a Little Mama, Sweet as She Can Be,” Davis told the crowd: “That’s the way you play when you ain’t worried about nothin’.”44 A reviewer for Jazz Journal took issue with several of the acts that night, including McGhee and Terry, who gave “pretty routine performances.” He had high praise for Waters and Davis, though, saying of the latter that “this blind, elderly man fervently chanted his hell-­ fire songs to a packed modern concert hall. . . . Davis is an archetypal figure in Negro song. Here for a few fascinating moments we were taken to the fountainhead of our music: it was a unique and memorable occasion.”45 By the time the tour had reached its second-­to-­last destination, 191

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Brighton, on May 11, all the animosities that had greeted Boyd two weeks earlier had melted away. Terry had been backing Davis up on harp for one or two songs nightly, and Tharpe had decided Davis was a man of great wisdom. During the final show, she told Boyd that when Davis sang “Precious Lord,” she wanted a microphone off stage. When the song began, Tharpe, on her knees, wailed as if she were back in an Arkansas church. Davis yelled, ‘Sing it, Rosetta!’”46 Simon Napier, in Jazz Monthly, wrote of the show: If you were lucky . . . and saw Gary at his very fine best, as I did for 35 minutes at Brighton, then I’m sure you’d agree that Gary Davis

on stage can produce the most wonderful country gospel music any concert stage is ever likely to see. His moving and beautiful rendering of “Pure Religion” was one of the most wonderful things I have

ever witnessed; and Muddy Waters, following on, broke his usual silence to pay a sincere tribute to “the great Reverend.”47

The group even managed a quick stop on the Continent the following day to record for French television in Paris, with Boyd introducing each performer in his schoolboy French. It was clear that European fans had a deep thirst for real American blues and gospel, much greater than what the performers could hope for in the States. “Everybody on the tour by the end of the tour was saying, ‘Oh, we gotta keep this going, we gotta do it again, we gotta do it in America,” Boyd says. “And so I pestered George [Wein] about this. I said, ‘Come on, George, put together the same package and sell it in America.’”48 But American concert promoters couldn’t be persuaded such a tour would prove commercially viable. The whole group, joined by Mississippi John Hurt, did a show together at Hunter College in New York within days of returning, then went their separate ways. The New Yorker sent jazz critic Whitney Balliett to review the Hunter show, and his scathing commentary was proof enough that a blues and gospel tour would be a hard sell to American audiences. “Most country blues singers sound like courting seals,” Balliett wrote. Davis was “a member of the seal persuasion,” who “started each line with a roar, dwindled to a guttural moan, and ended in a mutter. His guitar playing merely lapped at the rocks.” The only performer on the bill, in fact, who met 192

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with Balliett’s approval was Hurt, whose “remarkable guitar playing came through beautifully.”49

*

In the late spring, Davis traveled up to Detroit to play at the Retort Coffeehouse. There he met Rick Ruskin, a tall, lanky fifteen-­year-­old with short, curly black hair and glasses who had become a fixture at the club despite being just a ninth grader at Winship Junior High in the northwest section of the city. Ruskin was already a sure-­handed guitarist and delighted in showing older players licks on his new Martin D-­28. When Davis arrived in town with Annie, Ruskin got the job as opening act, the week of his final exams. He’d been learning Davis’s songs off records and impressed the Reverend by playing a respectable version of “You Got to Move.” Davis “sorta took me under his wing,” Ruskin recalled, “and he said, ‘Why don’t you come back with us? I got most of the summer off, and we can sit around and we can play, and I’ll show you as much as you can possibly learn.’”50 Ruskin’s parents didn’t exactly jump at the opportunity being offered their son. “It was a major effort to let a barely sixteen-­year-­old kid—­a white, Jewish kid—­to go with . . . black people on the road,” Ruskin says. The Retort’s owner, Pete Cantini, reminded the Ruskins that a minister and his wife were more reputable than the seedy characters their son had been hanging out with at home. The club itself was housed in the basement of a flophouse frequented by prostitutes. “Your kid is here just about every night that he can get his ass down here,” Cantini told Ruskin’s parents. “If he was going to get in trouble all these years, he could have found it just by going upstairs.” They finally acquiesced, and Ruskin left with the Davises. Gary was mostly taking the summer off from his frequent touring. Ruskin stayed out of trouble and focused on music, taking lessons all day and listening when other guitarists came by to sit at the Reverend’s feet.51 During the summer, Ruskin noticed that Davis seemed very fond of shooting the gun he’d gotten from Jesse Kincaid. BBs were lodged in the ceiling around the house. One morning, Ruskin got up and came out of the guest bedroom and Davis was coming down the hallway, BB 193

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gun in hand. He didn’t know Ruskin was there. He fired the gun and Ruskin wailed in pain. “He shot me in the left hand,” Ruskin recalled. Coming to the boy’s aid, Davis was beside himself. “Mr. Ricky, please don’t die!” he cried. There was some blood and a scar, but fortunately Ruskin didn’t suffer any long-­term effects, and his guitar skills remained intact. Fearing for the safety of other visitors to the Davises’ home, Ruskin took the gun with him when he went back home to Detroit at the end of the summer, though the Reverend still had “Miss Ready” available at a moment’s notice for his protection. “In hindsight, he was nuts,” Ruskin says of his teacher. But “he definitely had a right to be paranoid. And I guess he was so dependent upon others that he figured being armed was one way he would protect himself from being taken advantage of.”52 One place that made Davis particularly nervous was Brooklyn. That may help explain the almost surreal visit he paid that summer to Woody Guthrie, who, only a month past his fifty-­second birthday, was wasting away at Brooklyn State Hospital from the Huntington’s disease that would soon kill him. Davis had known Guthrie since their days jamming at Lead Belly’s apartment in the late 1940s, and he’d gotten the idea to visit his old friend after Dean Meredith, a guitar student from Canada, asked him to reminisce about the early folk scene in New York.53 With Meredith behind the wheel of the Davises’ Ford Fairlane, the Reverend somehow directed them on a complicated route to Brooklyn, identifying all the stop lights and major intersections. When they reached Flatbush, where the huge red brick institution was located, Davis got agitated, perhaps thinking back to the reception he and Bill McAdoo had gotten in Brighton Beach. “He started fumbling with his pockets and pulled out a loaded revolver and an eight-­inch switch blade,” Meredith recalled. “For a full ten minutes he sat there, sharpening the knife and lecturing us on how decent folks have to get themselves ‘prepared’ for a trip through Brooklyn.” When they made it to the hospital, they found Guthrie “in a dingy institutional green room decorated only with plaster cracks and a barred window soiled with years of grime.” The folk legend appeared skeletal, with his arms and legs twitching uncontrollably. Guthrie laid 194

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eyes on Davis and seemed to get excited, but an apparent attempt at mustering a greeting left him tangled in his sheets and the bars surrounding his bed, which required the help of an orderly to fix. Davis could sense Guthrie wasn’t long for the world and he did what he’d probably done countless times with members of his own flock. “Gary played and sang for him, then spoke about having the strength to meet a day of judgment and eternal salvation.” Guthrie would be dead in three years.

*

In the fall, the Village Voice ran an article on the British invasion group the Animals, who were making their first visit to America. The Beatles had broken through the previous year, and now a host of mop-­topped Englishmen, inspired by American blues, hoped to conquer the New World. The Animals, with their boisterous, bluesy shouting, seemed to be doing just that at the Paramount Theatre in Times Square. “Throughout the first number, which was drowned out by the general pandemonium, the rain of projectiles continued to fill the stage, while the musicians in the front row of the band held their [musical] scores over their faces to avoid being hit. Halfway through the third song, a girl leapt upon the stage and threw her arms around guitarist Chas Chandler’s feet.”54 Earlier in the year, the Animals had released their debut single in Britain, “Baby Let Me Take You Home.” It was a blatant rip-­off of “Baby, Let Me Lay It on You”/“Baby Let Me Follow You Down” with different lyrics. Had Bob Dylan initially credited Davis with “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” the Reverend might have gotten some recognition and royalties for the song, which reached number twenty-­one on the British pop charts. The Animals’ song credit, however, went to Bert Russell and Wes Farrell, prolific rock and R&B songwriters who had penned the popular hit “Hang On Sloopy.” It would hardly be the last time Davis’s contribution to the budding rock era went unrecognized. Davis did manage, however, to get some unwelcome attention, this time from the police. As a property owner, he now possessed something that someone else might covet, and he wasn’t taking any chances. North Peterson, his old student, came by the new house, and Davis brandished his revolver again. “And I said, ‘Uh, Reverend Davis, 195

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what is that?’ He kinda got a kick out of the damn thing. I said, ‘You know, this is a little scary here.’ But he said he needed it because of the kids in the neighborhood, and now that he had this house he felt a little insecure.”55 On October 31, with trick-­or-­treaters going house to house in search of free sweets and perhaps a little mischief, the Reverend found himself alone at home for his first Halloween in Jamaica. As Jim Robinson recalled: “They were trick-­or-­treating. And I guess Gary got so tired of them ringing the bell . . . he got kind of mad and he came to the door with the gun.” Though the arrest report hasn’t surfaced, it seems clear things got a bit out of control. The police came and took Davis into custody. He was charged with felonious assault. He took a plea deal and went before a three-­judge panel on December 21. One of the judges gave him a stern lecture, according to Robinson. “I don’t care if you’re blind or not. Don’t ever do that again.” Davis avoided a jail sentence and paid a fine of one hundred dollars.56 When Tiny Robinson had bailed Davis out after his arrest, she’d lied to police and told them she didn’t know the Reverend owned a gun. She promised to confiscate the weapon, but Davis got it back from her husband. “He said, ‘I can’t go out in the street without it,’” Jim Robinson remembered. “I said, ‘Gary do not pull that gun on kids. That’ll get you locked up and they’ll throw away the key.’”57

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE GUITAR LESSONS “BRING YOUR MONEY, HONEY!” He was the most giving, patient teacher. Very sensitive guy to where you were at. If somebody was there who really couldn’t play anything, he would start them at the beginning. Ernie Haw kins

F

irst came the laying on of the hands. Rev. Gary Davis couldn’t see his new guitar pupils when they stood trembling before him, but grabbing their hands—­sometimes for an uncomfortably long welcoming embrace—­told him what he needed to know before he took out “Miss Gibson” and sang one of his sacred songs to break the tension. “When I first met him . . . he spent a long time, it seemed to me, checking out my hands—­calluses, the size of my hands, all sorts of stuff like that,” says Bruce Conforth, the first curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who was twenty when he took lessons from Davis. “It was intimidating as shit.”1 As Davis’s reputation grew, and word got around that he was listed in the New York phone book, he welcomed more and more students to his living room for private instruction. Many were folk music fans with average abilities who weren’t destined to be more than weekend pickers or hobbyists. Others would go on to fame after absorbing Davis’s techniques, if they weren’t famous already. Interviews with dozens of his students suggest that well over a hundred young guitarists showed up at his door in the sixties and early seventies, and the Reverend, with very few exceptions, showed them inside. While he was far from alone among folk and blues performers in giving lessons—­Josh White, Brownie McGhee, and Big Bill Broonzy all taught from time to time—­few, if any, musicians of his caliber in the modern era could claim as many students and as much influence as a teacher. One would have to look to the jazz realm and someone like Thelo197

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nious Monk—­whose “classroom” was a nightclub stage—­to find a performer with as much impact on budding players. “He had a huge influence on my career,” says Steve Katz, who studied guitar with Davis in the Bronx and Queens beginning around 1963–­64 and later cofounded the rock group Blood, Sweat, and Tears. “Reverend Davis was a total inspiration.”2 “He was fundamental to my development—­as fundamental as Robert Johnson,” recalled Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead guitarist, who took lessons from Davis much later. “In fact, you can hear way more of Gary Davis in me than Robert Johnson.”3 There’s no blueprint for what makes a great teacher, but Davis had several qualities that the most gifted ones possess: an infectious spirit, a vast storehouse of knowledge, and an insightfulness that enables others to grasp reality in a new way. Not only did the Reverend devise a guitar style that shattered his students’ conception of the instrument, but his blindness and the fact that he’d overcome so much only added to his power to inspire. “He lives with his wife and his guitar in . . . a world of joy, hope, and, above all, faith,” North Peterson wrote in his high school literary magazine while taking lessons.4 Davis’s approach to teaching was, of necessity, simple. He would play a phrase over and over, until his student had mastered it. Though he couldn’t watch his pupils’ hand positions, he could tell by the timbre of a note whether the correct string was being employed to hit, say, a G in a descending run. Students described the way Davis navigated the guitar’s fretboard as a model of simplicity and conservation of energy: his hands barely moved as he changed from one knuckle-­ busting chord to the next. For some of his disciples, it was enough to take a few lessons and behold how Davis approached his art, without the limitations most guitarists placed on six strings. For others, learning his repertoire became an almost religious obsession. The increased demand for his services over the years, not to mention the tide of inflation, would have stipulated a price hike for the Reverend’s lessons, but the fee never budged: five dollars for as long as a session lasted, which often meant when the student tired out, as opposed to the teacher. “Five dollars is fine,” Davis would say if someone suggested he was selling himself short. “I ain’t lookin’ to milk the cow for more than she’s worth.”5 198

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“You could stay there all day if you wanted to,” says Danny Birch, a performer and teacher of the sarod (Indian lute), who studied with Davis for about three years. “He would never say, it’s time to go, the lesson’s over. It was incredibly inexpensive. . . . Basically it was free.”6 After the Davises had gotten on a firmer financial footing from his touring and royalties and purchased the home in Jamaica, the five dollars no longer put food on the table. But economics only goes so far in explaining why Davis never charged more to tutor beginners and professionals alike. Once, toward the end of Davis’s life, a British rock star showed up on East 174th Street, flashed a wad of cash, and asked for a lesson. “He had a hundred-­dollar bill, and the Reverend told him to get lost. . . . I remember seeing the limousine,” says John Mankiewicz, now a Hollywood screenwriter, who was in the middle of a lesson when the incident happened.7 Mankiewicz has forgotten the name of the rocker, but Davis was seemingly affronted by the notion that his teacher-­student relationship could be boiled down to a financial transaction. The fact that he always asked for payment upfront—­ “Bring your money, honey!”—­only served to reinforce how little it was in relation to the services provided. For Davis, sharing his music with a new generation, a captive audience of young, mostly white musicians, was yet another way for an evangelist to spread the gospel. “It ain’t no harm to use what God give you, is it?” he told one of his church congregations. “Every day or two, somehow or another, the Lord give me a song to sing. And I’m glad to have something that God give me to let somebody know something about.”8 Though few of his students professed an interest in Davis’s religious teachings per se, and many first wanted to learn “Candy Man” and “Cocaine”—­as opposed to his much more technically advanced gospel songs—­they invariably came away with more than just the bluesy guitar licks they studied sitting in front of the Reverend’s big easy chair. Annie, singing along to the spirituals from the kitchen, always had something on the stove, so a lesson often included an invitation to break bread and a little window into how Gary and Annie lived. In their treatment of these strangers, the Davises abided by the biblical teaching to “bear one another’s burdens,” even if they had less money than the middle-­class folkniks who sought them out. In 199

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the midsixties, blacks and whites lived largely separate lives, so the Davises’ generosity broke down barriers and provided a real-­world lesson for anyone looking to follow Gary’s imperative to “let us get together.” Indeed, the house in Queens often bustled not only with his students coming in and out for lessons but also with church friends dropping by unannounced for fellowship and conversation. All were welcome. “When you were there and it was mealtime, you were invited,” recalled David Bromberg, the eclectic blues-­folk-­jazz performer, another student who went on to a successful musical career. “They just accepted you.”9 Given the long, complicated history of whites’ co-­optation of black musical styles, starting with nineteenth-­century white minstrel troupes that donned blackface to peddle caricatured “plantation melodies” and ragtime to mass audiences, it’s not hard to fathom why some black musicians were leery of sharing musical secrets. The bluesman Larry Johnson, reflecting the anger that many blacks felt at seeing white blues, jazz, and folk artists get rich by adapting the work of African Americans, once accused Davis’s student Larry Brezer of “trying to steal black culture” by learning the Reverend’s songs in great detail. “After being challenged by him like that,” Brezer says, “my ardor for playing blues in general and Gary’s music in particular, did subside as I contemplated whether indeed I was [stealing] and if that was a prevailing attitude among his peers.”10 Davis himself always seemed pleased to teach his compositions as long as his students took his music as seriously as he did. “He said to me, ‘You don’t have to be black, you don’t have to be white—­anybody can play the blues,’” Alan Smithline recalled. “I’ve carried that with me since then.” For some greenhorn guitarists, Davis even assumed a kind of surrogate father role, offering advice and presenting an example of kindness and goodness that often seemed lacking in the world at large, especially as the decade of the sixties careened out of control and America’s social fabric began to unravel. “My parents were going through a sort of ugly divorce at that time, and [the Davises’] house was sort of my refuge,” Mankiewicz says. “And the Rev was very helpful, both of them were very helpful. You know, I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, so [these] were important years.”11 200

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The journalist Alex Shoumatoff, who studied with Davis off and on throughout the 1960s, recalled that a lot of young people, turned off by crass consumerism or the war in Vietnam or both, longed to grasp something that seemed real, unmanufactured, and somehow reassuring. The Reverend, with his missing teeth, smelly cigars, salty humor, and abiding faith that he’ll “be alright someday” provided the antidote many of them sought. “We were feeling this kind of disconnect with the society that then later resulted in the countercultural revolution of the sixties,” Shoumatoff says. As a seventeen-­year-­old student at an exclusive New Hampshire prep school, Shoumatoff would have been expected to nurture a love for the classical arts, but instead he fell in love with the country blues and showed up at the Folklore Center, where Izzy Young directed him to the Reverend. “I think Gary Davis touched a lot of people in a way that sort of changed their lives—­and definitely in my case.”12 For Shoumatoff, that included an extraordinary gesture during the height of the war. He’d joined the Marine Corp Intelligence Reserves to avoid the draft, and he was making monthly treks from New Hampshire to attend meetings at the Eleventh Communications Battalion in Brooklyn, where he’d begun learning harsh interrogation methods to use on America’s Cold War enemies. He’d visit Davis and despair about his part in the war effort. Shoumatoff had been taking Davis to storefront churches to preach, and the Reverend decided to let Jesus intervene in his student’s moral dilemma. “In a sort of heated moment in one of these storefront churches, he made me a minister, and that’s how I got out of the Marines,” Shoumatoff says. “It was a pretty fiery kind of thing. You were filled with the Holy Ghost and the Holy Spirit and all that.” Shoumatoff took his Bible down to the Eleventh Communications Battalion and—­with a slight roll of the hips that suggested he lacked the macho male orientation of a true Marine—­got his discharge, no questions asked.13 For all of Davis’s devout beliefs, his students also saw firsthand how he struggled to keep his spiritual life intact despite intrusions from the blues life. “On the one hand, there was this very powerful gospel-­religious element to his personality and his music,” recalled Ken Kipnis, another student. “But on the other hand, he really did 201

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racy stuff and took great delight in doing it.” Davis loved telling off-­ color stories, some most definitely not intended for mixed company. He hugged the girlfriends of his male protégés a bit too close during lessons. And it often didn’t take much persuasion to get him to teach the devil’s music at home, as long as Annie was far enough away not to detect any blue notes. She tried to enforce a strict code of religiously sanctioned conduct, but the basement became Gary’s inner sanctum. “She’d scold him occasionally, if he tried to play blues or made some kind of a reference that she felt was not befitting a reverend,” Bromberg says.14 Davis didn’t ask too much in return for his teaching, but, like an exacting classical composer, he did demand that his groundbreaking arrangements be played as he’d conceived them. “I think he knew he was great and he wanted to carry on his music,” says Woody Mann, who was all of twelve when his mother drove him to the first of his four years’ worth of lessons. “He would tell me, ‘You carry on, you go out there and tell ’em I taught you.’ It was very important to him that I learn the songs correctly.”15 Many of his disciples would later claim to be the special one who most fulfilled that commandment. Not that the Reverend always made it easy. If a student seemed close to mastering one of his tunes, he might slyly throw in a new syncopation, altered chord voicing, or even an entirely new arrangement—­as a test of wills, a life lesson, and a bit of one-­upmanship. “Musically he would chastise me for showing every bit of technique I had on every song I played,” Rick Ruskin recalled. “His exact words were: ‘One of these days someone’s going to take your own guitar and beat the crap out of you with it.’ And he was talking musically speaking.”16 “In the same conversation,” Ruskin goes on, “he played a version of ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ I never heard him play before. He said, ‘You think you know how I play this song?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you showed it to me,’ and he says, ‘Well, here,’ and he played it in a similar but different enough way that I’d never heard before.” There’s little doubt that all those lessons kept Davis’s musical juices flowing, so he could, in Stefan Grossman’s words, “always be steps ahead of all his students.” He also took great pride in the fact that young musicians continued seeking him out to learn his songs and 202

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his pioneering guitar style. “I think he was really happy about all the adulation these kids were giving him,” Steve Katz says.17 Although he never said so explicitly, the camaraderie he enjoyed with his white acolytes surely must have helped erase some of the demons from the Reverend’s Jim Crow past. Alan Smithline, who would live with the Davises for a time while taking lessons, recalled his first night in the basement in Queens when he and another boarder-­ student, John Dyer, were noodling on their guitars and Davis appeared at the top of the steps. “He yells out to us, ‘Mind if I join you boys?’ and it was a remarkable, wonderful, wonderful evening. Here’s Gary Davis: ‘Mind if I join you boys?’ People are always pulling musical rank, and they are people who couldn’t shine his shoes. ‘Mind if I join you boys?’”18

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BUCK DANCE (1965–­66) Now you see Supreme Court judges’ nephews . . . and businessmen’s sons and Harvard sons, they’re all forming folk rock groups, rock ’n’ roll groups, because they’ve effectively stolen in a way from the Negro so much so that they feel it’s their own, in the same way that jazz was made safe 20 years ago, 25 years ago. Izzy Yo ung

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or a man who had preached at least several times a week for nearly thirty years, staying busy on the folk concert circuit meant a bit of improvising when he wasn’t at home. Sometimes, Gary Davis couldn’t find an accommodating place of worship in a faraway city. In Detroit in January 1965 for a two-­week stint at the Chess Mate, a coffeehouse near the University of Detroit, Davis showed up at one of the city’s churches, guitar in hand, after Manny Greenhill had arranged with a church member to escort him to services. The religion reporter for the Detroit Free Press, Hiley H. Ward, had accompanied Davis too, probably expecting to hear him preaching and singing before a church audience. But Davis had not been allowed to minister at the unnamed church, and he was led ignominiously back out to the church member’s car. “I want to go back in,” a distraught Davis said. “I came to worship, not to play. I’m not a blind beggar. I’m a minister.”1 He sat in the car for a time. “They struck me deeply in there,” he said. The pastor was away, it turned out, and the chairman of the church board later explained that church members had a prearranged service and didn’t want it disrupted. Someone came out and invited Davis back in so that he could at least pray. “The blind man sat quietly,” Ward reported, “in his own soul’s world.”2 At home, Davis continued ministering to his two flocks, his church parishioners and his guitar students. By the spring of 1965, the latter 204

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included a precocious fourteen-­year-­old singer-­songwriter from East Orange, New Jersey, named Janis Fink—­soon to be known by her professional name, Janis Ian. Using babysitting money and her allowance, she began lessons with the Reverend, and though she found his muscular style impossibly difficult, she developed a great rapport with Annie, who fed her corn bread and stewed chicken, fried okra and black-­eyed peas.3 Davis’s Greenwich Village following was then at its height, and when he began taking Ian along to gigs he let her sing an occasional song or two in keeping with the generosity he showered upon his students. Ian, soon to become one of the darlings of the sixties folk scene, would credit him with jumpstarting her career at one of his concerts the following year at the Gaslight Cafe. “Miss Annie brought me along to the sound check,” Ian recalled in her autobiography. “She went up to the owner, Clarence Hood, and told him Gary wanted me to be his opening act. Mr. Hood declined, citing everything from my age to the fact that people were paying to see Gary, not some unknown kid.”4 Annie and Gary then shared a conspiratorial whisper and he started heading toward the door. “Miss Annie went back to Mr. Hood and explained that Gary really wasn’t feeling very well, they’d probably have to cancel that night’s show. I got the gig.” Ian opened for Davis that night in front of a full house. After her set, she met someone who connected her with a record producer, and she cut Society’s Child, her debut album, a few weeks later. “I owe my career to Reverend Davis and Miss Annie,” she would say.5 Shortly after Ian began her studies with Davis, the Reverend acquired another new student, one who would devote his life to mastering his guitar techniques, and who, along with Stefan Grossman, would do the most to preserve his musical legacy. Ernie Hawkins, a tall, quiet eighteen-­year-­old from Pittsburgh’s East End, had graduated from the venerable Taylor Allderdice High School in June, skipping the ceremony. The next day he’d made his way to New York to seek out Davis.6 Hawkins was turned on to Davis’s music by a former Antioch College student who’d lent him Harlem Street Singer, changing Hawkins’s life. As soon as he arrived in New York, Hawkins dialed up Davis, and they met in a storefront, probably in the Bronx, where Hawkins found 205

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the Reverend sleeping in an overstuffed easy chair in the back. “The door was open and I walked in. He was asleep,” Hawkins recalled. “I didn’t know what to do, so I just kind of touched him a little bit and said ‘Reverend,’ and he just exploded. He jumped and started hollering. He thought he was being robbed. It scared me and I ran back out in the street.”7 After things calmed down, Hawkins went back inside and cemented their relationship then and there by playing a version of “Oh Glory, How Happy I Am,” which he’d learned on the guitar grapevine. Davis hadn’t yet recorded it, but such was the power of his music that guitarists passed his arrangements from one to another like pilgrims trading cherished Scripture. It didn’t hurt that Hawkins had chosen not “Candy Man” or “Cocaine Blues” to demonstrate his chops, but one of Davis’s original spirituals. Hawkins began a year of intense study, ending when he got the itch to hitchhike around California. But he would remain close to the Davises, visiting them in Queens and bringing the Reverend to Pittsburgh for gigs. What Hawkins learned from Davis, which included a fair number of songs that Davis never recorded, laid the foundation for Hawkins’s lifelong devotion to his mentor’s guitar style. No one would absorb Davis’s complex arrangements in as much detail as Hawkins, who has subsequently taught them note-­for-­note to guitarists in video and DVD lessons produced by Stefan Grossman. Hawkins’s importance in preserving Davis’s music shouldn’t be underestimated. Even after the Reverend finally obtained sheet music for his songs and arrangements later on, they would include only chords and some voicings, but not the thousands of subtle techniques, including string dampening, syncopation, and rhythmic changes required to play the tunes correctly. If not for Hawkins, a number of Davis’s most intricate songs would most likely have survived only in skeletal form. Still, Hawkins regrets not having had the foresight to approach Davis as one would a composer, as opposed to just a folk guitar player. “The more I think about his style of playing, it’s so so so so difficult, that it took me all my life to feel like I was getting comfortable with it,” Hawkins says. “And when we were young there, taking a few lessons from him, looking back and realizing how barely, barely, barely 206

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we learned a lot of those songs. . . . A lot of them were just so deep. It’s just amazing how deep, deep, deep a musician he was.”8 In his inimitable way, Davis had tried that spring to impart the same lesson to another guitarist lionized by the folk movement. It was the day after an April concert at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, when Davis and Elizabeth Cotten had both wound up at the home of Lyle and Elizabeth Lofgren, two of the young concert organizers.9 “Libba” Cotten, born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1893, had mastered guitar and banjo as a young girl but had mostly given up playing when, in the mid-­to late 1940s, working in a Lansburgh’s department store in Washington, DC, she returned a lost Peggy Seeger to her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, a composer who was the wife of folklorist Charles Seeger, mother of folk singer Mike Seeger, and stepmother of Pete Seeger. Cotten began working as a domestic for the Seegers, who, quite to their amazement, eventually discovered her instrumental prowess. Cotten went out on the folk circuit beginning in the late fifties and had a major influence on guitarists through her songs like “Freight Train” and “Shake, Sugaree.”10 To Rev. Gary Davis, Cotten’s reputation as a master of the Piedmont style didn’t make much of an impression. As patient and gentle as he was with most of his guitar pupils, he could be brutal to fellow professionals. The Lofgrens had turned on their reel-­to-­reel recorder, and their tapes snatched the casual conversation in the living room that afternoon as the musicians and friends of the Lofgrens waited for dinner to be prepared. Davis talked about teaching Dave Van Ronk “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” and reeled off the country recipe for making wine out of tomatoes (and another type with locust seeds). At one point the Reverend decided to school Cotten on improving her guitar technique:11 Davis: You know one thing, Miss Cotten. There’s something deep I want to tell you.

Cotten: All right, tell me. Davis: Very deep.

Cotten: Yes, tell me.

Davis: Do you know what I could be to you? Cotten: Hmm?

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Davis: Do you know what I could be to you? Cotten: What you could be to me?

Davis: Yeah, in all your—­your undertakings. Cotten: No. What?

Davis: A great blessing in all your undertakings. Cotten: Well . . . I appreciate it.

Davis: Now, before you get too far. . . . I’m not speaking in ways no sweetheart or nothing like that.

Cotten: I didn’t think you meant in that manner anyway.

Davis: You’s a fine performer, I’ll tell you straight back. A fine performer, you understand? And there’s room for you for better. And listen at me and my exercising, you understand, would make you be greater. . . .

Cotten: Tell me what steps to take. Davis: What’s that?

Cotten: Tell me what steps to take.

Davis: I have to tell you. You can keep that style but you can put more to it and make it more greater, you understand. If you’ve got a good

ground and you don’t put more to it to make what you want to make over it, well, you’ve just got a good ground, that’s all.

Cotten: Oh, I see.

A short time later, Davis grabbed Cotten’s guitar as she was trying to tune it and played a typically dazzling rendition of “Twelve Sticks,” as if to say: I’m the only master here; just try to follow. “He was the best of the best and he hated to see these people who were probably inferior to him in musical ability get famous for what he called doin’ nothing,” Larry Brezer says.12

*

With the smashing success of the American Blues and Gospel Caravan the previous year, the English Folk Dance and Song Society and promoter Roy Guest put together another package of concerts for American folk and blues acts in England and Scotland, tapping Davis, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Derroll Adams, Buffy Sainte-­Marie, and Josh White for the American Folk Music and Blues Tour. Guest hired Joe Boyd, who’d managed the 1964 outing, to reprise his role as tour manager, 208

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and Brendan Power, a soft-­spoken twenty-­year-­old Irishman, signed on as the road manager and to look after Davis.13 The two-­week tour, beginning in Birmingham on June 3, 1965, would cover much the same ground as the previous year’s outing, but with a bit less fanfare and apparently less promotion. It was hardly uneventful, however. For Power, who hadn’t heard of the Reverend before getting the job, it began with an eye-­opening encounter between Davis and a young British guitar phenom. When Davis arrived in London to begin the tour, Power drove him to Selmer’s, the city’s biggest guitar shop, on Tottenham Court Road, which catered to working musicians. As Davis’s “Miss Gibson” was fitted with a new set of strings, a bloke who’d been watching the transaction asked Davis if he’d play a song or two, and Davis obliged. “Do you play the guitar?” Davis asked. “Yes, I do,” the young man said. “Well, would you play something for me?” “No, I could never play in your presence,” the man said. As he led Davis out of the store, Power asked a store employee who the shy young guitarist was. “That’s Eric Clapton.”14 Power had served as road manager for other musicians, including Phil Ochs and the New Lost City Ramblers. The effect Davis had had on Clapton, who’d just left the popular rock group the Yardbirds, was not lost on Power. “It changed my attitude toward Gary quite considerably,” Power says.15 Unlike the previous tour, which had a chartered bus, this one made the rounds in a station wagon, befitting its smaller budget. Only Davis, at age sixty-­nine, and Sainte-­Marie, a twenty-­four-­year-­old Cree Indian singer-­songwriter, would perform at every show, with the rest of the cast rotating in and out. Once again, so many miles from home, the Reverend—­who was still being portrayed by promoters as a street singer, though he’d given that up—­felt free to perform the blues that he knew British audiences wanted to hear. At the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on June 4, he included only one spiritual, “Children of Zion,” in a set of mostly blues. Bob Groom, writing for Blues World, found it a remarkable perfor209

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mance, and he put into stark relief what made Davis different from almost every other folk performer and rather more like a jazz artist: “There followed the high spot of the evening—­an instrumental which displayed Davis’s absolute mastery of the guitar. In the course of approximately six minutes, Gary must surely have utilized almost every note, every chordal phrase, every trick of technique available on a six-­ string guitar. His dazzling elaborations on the basic theme displayed an endless fund of ideas and a supreme ability to translate them into music.”16 After an encore, Groom wrote, Davis “left the stage to a tremendous ovation.” The British invasion was in full swing by then, with groups like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, and even the now-­ forgotten Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders virtually taking over the Billboard pop chart in the United States. The previous month, in fact, nine of the top-­ten songs were performed by British groups, a remarkable feat. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t still a whole lot of borrowing of American styles. At one point when the members of the American Folk Music and Blues Tour were relaxing at a hotel, Scottish folk music sensation Donovan came on the radio doing a version of Sainte-­Marie’s “Universal Soldier,” and she heard it for the first time from the next room. “She didn’t know that Donovan had recorded it,” Power says.17 Donovan would mine Gary Davis’s material for his next record. As the tour carried on, the close quarters of the station wagon proved a bit too much on a few occasions, Sainte-­Marie would tell her manager, Herb Gart. “The Reverend was spending the entire tour trying to feel her up. Pretending to fall out of the car—­whatever he could do.” Davis’s wandering hands had become something of a running joke among his followers, with his plausible deniability as a blind man giving him somewhat free rein to do things a sighted person could never get away with. “He had a just absolutely point on accuracy of hitting any woman he was speaking to in the bosom,” the folklorist-­ musician Ellen Stekert recalled. Waitresses at some of the folk clubs back in the States, like the Second Fret in Philadelphia, kept their distance from him, but many of the women who came in too-­close contact with Davis seemed to view him as a giddy, almost childlike spirit, a mischievous but stirring life force, not a malevolent one. As Gart 210

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recalled, “There was no complaint on Buffy’s part. Just the story with humor.”18 On June 13, the tour headed north, with Davis, Sainte-­Marie, and Elliott flying to Scotland for a concert at the Glasgow Concert Hall. Josh MacRae and Hamish Imlach, two Scottish folk musicians, met the threesome at the Glasgow airport. Having only seen them on record covers, Imlach worried they wouldn’t recognize their guests. MacRae had no similar concern: “A blind black man, a Cherokee Indian and a cowboy?” he said. “If we don’t recognize them, Hamish, I’m giving up the drink.” Mamie Lang, a fellow Glaswegian who was among the concert organizers, remembered that when the trio got off the plane, they were “well gone” with alcohol. Lang put Davis up for the night, and the two stayed up until morning, with Lang feeding him mince and tatties, while Davis taught her “Candy Man.”19 Though Davis was arguably better known in England than in the United States by then, his guitar virtuosity still managed to shock the uninitiated. In the crowd at the Glasgow concert were folk music enthusiasts like Alastair Cochrane, who drove from Perth sixty miles away to attend the show. “Jack and Buffy certainly lived up to my expectations, but Rev. Gary Davis far exceeded any expectations I might have had as an aspiring guitarist who had failed to get to grips with his style of playing,” Cochrane remembered. “It was an eye-­opening and jaw-­dropping experience to see him perform a small selection of his extensive repertoire and lift the evening’s performance to another level.”20 Journalists at home rarely bothered to interview Davis, whose devotion to acoustic gospel music for most of his career had made him less marketable. In Britain, where he became known early on as the blind minister who could play the blues without peer, there was more curiosity about his life’s story. Interest in the plight of American blacks ran high among young musicians in the United Kingdom, and that dovetailed with their deep affection for the music that black artists had wrought out of their despair. “Maybe we identified with the sense of freedom that so many of their songs spoke about,” Ralph McTell says. “There was this bubbling under of the political content, you know. Here we were quite aware of the civil rights movement; we were naive and idealistic.”21 211

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In Europe, Davis wouldn’t have to take a back seat to the white artists who popularized traditional music. Even Jack Elliott, whose fame in England had preceded Davis’s by nearly a decade, had a hard time competing for reporters’ attention with Davis on the same bill. As Simon Napier had written when the tour had visited Brighton on June 9: “This time [Davis] was almost carried off stage. Still, Jack Elliott had to go on sometime, I guess.”22 Blues Unlimited would feature several interviews with Davis over the years, the first conducted by Richard Noblett and two colleagues prior to a gig on June 18 at the Romford Folk Club in Essex. The interviews are among the few published talks with Davis that survive, and they touch on his upbringing, his influences, and his present life. Asked about his early days to start things off, he offered this startling assessment: “In South Carolina they hung coloured people when they felt like it; in Georgia, they staked them.” (Davis had a good memory. One article from his hometown paper during his childhood detailed how a crowd burned two black men at the stake in Statesboro after their conviction for murder.)23 Davis discussed the origins of some of his songs, including “Co‑ caine,” confirming that he invented the guitar arrangement based on a song from a traveling carnival show. And asked about his street-­ singing days in Harlem, he offered: “Oh, I used to! That’s where I got most of my robbin’ done.” Davis seemed to be living decently on his royalties and tour revenue, the reporters concluded: “The Reverend is looking very well and has put on weight since we last saw him. He could no longer be described as a ‘tall sparse man.’”24 Nearing the end of tour, Davis made an impromptu appearance on June 19 at a blues festival in Uxbridge, where the Who, Marianne Faithful, and Eric Clapton were performing along with the influential British bluesmen Long John Baldry and John Mayall. “I don’t think we really imagined that he would sing that night,” recalled Harvey Shield, then a young guitarist from North Wembly, who took Davis to the festival along with Power. “But of course as soon as we were there the organizers were so thrilled and said, ‘Will Gary sing us a couple of tunes?’ Long John Baldry was there and Eric Clapton, and they were both thrilled to see him.”25 Davis performed several songs, including “Cocaine” as an encore. 212

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By then, Shield’s band, Episode Six, with future Deep Purple members Roger Glover and Ian Gillan, had already cut a high-­energy electrified cover of “Cocaine,” which unfortunately was never released. Davis returned to the United States having made another enduring impression on British fans and musicians.

*

As usual, Davis wouldn’t enjoy nearly the same attention back home. In July, he made his second and last appearance at the Newport Folk Festival as a featured artist. With both the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam heating up, the crowd of seventy-­five thousand—­ many of them members of “the bedroll safari,” the Boston Globe noted—­broke attendance records over four days, in what would turn out to be one of the folk era’s swan songs. The big stories of the festival would wind up being Bob Dylan’s apocalyptic switch to electric instruments; Alan Lomax’s fisticuffs with Albert Grossman after Lomax derided the talents of the electrified Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a prospective Grossman client; and Joan Baez’s protestations against President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to send combat troops to Southeast Asia.26 Davis’s stellar performances on opening night and during a sparsely attended religious concert were captured by Vanguard Records and released later, and although he didn’t get much of the spotlight, Peter, Paul, and Mary dedicated a lively rendition of “If I Had My Way” to Davis. And the Reverend did manage to get his message of uplift across to some of the young people who had come in search of relief from the national malaise. Chris Morris, a nineteen-­year-­old student at Rockford College in Illinois, was among the college kids digging Davis’s from-­the-­gut vibe. “He was really an uplifter,” Morris recalled, and Davis was trying to get everyone “to focus their attentions on something other than their immediate frustrations.”27 Two weeks after Newport, Lomax got the chance to call attention to the traditional performers he thought had been getting short shrift, and this time there would be no big stars around to soak up the attention. With the support of the Newport Folk Festival Foundation, he hosted a concert of traditional music on August 16 in Central Park, featuring Davis, the Georgia Sea Island Singers, and the Ed Young 213

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Fife and Drum Band at the Delacorte Theater, best known as the site of Shakespeare in the Park. For Lomax, the concert also represented an opportunity to bring audiences closer to southern black folk musicians. Since the beginning of the year the civil rights struggle had entered a new stage, with the assassination of Malcolm X in February, the “bloody Sunday” clashes in Selma, Alabama, between demonstrators and police in March, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in early August. But also blowing in the wind was the buzz from a raucous concert the night before at Shea Stadium in Queens, where the Beatles and their brilliant pop melodies had all but been drowned out by the screams of fifty-­five thousand hysterical fans “in magnificent and terrifying voice,” as the New York Times had noted. Right before everyone’s eyes, the Beatles and Dylan were ushering in the rock era and closing the chapter in which folk music had become synonymous with pop and traditional artists like Gary Davis had enjoyed the fruits of a thriving college folk scene.28 Lomax welcomed the Central Park crowd by trying to drive home the continuing vitality of traditional music and its connection to the civil rights battles then roiling the nation. “The Negro has just won his right to vote, carrying his own fight in the places where it was dangerous and winning his right to stand proud and equal with the rest of American citizens.” He then led out Rev. Gary Davis, calling him “one of the great American instrumentalists.”29 Davis performed a diverse mix of songs that evening, frailing on the banjo, picking his guitar, and shouting like a man in church on a rendition of “I’m a Soldier (in the Army of the Lord),” with Bessie Jones and other members of the Georgia Sea Island Singers helping out with whoops and tambourines. In introducing the song, Davis weighed in with his views of earthly sin, tempered no doubt by recent events in the South and in South Vietnam: This world belong to the devil and we’re just here waiting awhile. Isn’t that right? Some folks say they don’t want to lay down and die and go to hell. Well, it is enough to live in hell and then lay down and die and go to hell, that’s too much. . . . Since the devil got the

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upper hand of the world and don’t allow us but a little bit, but let’s make a use of our little bit.30

He added a short time later: “Some people say, ‘If you Christian you won’t fight.’ No, you won’t fight if you ain’t got nothin’ to fight, certainly. The fightingest people we have is Christian people.” They were the closest to political statements that the Reverend was ever likely to make on stage. “He didn’t talk politics, he didn’t talk race,” Alan Smithline says, echoing what his other students would recall. He did, however, make his views known, showing up frequently during the sixties for concerts benefiting civil rights causes, and he took the same tack with Vietnam.31 By the fall, anti-­war fervor was reaching a boiling point. On September 24, Davis appeared before a capacity crowd of around three thousand at Carnegie Hall during a “Sing-­in for Peace” with a huge list of singers, including Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand, Odetta, Fred McDowell, Barbara Dane, and dozens more. Dane and Irwin Silber, the editor of Sing Out!, had organized the concert, and the performers signed a statement that appeared in the program: “The undersigned are gathered together for one purpose: to protest the immoral, irrational and irresponsible acts of war which our government carries out in Viet-­Nam in our names . . .”32 The event drew such interest that two shows were held, one ending at 11 p.m. and another beginning at midnight. At 3:30 a.m., several hundred concertgoers began a candlelight march to the Village Gate nightclub downtown for more songs. “That was actually the first large demo against the Vietnam War,” Dane recalled. “We had to take Carnegie Hall for [a] second show [the] same night, meaning a total of about seven thousand people came, even with a newspaper strike going on!”33 It was one thing performing on a stage in front of committed opponents of the war in the sanctity of Carnegie Hall. It was quite another braving a street protest, which is what Davis did three weeks later when Vietnam War opponents and supporters came face to face in one of their first confrontations. On the afternoon of October 16, more than ten thousand people marched down Fifth Avenue, from Ninety-­ 215

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Fourth Street to Sixty-­Ninth Street, along with a life-­size dummy of a bloodied Uncle Sam, chanting “Stop the war in Vietnam now!” “The demonstrators, most of them about college age, marched 10 abreast down the avenue, forming a mass of people 20 blocks long,” the Times reported. The protesters were jeered at, splattered with red paint, hit with raw eggs, physically attacked in a few cases by counterdemonstrators, and booed with shouts of “Back our troops in Vietnam, you traitors!” and “Commie rats!”34 Similar protests rocked cities around the country that day in what organizers called “the largest peace demonstration in 25 years in this country.” In New York, as marchers turned east at Sixty-­Eighth Street to head toward a rally in front of Hunter College between Lexington and Park Avenues, protesters and counterprotesters almost came to blows. “The counter pickets (the American Legion men) began to shout, ‘Commies!’ ‘Go to Cuba, you bastards;’ ‘Get a haircut, Pinkos;’ ‘Ho Chi Min is a fink,’” according to the Hunter Arrow, the student newspaper. “Suddenly there was shouting on both sides. The marchers screamed ‘Peace’ as their critics shouted at them. . . . There was movement of thousands of feet and the shouts of hundreds of angry people. . . . Riot seemed imminent.”35 At the rally, Rev. A. J. Muste, the eighty-­year-­old dean of American pacifists, called for an end to the war, and journalist I. F. Stone railed against the Johnson administration’s war propaganda and the “military industrial complex.” A saboteur cut the wires to the public address system, but folk singer Tom Paxton led the crowd in singing “We Shall Overcome.” Sixteen-­year-­old Mark Ross of Queens and his best friend Carl Gettleman, son of the actress Estelle Getty, were among the marchers. “We had this big rally and Reverend Davis played ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy,’” Ross recalled.36 It was early on in the war, before images of young G.I.s arriving home in body bags became a daily drumbeat on the evening news. Ironically, a song that was so personal to Davis would take on a whole new meaning for young white rock fans by the time the Grateful Dead and Hot Tuna covered it late in the decade during the worst Vietnam turmoil. Most of the crowd at the rally probably didn’t know who the Rev216

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erend was, but he “was always greeted with respect and admiration,” Ross says. Much of the nation hadn’t yet turned on the war, and appearing at the rally took courage for Davis, who as a blind man would have been assaulted with the sounds of protest without the visual cues to make sense of it all. He may not have been an overtly political performer like Pete Seeger or Len Chandler, but he was willing to put himself on the line for a cause he believed in.

*

As 1966 began, Davis was expanding his horizons. On January 15, he opened a music store at 3807 Third Avenue in the Bronx, a few blocks from where he and Annie used to live. His partner in the new venture was a man named Eddie Outlaw, who ran a newsstand nearby. According to a flyer, the shop offered guitar lessons given by Davis, guitar repair (“All Work done on Premises”), and guitars and records for sale along with custom-­made straps and cases. Cards were printed up that read, Eddie Outlaw & Rev. Gary Davis Record Shop. Whether Davis had any premonition that his concert work was going to taper isn’t known. But he seems to have taken his new business pretty seriously, with Annie sending him dinners at the shop. It’s unclear how long the store lasted, but given that few students, with the possible exception of Ernie Hawkins, remember taking lessons there, it was probably fairly short-­lived. “I wasn’t so keen about the music shop,” Annie Davis recalled. “Because it was in the wrong spot. A lot of people wasn’t too good around in there. . . . So we stayed awhile and the man went up on the rent, then we all decided we would give it up.”37 Had he been stocking the record bins in his new shop, Davis might have come across a couple of unpleasant surprises. By February, Verve Folkways had released Lightnin’ Strikes, an LP by Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins. Hopkins, a Texas bluesman who played mostly in a drone bass style and rarely appeared without dark sunglasses, had been delivered from relative obscurity by the folklorist Mack McCormick and was enjoying, like Davis, a late concert career. When the LP came out, some reviewers did a double take when they saw the record jacket: it featured a large photograph not of Hopkins but of another black guitarist in a fedora wearing black shades—­Rev. Gary Davis. “The tapes 217

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were bought from an outside producer, by a large busy label, and this undoubtedly accounts for the impersonal production,” Barbara Dane commented in Sing Out!38 At around the same time, Columbia Records released the debut single from the Los Angeles–­based band Rising Sons, featuring Taj Mahal and two of Davis’s guitar students, Ry Cooder and Jesse Lee Kincaid. On the A side was a version of Davis’s “Candy Man,” which the group had featured prominently in its L.A. stage act, with Skip James’s haunting blues “Devil Got My Woman” on the B side. On “Candy Man,” Kincaid sang and played backup guitar, with Cooder supplying Davis’s key fingerpicking lick and Mahal playing bass.39 Despite “playing Gary’s version down the line,” according to Kincaid, on the advice of their lawyer the group didn’t credit Davis with the song or the arrangement. Nor did they credit James. The song credits went instead to the Rising Sons. Izzy Young, for one, was having none of it. “They feel that Negro music is free as the air and belongs to everyone, so why pay for it,” he wrote in Sing Out! after getting a copy of the record. “I feel they should give something back, even if legally the true composer is not protected.” In fact, Davis was legally protected: M. Witmark and Sons, one of Warner Music’s publishing arms under the MPHC umbrella, had obtained a copyright for “Candy Man” in Davis’s name in 1964. But as Young would tell folklorist Richard Reuss a short time later, MPHC hadn’t followed through much after signing traditional artists like Davis, Odetta, and Jean Ritchie a few years earlier as part of the Folksinging Project, choosing instead to focus on big names such as Peter, Paul, and Mary and Bob Dylan.40 Kincaid still wonders who really wrote “Candy Man,” but he knows Columbia’s copyright department wasn’t going out of its way to find out. “Our slick Beverly Hills lawyer informed us that, ‘The way you handle this, boys, to make the big money is that you copyright the arrangement and claim the arrangement copyright,’” he says. As fate would have it, the single sold poorly, and although the Rising Sons had recorded extensively for Columbia, the record company opted not to release the LP at the time. “They really did not know how to market an interracial group, popularly,” Mahal says. “They just didn’t know how to do it.” Cooder left the band later that year, effectively killing it, and he and Mahal soon emerged as major solo performers.41 218

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It was in March, shortly after returning to New York from a West Coast trip, that Davis made one of his all-­too-­rare television appearances, on Rainbow Quest, Pete Seeger’s new folk music show on WNJU, a hard-­to-­tune UHF channel known mostly for Spanish-­language programs. For Seeger, who’d been blacklisted from television for more than a decade, the show represented a victory of sorts. He and his coproducer, Sholom Rubinstein, put up the money to finance thirty-­ nine hour-­long episodes, to run initially on channel 47 in the New York area and on thirteen stations around the country. In New York it had debuted the previous November and aired Saturday nights at 7 p.m., right before a program called Bullfights from Mexico. “Channel 47’s coup in obtaining the services of Mr. Seeger is reason enough to make sure that one’s set can pick up UHF,” the Times TV critic Jack Gould wrote.42 Taped without an audience at WNJU’s unadorned Newark, New Jersey, studio, the show had a simple format. Each episode opened with a clip of Seeger frailing his banjo and singing his song “Oh, Had I a Golden Thread,” whose lyrics inspired the show’s title. Then Seeger would bring out guest musicians to chat and perform a few songs, with the host often picking up his banjo or guitar to join in. His guests ran the gamut of folk music, from Judy Collins and the Stanley Brothers to Mississippi John Hurt and Tom Paxton. Davis’s episode—­number twenty-­three of thirty-­nine—­in which he appeared with Donovan and folk singer Shawn Phillips, got taped on March 10, 1966, a few weeks after Donovan and Phillips appeared together at Carnegie Hall. Ernie Hawkins drove Davis to the studio, and on the way Davis asked what songs he should perform for the show. “‘Oh Glory’ and ‘Children of Zion,’” Hawkins told him.43 When they arrived at the studio, Seeger’s wife, Toshi, handed Hawkins an apple, and Hawkins stood off to the side to watch the program unfold. Scotland-­born Donovan, then just twenty, had started making waves in the United States the previous year with his brand of psychedelic folk. He came on first, singing a slow ballad called “My Sweet Joy,” which he never recorded. Then Seeger tried to think of a complimentary number and settled on the traditional “Wagoner’s Lad,” which he performed solo. Next, Donovan sang “Colours,” the second of his singles to reach the Billboard Hot 100, and Seeger played along 219

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on banjo. Seeger then introduced Shawn Phillips, who came out with a sitar to accompany Donovan on “Twelve King Fishers.” The Indian stringed instrument had been made popular in the West by George Harrison, who’d played one on the Beatles’ song “Norwegian Wood” the previous year, and other folkies were experimenting with its otherworldly sound, soon to be associated forever with the psychedelic era. Following a short break, Rev. Gary Davis appeared sitting to Seeger’s left, dressed in a suit and wearing dark shades, and already launching into “Children of Zion” as Donovan and Phillips looked on, seemingly transfixed. While Seeger was no doubt happy to be back on television, he couldn’t have anticipated what the Reverend had in store. “Children of Zion,” Davis would tell students, was five hundred years old, passed down from his grandmother, who learned it from her grandmother, who learned it from her grandmother, and on and on, “way back yonder.” The song, which Davis’s grandmother sang hoeing in the fields,44 is one of the Reverend’s most intriguing, almost a chanted musical prayer, played in A minor but without a chorus or easy chord changes. As his fingers darted up and down the fingerboard of his Gibson B-­45 twelve-­string, Davis began to sing: Oh, I wonder where my old mother, a-­men,

Lord, I wonder where my old mother, a-­men She’s somewhere sittin’ in Glory, a-­men

Lord, she’s somewhere sittin’ in Glory, a-­men

Accustomed to performing in church without a time limit, Davis didn’t feel compelled to follow the unspoken rules of show business to “keep things moving.” His song went on minute after minute, more than seven minutes in all, with Seeger, Donovan, and Phillips looking on. Seeger grabbed his banjo and tried playing along but seemed stumped by the song’s structure. When Davis finally finished with a last flurry on the guitar, Seeger said: “Oh, Reverend Gary Davis. That wasn’t just a song—­that was a[n] epic!” Seeger told Davis that he and Donovan had a lot in common, an apparent reference to the Scottish singer’s busking in Edinburgh and London.45 Seeger said Davis had been “born and raised down in North Carolina,” and Davis quickly corrected him. Then Seeger added a little 220

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unnecessarily: “I know that sometimes when people hear you the first time, they don’t always understand all the words, but I think the message gets across the same.” “It gets across somehow,” Davis replied, betraying no offense. Seeger finally offered, a bit unsurely: “I’d like you to do another one. Is there another one where, maybe we could help out just a bit, that has kind of a little refrain?” Davis then launched into “Oh Glory, How Happy I Am”—­the song he’d planned on performing. It went on for another seven minutes-­plus, although this time Seeger could find the melody on his five-­string banjo. Before another break, Seeger announced that Donovan would do another song with Phillips on sitar and Davis broke in: “Let me feel that thing before you play it—­I just wanna feel it.” When the show returned, Phillips held up the sitar and Seeger placed Davis’s right hand on the instrument. The Reverend silently felt up and down the neck for a full minute, trying to get a sense of how its twenty-­plus strings functioned—­a fascinating bit of television for those who happened to tune in. Overall, Davis, who could take over a room with his magnetic personality, said very little during the program, preferring instead to politely answer Seeger’s questions and perform. Viewers would have come away with the impression of an older, unassuming blind minister, albeit one who could play the guitar with almost supernatural ability. The show with Donovan and Davis would first air on April 16, 1966, and, although Seeger would later say he spent all his savings producing the short-­lived program,46 Rainbow Quest would have a long afterlife, airing on stations around the country throughout the sixties and early seventies. It would be one of Davis’s few national TV appearances, along with a performance at the following year’s UC Berkeley Folk Festival that aired on public television. One topic that didn’t come up during Seeger’s show: Donovan had recently recorded a version of “Candy Man,” which led off side two of his second album Fairytale, released the previous October. He’d strummed the tune rather than fingerpicking it and added some drug imagery, but the arrangement was squarely based on Davis’s. On the record, though, he hadn’t given Davis credit for the words or music, calling it “traditional—­arranged by. . . .” He took a different tack with 221

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two other covers, giving Buffy Sainte-­Marie the author credit for “Universal Soldier” and the Scottish folk singer Bert Jansch credit for “Oh, Deed I Do.” In his autobiography years later, Donovan would say: “Another ‘cover’ I recorded for this second album was the country blues classic by Blind Gary Davis: ‘Candy Man.’ I had picked it up from Bert Jansch and given it my own rendering.”47 Once again, Davis would be overlooked on a song credit and have no one aggressively minding his interests. If he felt any anger or even knew about the copyright situation, he never mentioned it. In July, he left for the United Kingdom again, for his third tour, at the age of seventy. This one would be a solo affair of mostly small folk clubs. It may have been prompted by Doc Watson’s decision to pull out of the second annual Cambridge Folk Festival on July 9, apparently over a disagreement with his son and performing partner, Merle.48 The promoter, Roy Guest, got Davis as a last-­minute substitute, probably by calling Watson’s and Davis’s manager, Manny Greenhill. Davis wound up staying for three weeks, with a first stop on July 13 at the YMCA Hall in Aberdeen, Scotland, and subsequent appearances in Edinburgh, Keele (for the Keele Folk Festival), Barnsley, Cleethorpes, Redcar, Ashton-­under-­Lyne, London, Hull, Swansea, Wolverhampton, Essex, and Manchester.49 At Les Cousins, a popular Soho club, Davis performed two sets on July 23—­the first mostly gospel and the second including blues like “Cocaine” and “Candy Man”—­and later appeared impromptu at an all-­night jam hosted by the British bluesman Alexis Korner. “He stole the limelight . . . with a twenty-­minute spot that had the audience calling for more,” Tony Wilson wrote in Britain’s leading music magazine Melody Maker.50 In London’s famed Troubadour club on July 30, Long John Baldry led Davis down the cellar steps and into the subterranean spotlight. “They stood this poor little wizened old man on the stage . . . looking totally lost until they handed him his guitar,” recalled Terry Silver, then a twenty-­four-­year-­old Royal Air Force technician in the audience that night. Davis, it seems, was finally beginning to lose a bit of his youthful vigor. Still Silver remembers, with the high esteem in which British fans always held Davis, that it turned out to be “a magic evening.”51 222

Page from Gary Davis’s application to the South Carolina Institution for the Education of the Deaf and the Blind, Cedar Springs, South Carolina, August 26, 1914. Courtesy of South Carolina School for the Death and the Blind.

The home at 410 Poplar Street, Durham, North Carolina, June 1965, where Davis lived in the late 1930s and early ’40s. Courtesy of Open Durham.

(Top) One of the two blues tunes Davis recorded for the American Record Corporation in 1935 before he insisted on recording only spirituals. (Bottom) An ARC file card shows Davis's royalty went to the talent scout J. B. Long. Record scan courtesy of Roger Misiewicz; file card courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment Archives.

Sheet music for “Message from Heaven” (a.k.a. “There’s Destruction in This Land”) by Rev. Gary Davis, arranged by P. B. Watkins for piano and gospel quartet, 1946. Courtesy of Stefan Grossman.

Program from one of Davis’s church services, New York City, late 1940s or early 1950s. Courtesy of Stefan Grossman.

Davis performing at the Music Inn, Lenox, Massachusetts, July 2, 1950. Annie, his wife, is seated behind him. Courtesy of Estate of Leonard J. Ross.

Music Inn concert, July 2, 1950. Left to right: Dan Burley, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and a snoozing Davis. Courtesy of Estate of Leonard J. Ross.

One of the only surviving photos of Davis as a street singer, in Manhattan, early 1950s. Photo by John Cohen.

Izzy Young leading Davis on stage for a midnight concert, Actor’s Playhouse, New York City, March 21, 1958. Courtesy of Photo-­ Sound Associates. Ronald D. Cohen Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Izzy Young at the Folklore Center, Greenwich Village, with Liz Blum, circa 1958. Blum would later host Rev. Gary Davis and Bob Dylan together at Bennington College. Courtesy of Liz Blum.

Davis playing guitar at a Greenwich Village party, May 1, 1959. Happy Traum and his future wife, Jane, stand behind the bass player. Dick Weissman stands to their left, arms folded. Standing with guitar on Davis’s left is his first New York guitar pupil, John Gibbon. Courtesy of Photo-­Sound Associates. Ronald D. Cohen Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

(Above) Davis jamming with Barry Kornfeld, his first concert partner, at a Greenwich Village party, May 1, 1959. Courtesy of Photo-­Sound Associates. Ronald D. Cohen Collec‑ tion, Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

(Right) Davis on the cover of Sing Out!, February–­March 1960.

Davis at the Indian Neck Folk Festival, Branford, Connecticut, May 1961, where he made quite an impression on a young Bob Dylan. Photo by Beau Johnson.

Davis being recorded by Stefan Grossman at the Reverend’s home in Jamaica, Queens, circa 1969. Photo by Herbert Grossman. Courtesy of Stefan Grossman.

(Left) Davis with some female admirers, Club 47, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1963. Photo © John Byrne Cooke.

(Below) Davis and Elizabeth Cotten at the home of Lyle and Elizabeth Lofgren, Min‑ neapolis, Minnesota, April 1965. Davis told Cotten he could give her guitar lessons to improve her playing. Photo by Elizabeth Lofgren.

Davis’s arrest record, New York City Police Department, 1965. Courtesy of Stefan Grossman.

Gary and Annie Davis at home in Jamaica, Queens, circa 1968. Photo by Stefan Grossman.

Davis asleep with one of his “Miss Gibson” guitars at home in Jamaica, Queens, circa 1968. Photo by Stefan Grossman.

Davis checking his Braille watch at Apostolic Studios, New York City, 1969. Photo by John Townley.

Davis pinching a woman’s bottom at the Cambridge Folk Festival, England, 1971. Photo by Stefan Grossman.

Davis getting a pretty girl to hug him onstage in London, 1971. Photo by Georges Chatelain.

Davis at the Cambridge Folk Festival, England, 1971. Photo by Stefan Grossman.

The Davises’ home at 109-­42 174th Street, Jamaica, Queens, early 1970s. Courtesy of Stefan Grossman.

Davis reading his Braille Bible with Roy Book Binder, circa 1972. Courtesy of Stefan Grossman.

Davis in bed, circa 1972. Courtesy of Stefan Grossman.

Davis’s final concert, First Presbyterian Church, Northport, New York, April 24, 1972. Photo © Doug Menuez.

Rev. Gary Davis funeral program, May 11, 1972. Courtesy of Stefan Grossman.

Gary and Annie Davis’s grave at Rockville Cemetery, Lynbrook, New York. Annie’s date of death is still missing from the marker. Photo by author.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

WHERE YOU GOIN’, OLD DRUNKARD? People thought the hip thing to do and the kind thing to do, although it wasn’t kind, was to bring him a fifth of whiskey. J ohn Ull man

O

ne of the most unfortunate and least-­discussed aspects of Rev. Gary Davis’s late career as a concert performer was the way in which problems with alcohol sometimes overshadowed his genius and threatened his livelihood. He’d long enjoyed a good drink, his beverage of choice being a bottle of Seagram’s 7 whiskey with some peppermint hard candies tossed in, making a kind of homemade schnapps. As a younger man, Davis could down liquor like he was slurping lemonade on a hot day and often go about his business. He drank a good many young folkniks under the table and was sometimes the last man standing at parties in the Village or Cambridge. As he aged, however, his tolerance for alcohol began to wane. At home, that didn’t matter so much, since Annie, who didn’t approve of drinking in principle, intercepted the booze that students brought as offerings and made the bottles disappear in a flash. Out on the folk circuit was another story. When Manny Greenhill booked the Reverend for out-­of-­town gigs, he relied on club owners, folk music fans, students, and others to house and care for Davis. Even had Greenhill wanted to travel with all of his clients—­a logistical impossibility—­doing so would have cut into what were extremely tight profit margins for traditional artists on the road. The system worked much of the time, but some of Davis’s caretakers were better suited to the task than others. “Manny was famous for putting Davis on a bus or a train and sending him off somewhere, knowing that at the other end of the line there would be some young Jewish cowboy with a D-­28 [guitar] in one hand and bottle of whiskey in the other, 223

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ready and waiting to take care of the old guy,” recalled the folk singer Andy Cohen, who spent some time with Davis in the sixties and later became a noted interpreter of his music.1 Sometimes, if he drank too much before a gig, the often mirthful Reverend could become irascible and difficult. Just before a fall 1961 concert at Bennington College, where he was scheduled to perform with the little-­known Bob Dylan, Davis had gotten drunk at a dinner with college students and refused to go on stage until concert organizers answered a riddle that proved unanswerable. Dylan performed a long opening set to a smattering of boos from the impatient crowd until the effects of the whiskey wore off and Davis finally agreed to appear. “[Davis] was drunk and he was cantankerous and he was really uncooperative, and we weren’t sure we were going to be able to get him onto the stage,” recalled Liz Blum, the Bennington college sophomore who organized the show.2 It wasn’t just getting him to perform that proved challenging after Davis overindulged. He also had a tendency to preach at length to a crowd that had come to hear music. The problem was epitomized by a pair of ill-­fated concerts in Berkeley in 1964 and ’66. On both occasions, the Reverend’s caretakers were young folkies caught up in an emerging counterculture that embraced sin as a kind of political statement. In that milieu, they were ill-­prepared to put the breaks on any self-­destructive behaviors. “The kids hanging around him [were] just plying him with liquor and not having sense to limit him at all,” recalled Howard Ziehm, who hosted Davis for the January 1964 gig with the bluesman Jimmy Reed at the Berkeley Community Theater. Ziehm had a later career as a producer of X-­rated films like Flesh Gordon, but back then he was the free-­spirited part-­owner of the Cabale, a legendary Berkeley nightclub. “We were all like free-­wheeling, pot-­smoking, beer-­drinking, just trying to be crazy,” he says. “We didn’t really know why we were being crazy. You know, the Vietnam War was going on and everybody was in a rebellious mood. So there was a lot of camaraderie.”3 When a wobbly Reed was unable to perform at the concert due to what his manager later said was a seizure, Davis came on after an alcohol-­fueled afternoon and “started talking about the Israelis marching across the desert and this and that,” recalled Chris Strach224

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witz, the folk music producer, who promoted the show. “I finally had to go out and tell him, ‘Reverend, sing a song.’” Davis played a few songs but kept on discoursing, even as the crowd started to give up on the show. “One felt relieved he did not see the clusters of his audience walking towards the exits,” Russ Wilson wrote in the Oakland Tribune.4 Two years later, in February 1966, with his reputation already suffering, Davis had an even worse outing, with more press on hand to witness it. This time he was staying with Barry Melton, Bruce Barthol, and Paul Armstrong, all members of the fledgling folk rock group Country Joe and the Fish, who lived together, along with the avant-­ garde guitarist Robbie Basho, in the second-­story flat of an old house at Telegraph Avenue and Russell Street. By then, the psychedelic era had begun crystallizing in the Bay Area, as drugs, electric guitars, and anti-­war rage merged into an anti-­authoritarian hippie movement. Melton recalled the scene at the house for the week that Davis stayed there, attired for the occasion in his ministerial three-­piece suit and tie: “The Rev was tough. We sat around the table. We smoked weed, we drank voluminous amounts of alcohol. It’s possible we even had a pot of peyote boiling on the stove. . . . And we played and played and played and played, like four or five hours a day. I was eighteen, so I understand how I had that unlimited energy, but I’m tellin’ ya’ that he did too.”5 Davis’s concert at the Florence Schwimly Little Theater got off to an excellent start, but the Reverend drank during an intermission and things went downhill from there. When he began his second set sermonizing and still hadn’t played any songs, the promoter, Bill Ehlert, came on stage, according to one report, and “whispered to Gary that no music, no whisky. Infuriated, the Rev. tried to smash his guitar over Elhert’s head, muttering that nobody could talk to him that way.” It’s possible, of course, that Davis used his spontaneous lectures to buy some time until he regained the motor skills necessary to perform his demanding repertoire. Unfortunately, with his clouded judgment and inability to see his audience, he failed to recognize that he was turning off his fans. The show eventually continued with more sermonizing and Davis singing some songs, including “She’s Funny That Way”—­twice. To‑ ward the end of the concert, the person working the spotlights cre225

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ated a carnival atmosphere by flashing a new color every time Davis drunkenly changed chords. “The Rev. and the lights got two encores,” ED Denson sardonically noted in the Berkeley Barb, a counterculture paper. “The tragedy is that the Rev. Gary Davis is a gifted performer capable of some of the best music of any of the living folk musicians. Instead, the audience is treated to a sideshow which is degrading to the artist, and for the most part a drag.”6 The press came down hard. Denson concluded: “He simply has not adapted to being an artist for audiences more sophisticated than those on the street corners of Harlem, and the problem is made much worse by the encouragement given to him to continue his burlesque and Uncle Tom–­ing by the younger hippies.”7 Ralph Gleason, the critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, who had been at the Byrds’s show nearby and seen none of Davis’s brilliant first set, treated the episode like farce. “The kiddies besieged the Byrds and wouldn’t let them into the street and the Berkeley fuzz was trying to keep order like on the VDC [Vietnam Day Committee] march,” he wrote. “And next store at the Little Theater some old blind cat with a guitar was . . . on stage talkin,’ talkin,’ talkin’ and the guy putting on the show had to go out and ask him to sing, but it didn’t do any good, and some Berkeley folksinger type in white [L]evis, a flock of curls and a pea jacket yelled ‘amen, brother’ like he was in some church or something.”8 The reviewer for the UC Berkeley student newspaper thought it was high time for Davis to get off the road: “Sadly, this disappointing behavior has become recurrent in Davis’s concerts. . . . Davis’s manager . . . should seriously consider withdrawing Gary from the active concert circuit and perhaps present him at an occasional large festival and a few coffeehouses.”9 Alcohol may even have been a factor in a story that Barry Melton now tells with humor, but which could have ended tragically. The morning after the gig, when the Reverend was asleep in his bedroom, Melton tip-­toed in to retrieve something. I got whatever it was and I was headed toward the door when I

heard in a commanding voice, “Don’t move or you’re dead!” I turned around to see Rev with a .38 revolver in his hand pointed in my gen-

226

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eral direction, but sort of moving around so as to cover a wider tar-

get area. I remember screaming something to the effect of, “No—­ don’t shoot.” Rev replied, “One wrong move and you’re dead.” Well, then I started talking a mile a minute. . . . “Rev, it’s me, it’s Barry, don’t shoot Rev.” . . . Finally, Rev said, “Is that you, Barry?” The incident was soon over, and I had escaped with my life.10

There’s no doubt that Manny Greenhill got wind of Davis’s drinking problems, because promoters often had instructions to watch his intake. But the incidents grew more frequent as the decade wore on. Ed Pearl, the Ash Grove owner, recalled at least one occasion in the mid-­to late sixties when the Reverend narrowly avoided catastrophe at Pearl’s Los Angeles club. “Can’t remember who was supposed to be taking care of him, but that person got him drunk,” Pearl says. “So he arrived at the club completely drunk and he just faded out in the dressing room. And we weren’t going to have a show, and so I went there and kind of forced him. I said, ‘Gary you have to get it together, we have a full house here, people are waiting for you.’ I had to clean him up. And he went on stage and he was very good.”11 Hearing from Greenhill or by word of mouth of Davis’s difficulties, some promoters tried to keep things from spiraling out of control. When Barry Olivier, the founding director of the Berkeley Folk Festival, booked Davis to perform the year after his latest Berkeley fiasco, he had serious misgivings because of Davis’s past troubles. Two months before the festival, he wrote to Pearl asking for advice on how to avoid the same fate: “We are interested particularly in having Davis make a good contribution,” Olivier wrote, “because of his previous problems with Berkeley audiences, which have resulted in his popularity shrinking considerably here.”12 Olivier avoided any distress by pairing Davis with a young, black folk music fan who led him around during the festival and kept the booze away. And, aside from Davis’s concert performances, Olivier suggested the Reverend roam the Berkeley campus and play impromptu whenever the spirit moved him, recalling his days as a street singer. Thanks to the careful preparation, Davis had no problems and was very well received.13 Unfortunately, that kind of attention to detail often wasn’t possible. 227

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In the summer of 1967, Davis had the biggest meltdown of his career, at the Mariposa Folk Festival. Held on one hundred acres of cow pasture outside Toronto, Mariposa was Canada’s answer to Newport, a hugely popular event that attracted thousands of spectators over several days. Davis was on the schedule for opening night, but when he arrived to perform it became clear very quickly that he couldn’t. “He went on stage and could hardly stand,” recalled Leigh Cline, the stage manager that year. Davis attempted to play a few numbers and, as the Globe and Mail reported, “stumbled around the stage and mumbled into the mike.” “He was just really really drunk,” says Richard Flohil, who hosted the festival’s blues workshop. “He was slurring words. He was making somewhat suggestive remarks to ladies in the front row.”14 A member of the festival staff went on stage, midsong, to bring the spectacle to an end. Davis became belligerent before finally being led off in disgrace as the crowd of more than two thousand watched in stunned silence. The media mostly took pity. The Toronto Daily Star used a single word to sum up his performance—­“disastrous”—­and left it at that. The Globe and Mail lamented that “it was the appearance and not his songs that evoked the sadness.”15 Getting drunk or worse before a gig may have been all too common in jazz circles, and in the coming rock era mind-­altering drugs would become almost sine qua non. But there was something poignant about a blind, septuagenarian man of the cloth tottering under the spotlight in front of thousands. His fans might have recalled a verse from Davis’s “Pure Religion” about the drunkard “staggerin’ with a bottle in his hand” instead of crossing into heaven. Festival officials had long assumed Davis had coaxed a young staffer into furnishing him with whiskey back at his hotel. But that’s not what happened. The Canadian radio deejay Bev Lamb, then a young folk fan, recalled that prior to the concert Davis had “played all afternoon with his back to a tree, singing blues to whoever was nearby, including me. It seemed like a free concert. Sadly, people kept on offering free booze.”16 That evening, Davis reunited with his student Rick Ruskin, who escorted him to the performer’s tent, where they greeted Pops Staples, the matriarch of the folk gospel group the Staple Singers, who were 228

WHERE YOU GOIN’, OLD DRUNKARD?

performing that night. Earlier in the day, Staples had asked Richard Flohil if he could do anything to circumvent the festival’s no-­alcohol policy, and Flohil, a British-­born writer and public relations man, had obliged by making a run to the liquor store and surreptitiously handing Staples a mickey of rye, which he put in a flask. When Davis arrived for his show, Staples offered him a drink. “Pops Staples basically had a flask and he gave Gary far too many hits on it,” Ruskin says. “It was Pops Staples that got him drunk.” When everyone realized how incapacitated Davis had become, a chagrined Staples told Ruskin, “I didn’t realize I had given him too much.”17 Staples didn’t admit publicly to giving the Reverend the booze, but privately, Ruskin says, he was very embarrassed. If Staples did get the Reverend drunk, or put him over the edge after an afternoon of drinking, it had a surely unintended but nevertheless potent “life imitating art” aspect. Two years earlier, the Staple Singers had recorded their own version of “Samson and Delilah,” but Pops Staples had added a biblically accurate fourth verse that probably would have made the blind Davis, who seemed to identify with Samson, wince:18 They caught ol’ Samson by surprise

Picked up a stick and punched out his eye

The next day the festival’s director, Estelle Klein, asked Dick Waterman, who managed several rediscovered bluesmen, to keep an eye on Davis until his scheduled follow-­up show two nights later. Waterman had arrived in Toronto after Davis’s humiliation, and he asked the Reverend what had happened. “The devil put whiskey before me last night,” Davis told him, “and I was too weak to leave it be.” Waterman, whose clients included the alcoholic bluesman Son House, made sure Davis didn’t touch another drink and helped him choose four songs for his concert, including “Samson and Delilah” and “Twelve Gates to the City.” Davis apologized to the crowd for the Friday fiasco, Ruskin recalled, and put on a stellar show—­“staging a comeback,” as the Toronto Star noted.19 No one who knew Davis had the sense that he needed booze to function the way Son House did. Roy Book Binder, whose lessons and trips with the Reverend began two years after the Mariposa disaster, recalled: “When I toured with him, my main job was to intercept the 229

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bottles the college kids were trying to get him loaded with because that’s what college kids did. I used to wet the bottom of a glass with a quarter of an inch of bourbon or something and he would be totally satisfied.” Estelle Klein, who’d seen Davis totally undone with drink and then perform triumphantly two nights later, dashed off a pointed letter to Manny Greenhill after the festival, saying, in Waterman’s recollection: “The Reverend should not be allowed to travel alone or should certainly have somebody taking care of him as far as monitoring his drinking.”20 After that, Greenhill seems to have redoubled his efforts to let promoters and lead boys know that alcohol could be a big problem if not managed correctly. Nevertheless, Davis’s struggles continued off and on for the rest of his performing days, including a show toward the end at the University of Alberta when he got hopelessly drunk and his young student Larry Brezer had to attempt to take his place in front of an irked audience of one thousand, an experience Brezer remembers as “horrible.” Perhaps sensing that the rigors of the road were getting the better of Davis, Pops and Purvis Staples had tried telling the Reverend in the performer’s tent at Mariposa that he was getting too old to be living the life of a traveling guitar evangelist. “Purvis is trying to convince Gary to retire, arguing that he has done more than his fair share to serve God; that the Lord would want him to spend his last years enjoying the abundance of good things he created for the uplifting of Man’s soul,” Davis’s student Dean Meredith remembered. But Davis couldn’t be persuaded. He told them: “God put me on this earth to spread His Gospel and sing His Truth, and Lo’ help me, that’s what I’m bound to do until the day He knocks me down dead.”21

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THERE’S A BRIGHT SIDE SOMEWHERE (1967–­1970) I’ve been in love with his playing since I was fifteen. And when I actually met the guy, you couldn’t not love him! B ob Weir

B

y 1967, the musical world was in a state of flux. Clubs that a few years earlier had almost exclusively featured folk were now turning their attention to folk rock acts like the Byrds and rock groups like Cream, the Jefferson Airplane, the Mothers of Invention, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, which became the star attractions at concert halls from Los Angeles to New York. “Everyone I know is out of the folk music scene, into the pop music scene,” Izzy Young was lamenting at the Folklore Center as the year began.1 In what seemed an apt metaphor, Young had moved his once-­ bustling store to a new, less busy location on Sixth Avenue. Not everyone had left folk music, but commercial tastes in the United States had begun shifting inexorably, with obvious repercussions for the traditional artists who’d ridden the crest of the folk wave. “The interest in old blues singers died very quick,” Roy Book Binder recalled. “As soon as the hippie psychedelic thing happened and folk rock, it was all over. No solo act could draw a crowd. People couldn’t pay attention.”2 It was a hard economic reality for Rev. Gary Davis. With fewer gigs available, he had little choice but to further loosen his policy against playing blues if he wanted to be invited back. A program of spirituals wouldn’t get the job done, so he often included an entire set of secular songs, sometimes referring to that section of the concert as “y’all’s set,” as opposed to the one he preferred performing, what he called “the old folks’ set.”3 Or he’d mix in his popular gospel numbers with blues, rags, and secular tunes. During a concert in Montreal that January, he explained why he was performing more secular music than ever: 231

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Sometimes you got to give people . . . when they go to a market, you

got to give them what they call for. If it’s beef, the man got to have it

or he lose his money. And if they call for pork chops and he ain’t got it, he still lost his money. And if they go there and call for liver pudding and he don’t have that, he still lost his money. So that’s what I’m here for you all tonight. I’m trying to give you all what you want because I want your money.4

When Davis reached back for his secular material, he sometimes resurrected songs from the long-­ago era before the blues became widely popular and revolutionized American music. One song that he favored in the latter part of his concert career was “She Wouldn’t Say Quit,” a jaunty tune he’d first heard in a tented minstrel show in Greenville, South Carolina, around 1910.5 The lyrics were, to say the least, suggestive: I had a little girl and she wouldn’t say quit She wouldn’t say quit She wouldn’t say quit

I had a little girl who wouldn’t say quit Oh, please don’t tell nobody

The song also contained violent imagery that escalated verse after verse, and there were a lot of verses, with Davis pulling out lines at will, seemingly able to make it go on forever. I tried my best to drown her But she wouldn’t say quit She wouldn’t say quit . . .

And: I began to slap her . . .

I throwed her out the car . . . I put my foot on her . . . I began to whip her . . .

To the minstrel show audiences that first heard the tune in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, the violence might well have come across as slapstick, but with the founding of the National Or232

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ganization for Women in 1966 and the push for gender equality, the song could hit a sour note, with modern audiences not knowing what to make of it. Unable to read visual cues from the stage, the Reverend would often prolong the discomfort by stopping to ask the women in the crowd, “Can’t nobody tell me why she wouldn’t say quit?”—­a question usually met with silence. The song would nevertheless become one of his concert staples. In 1970, Davis would even perform the song for a group of surprised children during a concert at the Buck’s Rock Work Camp in New Milford, Connecticut. “I don’t know if he quite understood that he was playing for kids, playing for teenagers, playing for twelve-­year-­olds,” recalled the banjoist Bob Carlin, then a seventeen-­year-­old camper. “It was pretty dang funny.”6 On the other hand, when the Reverend performed his gospel material for American audiences in the post-­folk environment, it could be a tough sell, even more so than during the revival. It was one thing to sing “Twelve Gates to the City” to a crowd that had heard Dave Van Ronk or some other Greenwich Village folkie cover the song, quite another to reach kids who spent their days listening to Hendrix and the Doors. David Amram, the multi-­instrumentalist and composer, performed in a concert with Davis and the folksinger Odetta at Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan’s East Village in the latter part of the sixties. As Amram recalls, the audience did not at first pay much attention to Davis. “He was all dressed up like he always was in this beautiful suit. Odetta was there, and a lot of other people too. He started playing, and Odetta turned to everybody, including the musicians who were talking and laughing, and said, ‘Be quiet! This is a very special thing!’ I never saw her shush anybody before or since. She was really letting everybody there know in Tompkins Square Park that this was somebody you better listen to.”7 With his bookings slowing down, Davis stayed home with Annie in Jamaica for longer periods, focusing, no doubt, on his ministerial work and his private lessons. With even the college folk scene diminished—­ some folk societies simply folded for lack of interest—­he often found himself relegated to smaller venues, like the YMCA on Twenty-­Third Street in Manhattan, where Bernie Klay, a maintenance engineer for the New York City Board of Education, had begun staging folk concerts after Izzy Young cut down on Folklore Center shows. 233

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Still, there were gigs to be had, at the larger folk and blues festivals; at clubs like the Quiet Knight in Chicago, the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, and Caffè Lena outside New York; and at some colleges that maintained a core group of folk enthusiasts. Some folklorists around the nation still took great pains to host traditional musicians well into the decade. Harry Tuft, who had modeled his Denver Folklore Center after Izzy Young’s place, had Davis in for several shows in the fall of 1968, and John Ullman, one of the founders of the Seattle Folklore Society, brought the Reverend to the West Coast the previous year for three concerts and an appearance on Channel 9, the University of Washington’s educational station. The concerts were well attended, but the visit highlighted the difficulty of caring for an older blind performer on the road. Ullman booked Davis at the Friends’ Center, a Quaker church with folding chairs and a little riser for a stage. The meeting hall served as the concert venue, and the library became the backstage area. The nearest bathroom was on the lower floor inside the Quaker nursery school, and that proved a challenge for Davis, so Ullman improvised, bringing in a plastic bowl from home, which the Reverend used five minutes before going on stage. The setup worked fine the first two nights. But at about 5 a.m. on the morning after Davis’s final show, Ullman sat bolt upright in bed and said, “Oh, shit.” He’d left the plastic bowl with the Reverend’s pee in the library of the Friends’ Center, which would soon be teeming with Sunday morning worshipers. At 7, Ullman drove to the center and roused the caretaker, telling him, “I’ve left something very important in the library.” He went in and surreptitiously tossed the urine out the window.8

*

As the folk boom ebbed, the jazz labels that had done so much to document it, like Prestige and Riverside, largely returned to their roots. Davis’s recording days might have been behind him had it not been for his friends and students. One former student, John Townley, had become a record producer, opening New York’s first twelve-­track studio on West Tenth Street off Union Square, where he recorded groups like 234

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the Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. In March 1969, Townley invited Davis to his first studio session in five years for an LP that would be called O, Glory: The Apostolic Studio Sessions, issued posthumously by Adelphi Records. Townley felt that Davis hadn’t yet been recorded well—­which un‑ dersells his Prestige sessions. Still, with the twelve-­track stereo production at Apostolic Studios, the Reverend could get “the same kind of treatment usually accorded a pop artist who promises to make his record company a great deal of money,” Townley noted.9 One of Davis’s students, Geoff Withers, met Gary and Annie in the studio. Also on hand was Larry Johnson, a black blues performer who’d been one of Davis’s closest New York confidants for a decade. “It was very relaxed,” Withers says of the session. “I got the impression that not much, if anything, was planned, thus Larry sitting in on harp, Annie on voice, and the Rev. playing piano.” Johnson had become by then an outstanding blues and ragtime guitarist himself, but he accompanied Davis on harmonica as he’d done in the late 1950s, when they’d first met. “You can hear where I tried to keep the harmony going against his guitar work. When I met him, we’d sit up days and nights and play to each other. That was good ear training.”10 Davis wanted to record his gospel repertoire. Townley wanted both spirituals and secular tunes, and Davis agreed after extracting a promise that Townley release the gospel material first. That included Davis’s first studio recordings of “O, Glory” (aka “Oh Glory, How Happy I Am”) and “There’s Destruction in This Land,” the song he’d had printed up as sheet music after his arrival in New York. On “Soon My Work Will All Be Done,” Annie sang along in their only recorded studio duet, on a song she’d helped him sing in concert and at home so many times. “They were very affectionate . . . and you could tell by the singing,” Townley remembered.11 The Apostolic Studios had about seventy instruments on hand that musicians could pluck off the walls: guitars, banjos, sitars, ouds, all strung up and ready to go. “I had this beautiful Paramount C-­style banjo . . . gorgeous to look at, rang like a bell, deep echo,” Townley says. “He picked it up and started to play and we were rolling tape.”12 The result was the only studio recording of Davis on a five-­string banjo, 235

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a spectacular spiritual called “Out on the Ocean Sailing,” which had been recorded by Mitchell’s Christian Singers from Kinston, North Carolina, back in the 1930s. Townley also had a piano around, and Davis made his only piano recording that day, on the old hymn “God Will Take Care of You.” Annie, Townley, and several studio employees sang behind Davis, their voices overdubbed about ten times to create the sound of a choir. The result was a gorgeous re-creation of Davis singing a hymn in church—­a more formal, less raw kind of singing that showed off his mellower side. At the end of the session Davis wanted payment in cash and in private. Townley took him into the well-­appointed studio bathroom and handed him five one-­hundred-­dollar bills. Then he decided to kid around with the Reverend, telling him, “You are out of sight, a blind man—­I could steal it all.” At that moment, Davis showed him the lightning-­quick defenses he’d built up over so many years on the street. “I felt suddenly the gentle but firm tip of a stiletto beneath my chin. We both broke down in hilarious laughter.”13 Pete Welding, reviewing the LP later for Down Beat, noted that Davis was captured “with a fair degree of his earlier power and vigor, only occasionally succumbing to hesitancy in the instrumental work and to breath and range problems in the vocals.” Despite the bonus of hearing Davis on a variety of instruments, he concluded that “collectors will already have stronger and more definitive performances of most of this material”—­but that assessment overlooked some real gems.14 Around this time, after a gig at the Quiet Knight in Chicago, a fan backstage showed Davis a twelve-­string guitar made by a local luthier, Bozo Podunavac. Visiting Podunavac’s shop, Davis ordered a custom twelve-­string that became known as “Miss Bozo.” With Davis’s blazing speed on the guitar finally tapering, he would favor his twelve-­string more and more, as the guitar’s octave-­spaced string pairs offered a richer, fuller sound than a six-­string. Davis’s skills were still considerable, yet an apologetic tone began creeping into his onstage remarks as one of the world’s greatest guitar virtuosos came to grips with his diminishing power. When in the late spring of 1969 the Electric Circus, a rock club on 236

THERE’S A BRIGHT SIDE SOMEWHERE (1967–70)

St. Mark’s Place in New York’s East Village, inaugurated a weekly concert series called the First Generation Blues, featuring older traditional performers alongside contemporary ones, a New York Post reporter described the scene as Davis was led on stage: For nearly a minute he stood silently in front of the audience, swaying slightly. “My God, this is terrible,” whispered a teenage girl in a

see-­through blouse. “What if he can’t do anything?” Davis groped for the microphone, and when he found it, said almost inaudibly,

“Now I don’t want you gettin’ to expectin’ about what I’m doing

here. It ain’t much.” He began to play, his calloused fingers working the strings. The guitar’s twanging, ringing, cutting voice filled

the room with feelings of agony and loneliness. And over the eloquence of the 12-­string guitar came Davis’s rasping voice. Usually

grave, then soaring to high notes and becoming more powerful be-

fore subsiding into a low murmur. And when he finished, the girl in the see-­through was on her feet with the rest of the audience. She was clapping hard, and she was crying.15

Davis seemed to be pondering his mortality, even more so than usual. “He’s getting close to the end of the line and knows it,” Roy Book Binder told a radio deejay around then. “Most of the songs he writes today are death-­orientated songs.” With perhaps his legacy in mind, Davis talked of opening his own church, according to Phil Allen, who’d begun taking lessons. “I asked him what he would name it, and he said, ‘The Hellfire Baptist Church,’” Allen recalled.16 With his performing career starting to wind down, Davis could take solace in the fact that elements of the musical world were beginning to come to terms with his genius. Stefan Grossman had been hard at work editing a book of sheet music and lyrics for dozens of songs from Davis’s repertoire. With Rev. Gary Davis: The Holy Blues, released in May 1970, Davis finally got copyright protection for eighty of his songs and arrangements, including “Oh Glory, How Happy I Am,” “Let Us Get Together,” “Children of Zion,” and “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” Robbins Music, established in the 1920s during the era of popular songs and early jazz,17 acted as Davis’s publisher in partnership with Manny Greenhill’s Chandos Music. The collection mostly comprised religious material, with just a few of the tunes represent237

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ing his vast repertoire of popular, minstrel, folk, country, old jazz, ragtime, blues, and hillbilly songs. “All those beautiful songs,” Annie recalled. “He wasn’t like we are. You can write something down. All his beautiful songs, he taken care of them in his head. Often, I’d feel his head, I’d say, ‘That’s why you bald headed, you carry too many things in your head.’” After the book came out, she wrote to Grossman: “You really did a beautiful job on the book you did on the Reverend and I like the book very much. . . . I received six books, and tonight I only have one book left. I’m going to keep that one for myself.”18 That fall, Yazoo Records, a New Jersey–­based label founded by Nick Perls that catered mainly to blues collectors, released Reverend Gary Davis: 1935–­1949, an LP of Davis’s long-­lost 78s from 1935 to 1949. The record’s sixteen tracks gave many listeners their first taste of Davis’s astonishing guitar skills as a relatively young man. Reviewing the record in Sing Out! Rob Fleder wrote: “If you’ve never heard Davis, this album is a must; if you already think Davis is great, you’re in for a surprise as to how brilliant he was in the 1930s.”19 Once again the release would garner little attention from the mainstream press, though it would help cement Davis’s status among the blues cognoscenti as one of the great masters, rivaled in sheer virtuosity on record perhaps only by Blind Blake. Meanwhile, the musicians who would dominate the Album Oriented Rock era of the 1970s were coming to the fore. One was Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead guitarist, who’d begun lessons with the Reverend in Queens that fall—­probably in late September when the San Francisco–­based band was in town to play the Fillmore East. Weir, in turn, was trying to find some work for Davis. Annie noted that “Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, who is one of his new students, is trying to arrange something”—­a gig—­for the Reverend in California.20 By this time, the Dead already had recorded a sprawling, electrified ten-­minute-­plus version of “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” at the Fillmore West in San Francisco for the album Live/Dead, released the previous year. With Davis credited for the tune, the LP would rise to Number 64 on the Billboard charts, providing him with another royalty. The song would become one of the Dead’s live show staples, along with Davis’s “Samson and Delilah,” released on several Dead albums begin238

THERE’S A BRIGHT SIDE SOMEWHERE (1967–70)

ning in the late 1970s and available on the countless concert bootlegs for which the band became known.21 For a group that built its reputation by “spreading out” on long jams, Davis’s improvisational approach, his ability to harness the entire fretboard of the guitar, and his masterful use of chords proved more of an inspiration than the work of blues artists like Robert Johnson, who, at least in their recorded output, usually stayed within a predictable twelve-­bar, three-­chord blues framework. “He [Davis] wasn’t as tightly structured by the blues as those other guys,” Weir recalled. “If you accept style—­and the blues is a style—­as a set of limitations, then those guys were confined in some ways.” Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist, also had a high opinion of Davis: “He always was kind of overlooked, but technically speaking he’s definitely the best of them.”22 Weir, who considers Davis his mentor, was twenty-­three when he took lessons from the Reverend, and they clearly had a profound effect on his musical thinking. Indeed, the way he describes his own approach to guitar seems to echo Davis’s: “I don’t think of guitar that much as a single-­line instrument. I think of it like a brass section or something. I think of it as a chordal instrument.”23 Weir had gotten the idea to call on Davis from Jorma Kaukonen, who never availed himself of lessons, though he’d absorbed much of the guitar style from his roommate Ian Buchanan back in their days at Antioch College. “I didn’t have the outrageous three dollars an hour he was charging then” for lessons, Kaukonen recalled with a laugh (although Davis actually charged five dollars).24 As guitarist for Jefferson Airplane, Kaukonen had incorporated Davis’s playing into a song called “Embryonic Journey,” an acoustic fingerpicking-­style piece featured on the band’s Surrealistic Pillow LP. Hot Tuna, Kaukonen’s new acoustic blues-­rock outfit apart from the Airplane, relied heavily on Davis’s oeuvre in both its live and recorded work. Hot Tuna’s eponymous debut album, recorded live at New Orleans House in Berkeley and released in 1970, featured “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” “Oh, Lord Search My Heart,” and a version of “Hesitation Blues.” Davis got writing credits for all but “Hesitation Blues,” a song that had a long publishing history and had been recorded early in the twentieth century by numerous artists ranging 239

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from the Victor Military Band to the Vaudeville crooner Al Barnard and the old-­time string band Charlie Poole and His North Carolina Ramblers (under the title “If the River Was Whiskey”). Kaukonen’s arrangement of “Hesitation Blues” is squarely based on Davis’s, though with much improvising throughout. “Rev. Gary Davis is a large source of our material,” Kaukonen told a reporter after Hot Tuna’s founding. “We do a lot of his spiritual stuff.”25 Davis, not often impressed with other guitarists, made an exception for Kaukonen. John Dyer, who lived with the Davises as a student in the early seventies, was playing the Hot Tuna record in the basement in Queens one night when Davis came down the steps, plopped down in his armchair, and listened without uttering a word. Dyer braced for a scathing critique, but after a few minutes, Davis said, “That boy sure can play!” “And I’m sure,” Dyer says, “it was because he was respecting all of Jorma’s improvisation, apart from also the flattery of someone playing your music and being pretty adept at it.”26 If Davis understood by then that his days as a folk troubadour were coming to an end, he could take pride in the fact that a diverse crop of musicians would carry on his music.

*

In September 1970, the Reverend made his second appearance on film, in Black Roots, a sixty-­one-­minute documentary produced and directed by Lionel Rogosin, with Alan Lomax serving as a musical consultant. Rogosin, a New Yorker born in 1924, made independent films with an activist streak, having documented street derelicts on the Bowery as well as a black migrant worker in Johannesburg decades before apartheid became a cause célèbre. For Black Roots, he gathered a handful of notable blacks in a cafe and filmed them discussing race relations and family life, with occasional candid street scenes edited in later. The film featured Rev. Frederick D. Kirkpatrick, a Louisiana-­ born civil rights activist who’d recorded folk songs with Pete Seeger under the name Brother Kirk; Flo Kennedy, a prominent New York civil rights attorney; and the musicians Jim Collier, Larry Johnson, and Davis.27 Black Roots was part of an early seventies trilogy on the plight of 240

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blacks in America. Rogosin later discussed his vision for the film at a university symposium: “In the histories of these five people, tales of the hardships of sharecroppers, Ku Klux Klan raids, indignation and humiliation, as well as the warmth of family life and the humor which grew out of the hardship of life in America, a pattern emerges, which becomes the universal history of Black America.”28 Davis’s role in the film consisted of playing two songs, “I Belong to the Band” and “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” on his “Miss Bozo” guitar and telling a long, hard-­to-­follow story about a race crime down South and the revenge exacted by a black man whose wife had been murdered for scolding some white children. Johnson accompanies Davis on harmonica on “I Belong to the Band,” and others join in with tambourines and claps. As Davis performs a simmering, especially mournful version of “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” Kennedy is seen wiping away tears. Rogosin’s film On the Bowery had won the documentary grand prize at the Venice Film Festival, and he complained that National Education Television, the precursor to PBS, had shown little interest in Black Roots or any of his other films in comparison to European stations like the BBC in Britain and NDR in Germany. His films, he told Variety, “deserve to be shown on American television.”29 Black Roots opened at the Rogosin-­owned Bleecker Street Cinema in the Village after its presentation at the New York Film Festival to decidedly mixed reviews. “Much of what they say is highly impressive, but the first half of the picture seems a redundant reminiscing about white oppression in the South,” wrote Howard Thompson in the New York Times. While Thompson noted the one “exquisite moment” in the film—­the image of Kennedy crying during Davis’s performance—­ “most of the previous testimony of his early years by this fine old man is unintelligible, or perhaps it was the soundtrack.” When it was shown in the United Kingdom that December, the Sunday Times of London recommended Rogosin’s film as “the choicest programme of the week.”30 It seems to have made little impact in the States, relegated mainly to film festivals and university symposia. But from the experience of working with Davis, Rogosin decided to make a documentary about 241

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the Reverend’s life. With Larry Johnson’s help, Rogosin went on to conduct several hours of interviews with Gary and Annie.31 However, with Gary dying during the research phase, the film never ­materialized.

*

If the Davises had always been welcoming to Gary’s white acolytes, they took it a step further in 1970. Playing some gigs in Vancouver, Canada, Davis met a young guitarist named Larry Brezer, whom Davis invited to live in Queens while he took lessons. The twenty-­one-­year-­ old stayed for a year, sleeping on a foldaway couch in the basement and earning fifty dollars a week driving the Davises to church, taking Annie shopping, and leading Davis to his gigs. Two other live-­in students would follow in the coming years. It’s unclear why, with Davis performing less, he felt the need to have a live-­in student and lead boy. It may have been an act of generosity and fellowship toward a young musician, or there may have been something more to it. “Greeting[s] in the name of the Lord,” began a letter from Annie to Alex Shoumatoff earlier in the year, when Gary had been nearing his seventy-­fourth birthday. She talked of having a party for her husband. “He is such a lonely person I can’t do too much for him,” she wrote.32 Whatever lay behind the arrangement, Davis and Brezer grew quite close. “I really loved that old man,” Brezer says. Gary usually respected the religious beliefs—­or lack thereof—­of his pupils, but perhaps owing to how tight he and Brezer became, he decided to try saving the young man’s soul on one occasion following services at a storefront church: Afterwards, they took me over to someone’s house, and there were

about a dozen of these high-­energy holy-­roller types, and they

started focusing in on “Brother Larry.” And I remember they gave me this tea that was mildly psychedelic. And they put this Bible in

front of me and said, “Now Brother Larry, we want you to concentrate on the red lines in the text.” . . . And they were holy rollin’ and

they were prayin’. . . . I don’t know whether it was an exorcism or a

conversion ceremony. And I remember [Davis] came back later and he said, “Larry boy, how come you Jews are so stubborn?”33

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By this time, some of the Reverend’s older students had begun making names for themselves. Stefan Grossman had become a sought-­after performer on the more vibrant European folk circuit, and he traveled back to the States briefly to perform on December 21, 1970, at the Washington Square Methodist Church on West Fourth Street in the Village. Davis went to the show and afterward made his way over to the Gaslight a few blocks away to see a late set by David Bromberg. “I did a couple of his tunes and dedicated a tune to him that I had written, because I was tremendously pleased to see him,” Bromberg says. “He stood up and gave a sermon, and it was the most lucid sermon I ever heard him give.”34 Davis told the audience at the Gaslight: “I have no children, but I have sons,” and claimed Bromberg and Grossman as his progeny. It was a poignant moment for Bromberg and also unintentionally so for Davis, given that he probably did have children back in the South with whom he never had a relationship.35 Toward the end of the year, Davis and his newest “son” flew back to Larry Brezer’s old stomping ground for a series of concerts, staying with the young man’s parents in Vancouver. After many months together, Davis never hesitated to tell his companion what was on his mind. In this case, it was sin. “We were in Vancouver, as I recall,” Brezer remembered. “He said, ‘Hey, boy, how about you and me running out and getting us some women.’ So I took him to this club where the working girls used to work.” They had only enough money for one, so Brezer procured a girl for his teacher, a pretty white woman in her mid-­to late twenties. “He and his little pro went up to the hotel room and I waited outside. . . . And he definitely got it on, no question about it,” Brezer says. “She came out with a big smile on her face. She handed him back over to me and said, ‘You better take care of him—­he might be a little tired.’”36

243

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TIRED, MY SOUL NEEDS RESTING (1971–­72) There were some nights when he was on fire, even in 1971. He could still bring it. R ick Ru skin

I

n February 1971, Rev. Gary Davis traveled to Pittsburgh with Annie to perform the wedding ceremony for his former student Ernie Hawkins and Joanne Kauffman, both twenty-­three, who tied the knot in front of a few friends at Hawkins’s little garage apartment on Darlington Road. Davis had some wedding rites he’d had printed in Braille in a children’s book and he signed the marriage license with an X, identifying himself as a minister at Shiloh Baptist Church in Jamaica—­probably one of the many storefront churches at which he still preached. Davis had a special wedding gift for the student who would go on to preserve his arrangements like no other. “That’s when he gave me ‘Stars in My Crown,’” Hawkins says. “We were just sitting around and he said, ‘I have a song for you.’”1 “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?” was an old hymn that began: I am thinking today of that beautiful land I shall reach when the sun goeth down

When through wonderful grace by my Savior I stand Will there be any stars in my crown?

The moving, complex instrumental arrangement that Davis taught Hawkins that day but never himself recorded is among the most beautiful pieces attributed to him. It’s emblematic of the vast unrecorded repertoire that Davis took to his grave. After Davis’s death, Annie would repeatedly ask Hawkins whether he’d recorded “Will There Be Stars in My Crown?” Hawkins finally released it more than two decades later on an album called Blues Advice. “He said there were a lot 244

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of songs that he never sang for anybody that he wrote,” Hawkins says. “It was kind of like prayer for him.” When the Davises returned home from the nuptials, Annie wrote to Hawkins and, with quintessential kindness, invited the newlyweds to stay with them in Queens: “Remember, our doors stand wide open with welcome.”2 Gary’s wedding gift hints not only at his faith that Hawkins would perform the composition correctly, but also at his own sense that he needed to begin thinking about what he intended to leave behind after he was gone. Approaching his seventy-­fifth birthday, Davis clearly had his legacy on his mind as he entered the recording studio for the last time. On a cold and gray St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, Larry Brezer drove Davis to a session for the New York–­based Biograph label, and in many ways it would be like no other Davis had ever done. Tom Winslow, a black folk singer who’d been taking lessons from Davis in Queens—­ one of the Reverend’s few black students in New York—­had recorded an LP for Biograph, and Winslow suggested to the label’s owner, Arnie Caplin, that he record Davis.3 Caplin had founded Biograph four years earlier, at first issuing rare piano rolls by Fats Waller, Scott Joplin, and others, then branching out into folk, prewar blues, and rediscovered bluesmen. Davis’s session would yield two LPs, and the album jackets would note that the recordings were made “at the Sherman Fairchild Studio.” Actually, the “studio” was the living room of Sherman M. Fairchild’s five-­story luxury townhouse at 17 East 65th Street. If Davis could see, he probably wouldn’t have believed his eyes. Hank O’Neal, the recording engineer, who’d arranged for the session to take place there, described the town house as “unlike any home I’d ever visited in New York. [It] had once been an ordinary old-­fashioned town house, but Sherman had gutted it and built a very modern residence. The various levels were reached not by stairs, but by ramps; there was an enclosed interior courtyard, there was a lot of glass, and the expansive living room, slightly below street level, boasted two perfectly matched Steinway L pianos.”4 Fairchild had been born exactly twenty-­three days before Davis, on April 7, 1896, in Oneonta, New York, but his life couldn’t have been more different. The son of IBM’s first president, Fairchild was, at the 245

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time of the recording, IBM’s largest shareholder. He’d been a serial entrepreneur who started more than seventy companies with names like Fairchild Aviation, Fairchild Camera and Instrument, and Fairchild Semiconductor. (In 1942, Manny Greenhill had gotten a job as an inspector at the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation in New York City. He left after two years to enter the military, and a note on his employment file indicated that he was “not eligible for rehire. Too much interested in union activities for good of company.”) Fairchild also had a passion for jazz, which he fed by starting a jazz label with O’Neal and installing state-­of-­the-­art recording equipment in a control room overlooking the living room.5 The traditional St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City starts in midtown and heads up Fifth Avenue, all shamrocks and bagpipes, leprechaun hats and green beer. It’s not a good traffic day under normal circumstances, and in 1971, as the Times reported, traffic was “paralyzed, public transportation in chaos,” with hordes of young drunken revelers adding to the bedlam. Brezer, Davis, and Winslow couldn’t reach the studio by car, so they had to walk some distance to get there, tiring Davis out. At one point after the recording session began, Davis would utter uncharacteristically, “People think playing guitar is easy, but it’s not.” As Winslow recalled, “He was exhausted, but insisted on completing the session for his legacy to us who would follow.”6 In five hours, Davis recorded twenty-­five songs, accompanying himself with “Miss Bozo” and harmonica; his six-­string “Miss Gibson” apparently stayed home. If this was to be his final studio session, Davis made sure to leave no stone unturned. Among his gospel numbers, he recorded “I Heard the Angels Singing”—­his only studio take of a spiritual recorded in 1928 by Rev. Edward Clayborn, “the Guitar Evangelist.” Clayborn’s almost jaunty slide guitar version is forgotten, while Davis’s shiver-­enducing E minor arrangement became one of his most admired pieces. He added the only studio recordings of “Children of Zion” and “I’ll Do My Last Singing,” the latter an original song that spoke in quite personal terms about death. Davis saved his biggest surprises, however, for his blues, which he finally, with full knowledge, committed to record with vocals. “He was 246

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going to do some of his secular songs, so he left Sis Davis home,” Winslow remembered.7 They included “She’s Funny That Way,” “Cocaine Blues,” and a sprightly version of “Hesitation Blues” that he dedicated to guitarists, saying “this here is for you to get your learning, you see.” It was a coded message for Annie, telling her that he was recording as a teacher, not purveyor of the devil’s music. When it came time to record “Candy Man,” Davis turned to Brezer and asked him to sit in, a big-­hearted gift from teacher to pupil. Brezer capoed at the fifth fret, transposing the song from the key of C to F, and Davis played a gorgeous bass line underneath. “That was a shock, man,” Brezer says. “You never saw a kid shake and sweat so much. Gary was a one-­take recording artist. He refused to do more than one take.” When the tapes stopped rolling, Davis said, “That’s it boy. This’ll be a good send off for ya.” Brezer had been battling with his parents over his direction in life, and he’d leave the Davises and return to Canada a few months later.8 Though he detested bottleneck playing as “cheating,” Davis even pulled out a knife to record “Whistlin’ Blues.” In characteristic fashion, however, Davis didn’t play slide like anyone else. He used an open tuning based on a D6 chord that would have perplexed most bluesmen. It made his guitar sound like a barrelhouse piano. Biograph would release two LPs of the material that fall, New Blues and Gospel and Lord, I Wish I Could See. Caplin later recalled that Davis made no mistakes during the session, but that oversells things a bit. There are audible gaffes, and he’d begun playing within the limits imposed by age, though he remained a formidable musician. “It must be admitted that his abilities are waning a little,” Paul Oliver would write in Jazz and Blues magazine, adding: “It’s a touching, somewhat wistful album which may not be the Reverend’s best, but is still a reminder of his exceptional powers. His has been an undeservedly hard life and we’re all culpable for having taken him for granted.”9 A little more than a month after the Biograph session, on April 23, the Rolling Stones released their ninth studio LP, Sticky Fingers, recorded between 1969 and 1970 in London and at the Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama. The album—­featuring Andy Warhol’s famous zipper crotch sleeve—­comprised nine Stones originals, including the hits 247

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“Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses,” and one cover, or so it seemed: “You Gotta Move,” a spiritual that both Mississippi Fred McDowell and Rev. Gary Davis had long included in their repertoires. McDowell, a hypnotic slide guitarist in the North Mississippi style, had, like Davis, enjoyed a late-­blooming career on the folk and blues circuits after his discovery in 1959 by Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins in Como, Mississippi, where they found him in overalls, having literally just walked off his farm after a day of picking cotton.10 The initial US pressings of Sticky Fingers on Atlantic Records credited McDowell as the composer of “You Gotta Move,” probably at the insistence of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, both connoisseurs of country blues. Chris Strachwitz, the head of Arhoolie Records and also McDowell’s music publisher, recalled that after the album’s release, he sent notices to Atlantic asking for a royalty payment.11 However, around the same time, the Stones’ New York–­based music publisher, ABKCO, complained to Atlantic that the song should be credited as a Jagger-­Richards adaptation of a song in the public domain.12 The Stones had bitterly parted ways with their manager, Allen B. Klein, in 1970, but Klein had forced the band to sign off on a lucrative settlement deal that gave his company, ABKCO, publishing rights to all Stones songs recorded before 1971. By June 1971, ABKCO had registered a new copyright for “You Gotta Move” on behalf of Jagger and Richards, probably without their consent, claiming “new words & new musical arrangement.”13 In Berkeley, Strachwitz instructed his attorney to rebut ABKCO’s claim. But Manny Greenhill also had gotten wind of the album credit to McDowell, and sensing a once-­in-­a-­lifetime payday for Gary Davis, called up Strachwitz and said, “That’s the Rev’s song.”14 More than pride was at stake: Sticky Fingers would sell more than three million copies in the United States alone and twice that worldwide. Davis and McDowell each had secured copyrights on their much different arrangements: Davis fingerpicked the song in typically astounding fashion in standard tuning in the key of D, while McDowell played it with a bottleneck in open E tuning. Strachwitz lectured Greenhill that they both knew the song had originated in the black church and wasn’t Davis’s to claim as an original composition. To bolster his argument, Strachwitz asked McDowell 248

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where he’d learned the tune, and McDowell had produced a hymn book from his small Baptist church back in Como. Recordings of the song date back as early as 1938, by the Frazier Family, a gospel group out of Detroit. In 1950, Sister Rosetta Tharpe scored a gospel hit with the song in a duet with Marie Knight.15 On the Stones’ record, guitarist Mick Taylor plays the signature lick with a bottleneck in open E tuning, sounding much like McDowell. Strachwitz had long admired Greenhill as a straight shooter. “There were all these other rip-­off promoters around, but Manny Greenhill really seemed to be a real honest, straightforward guy,” Strachwitz says. “He also knew that’s where the money is. There ain’t no money in [traditional] records.”16 The dispute between Strachwitz and Greenhill on behalf of their elderly clients dragged on, and in the fall it became more than a simple legal question: McDowell, who was sixty-­seven, was diagnosed with abdominal cancer back home in Memphis. Greenhill, however, refused to back down, a position that elicited a rare rebuke from people like Stefan Grossman. “He said, ‘I represent Gary Davis and that’s his song,’” Grossman recalled. “I didn’t agree with Manny, especially because Fred McDowell had cancer.”17 Finally, after Strachwitz argued that “we will both lose if we don’t get our act together,” they had a meeting of the minds. Their Solomonic compromise: When “You Gotta Move” was recorded using a slide, McDowell would claim 75 percent of the royalty and Davis 25 percent; if the song was fingerpicked in standard tuning à la Davis, the Reverend would get the three-­fourths share of the royalty. Despite ABKCO’s claim on the tune, ending the stalemate allowed Strachwitz to get the royalties flowing from Atlantic, and he traveled to Como and handed McDowell a check for $7,106.02 the following April—­the biggest payment McDowell ever pocketed—­three months before he lost his battle with cancer.18 It’s unclear whether Davis and McDowell knew about the dispute. Davis had visited McDowell at the Gaslight while their representatives squabbled and they were cordial, sharing a schnapps with Davis’s student Alan Smithline. But privately the ever-­competitive Davis didn’t think much of McDowell’s art, telling Smithline as they took in McDowell’s performance, “He ain’t nothin’.”19 249

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In the view of Dick Waterman, McDowell’s manager, Davis “got 25 percent for nothing” in the “You Gotta Move” deal, although Davis wouldn’t live very long either after getting his share of the first royalty payment. Still, Waterman didn’t fault Greenhill, whom he’d once worked for and whom he considered a role model. “We’re talking Rolling Stones money. He had the opportunity to step up on behalf of his guy and he took it.”20 (It would take another six years and a federal lawsuit before ABKCO gave up its claim on “You Gotta Move” and McDowell and Davis got the composer credit free and clear.)21

*

In late June 1971, Davis performed for a week at the Gaslight II on MacDougal Street with his student Roy Book Binder as the opening act. Barkers stood outside the basement club, hollering: “Come on downstairs, see the great Reverend Gary Davis, five dollars, come on down!” It didn’t do much good. “The crowds were pitiful—­five, six people,” Book Binder says.22 If Davis wanted to feel the adulation of an adoring crowd, he’d have to go overseas, where the interest in American roots music pioneers remained high. In July, Davis prepared to make what would turn out to be his final trip to England, with Ken Woollard, founder and director of the Cambridge Folk Festival, arranging sixteen appearances over two and a half weeks, including a headliner at Cambridge. Annie tried to talk Gary out of going on such a grueling tour at age seventy-­five. “I said, ‘Rev. Davis, you’re not able to go to England, please don’t go.’” But Davis said he couldn’t afford to turn down work. “I’m working hard today so, if I should go before you do, I want to have it so you won’t have to go around and beg nobody,” he told her. “I want it to be so you can get little things that you need. That’s why I’m working so hard.”23 Davis flew into London’s Heathrow airport on July 22 and headed out on the road the next day, headlining mostly at folk and blues clubs like the Brickhouse in Hull. As had often been the case, the British music press treated his appearances as events, at the same time voicing concern about Davis’s advanced age. When he performed, on July 26, at the Victoria Rooms at the University of Bristol, where Charles Dickens had once given a reading, David Harrison of Blues 250

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Unlimited described the Reverend as “frail and looking extremely old,” and noted that there had been some trepidation about whether he was fit to take the stage. “All of us who know and love his music were concerned that anticipation could easily become an embarrassment. But not only did Rev. Davis give a stunning show, he also gave a very surprising one.”24 The “surprise” was one that had become by then something of a given: a first set of spirituals followed by a blues set, including “Candy Man,” “She’s Funny That Way,” and “She Wouldn’t Say Quit,” which “became increasingly bluer verse by verse.” “He needed no persuasion in Bristol to run the gamut of blues eroticism, and it was an experience I wouldn’t have missed for anything,” Harrison concluded, noting that most people assumed Davis would not make it back to England again.25 At Cambridge, where Davis was featured on the cover of the festival program, the Reverend met up with Stefan Grossman, then living in Europe, and surprised him by performing at the three-­day event sitting down. He was a tremendous hit nonetheless. Melody Maker, in one of four articles it ran on Davis’s tour, called his Cambridge appearance “a major success.”26 Describing the scene at one of the concerts, R. J. Bater of the magazine B.M.G. pointed out that Davis was still able to deliver his religious message to an audience that might ordinarily cringe at any kind of mention of God: “Now, I’m gonna tell you about a friend of mine, you understand. He’s a friend to you too. His name’s Jesus.” From any other person, an address like that would have brought derision from many in

the crowd. But not a whisper. The old negro effortlessly coaxes a

gentle, ambling rhythm from the guitar. Walking bass. Smooth syn-

copation. His voice, at first feeble and unintelligible, grows rapidly

stronger until the words are plain. . . . Suddenly the air is pierced with a tremendous cry: “Glory, hallelu.” Can this man really be in his 76th year? Can he really be blind? He is certainly happy.27

After Cambridge the tour continued on its blistering pace, with stops in Wolverhampton, Manchester, and Brighton, where a long line of fans queued up to watch Davis perform at the Stanford Arms, a folk club upstairs from a popular pub. By the time Davis arrived back 251

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in London for his final show, at the new Shaw Theatre in St Pancras on August 8, he was uncharacteristically complaining of fatigue. “My feeling was that in ’71 he was getting past it to be trailing around the country,” says Richard Noblett, who spent the afternoon with the Reverend. “I ended up, I must admit, feeling sorry for him, though there was no good reason for it.”28 At the concert, Davis performed “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (and Playing Guitar at the Same Time),” and he employed his favorite late-­ career routine for getting a young woman to hug him on stage. The British musician Simon Prager, who hosted Davis for the concert, reconstructed the dialogue from hearing Davis do the routine a number of times: I went to my doctor last week and he say, “You ain’t lookin’ too

good.”

I say, “Tell me what’s wrong with me, Doc.”

He say, “When’s the last time you hugged a decent woman?”

I say, “Don’t ask me that, Doc. I ain’t seen a woman in about

twelve months.”

He say, “Twelve months? Good God. You dead already.” I say, “Don’t tell me that, Doc. I don’t wanna die.”

He say, “You don’t wanna die? I’ll tell you what you gotta do.” [Pause for dramatic effect]

You all gonna sit there and watch me die?

Karl Dallas, reviewing the concert for Melody Maker, described what happened next: He’d asked a girl from the audience to come up and give him a hug,

and such is the man’s magnetism, this 75-­year-­old black man without any teeth, that a beautiful girl does indeed come up, and he

plays an instrumental while she stands beside him, his great granite

head nestling against her young breast, then his right arm suddenly encircling her waist while his left hand hammers out the melody on the strings by itself.29

Overall, he seems to have saved one of his best shows of the tour for last. And even though the guitarists who’d “hitched and hiked from the remoter parts of Britain” to see the concert weren’t necessarily 252

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interested in his gospel material, the message hit home by the sheer force of his delivery. Dallas noted the “remarkable transformation Rev. Davis wrought in that stuffy little theatre on Sunday night. He touched our souls, and by some strange magic, as we left the theatre, it did seem for a moment as if the whole of smoky London had indeed been converted.”30 The next morning, Davis departed Heathrow for New York, another successful tour under his belt. And even though the press reported that Stefan Grossman was said to be making three times on the British folk circuit what his mentor was being paid, the Reverend must have welcomed the terrific reception he’d received from fans. As it turned out, he had little time to rest from the tour and the long flight home. Less than two weeks later, he once again boarded a transatlantic flight, this time bound for Bilzen, a small city in eastern Belgium that played host to Jazz Bilzen, the country’s most prominent jazz and rock festival at the time. Alan Smithline, then living with the Davises, remembered the trip as separate from the UK tour and “almost an overnight thing.”31 The three-­day festival was chaotic and disorganized, especially with the last-­minute cancellations of Elton John (contractual issues) and former Cream singer-­bassist Jack Bruce (illness). Davis performed on Saturday afternoon, August 21, along with Al Stewart, Rory Gallagher, and Larry Coryell. With the festival moved outside the city to Diepestraat, some fourteen thousand people packed a tree-­lined meadow for what must have been the biggest crowd of Davis’s career. Sitting down as he’d done in his UK shows and dwarfed by huge stacks of amplifiers behind him, Davis seemed to make quite an impression. One account of the concert said that the Reverend, in his suit and hat, cut a pitiable figure on stage, but after his performance the crowd went wild. Even Davis, the report said, hadn’t expected such enthusiasm from Belgian music fans.32 When Davis finally returned home to Queens for good, he was sapped. “B. Davis came back so tired, but he is now back to his usual self with students coming in for lessons daily,” Annie wrote to Robert Tilling, a British watercolor painter who’d befriended the Davises and hosted the Reverend during the tour. Alan Smithline recalled that Annie was keeping a closer watch on her husband’s expenditure of 253

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energy with his guitar students. “After that trip, she’s metering out how much he can play. She’d say, ‘Okay, B. Davis, that’s enough.’ She’d take the guitar from him and put it away. ‘Because you’ll play yourself to death and there won’t be a B. Davis left for the world.’”33 The Davises rarely discussed their health with Gary’s students, and most of them never asked probing questions. But Annie occasionally let slip that they had significant medical issues, telling Alex Shoumatoff the previous year that “neither one of us is too well. . . . We’re just trying to put the best face on the outside, and that’s all I can say about it.” Davis had at least one prolonged hospital stay for an undisclosed ailment in the late spring and early summer of 1970, and in the fall of 1971, after his overseas tour, Gary’s health took a serious turn for the worse.34 He’d been booked to do a Halloween-­themed gig October 30 in the auditorium of St. Gregory’s Church on West Ninetieth Street in New York, but around the first week of October he was admitted to Jamaica Hospital not far from his home, possibly after suffering a stroke. “Rev. Davis is in the hospital now. He’s been there for 2 weeks and might be there another 2 weeks,” Annie wrote to Stefan Grossman on October 21. “He is feeling OK, but the doctors want to keep him in a bit longer so they can remove blood clots that have formed in his lungs. We have been visiting him every day and we read your last letter to him and he enjoyed it very much.”35 With his health failing, Davis completed a will on November 5, leaving all his possessions, including his car and two homes, to Annie. The will named Tiny Robinson as both the executor of Davis’s estate and its beneficiary after Annie’s death. (Davis did not get along well with Annie’s two daughters, so it’s no great surprise they were excluded.)36 According to tax documents, Davis, who had ground out much of his life in dire poverty, had amassed an estate worth $81,000 (about $460,000 in 2014 dollars), including the home in Queens, with a market value of $30,000 (but with an outstanding mortgage of nearly $12,000); the home in New Jersey worth $15,000; and about $17,000 in two bank accounts.37 The Davises had always shown great generosity with their money, buying guitars for students like Larry Brezer and making loans to church friends with little expectation of being repaid. 254

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Davis’s probate file would later show a $500 loan to a Theodore Debury, who was on welfare, and $600 to a Rev. Thomas H. Brown, who couldn’t be located by the court. Davis was aware that there were people who coveted what he and Annie had, and he warned her: “If I should go before you do, I don’t want you to let nobody to come along and fool what you got out of you, not even your daughters, nobody. I want you to keep it. Remember, I worked hard for it.” Roy Book Binder recalled: “He knew everyone would come for his money the second he died. Because he lived a very comfortable life the last ten years.”38 The next several months Davis was in and out of the hospital. In January 1972, he dictated a letter to Ernie Hawkins in Pittsburgh, sounding optimistic, though he was having kidney trouble: “You said you were going to see me in a few weeks. I hope I’m strong and I’ll play guitar and have fun with you. . . . I’m going to eat a lot so’s I can chase you around the house.”39 He suffered a heart attack on February 26, according to Robert Tilling. His student John Mankiewicz visited him then, as Davis recuperated in a room with twelve other beds. Mankiewicz brought him grapes, which Davis liked peeled, and watermelon. Alan Smithline brought one of the Reverend’s guitars to the hospital, and he seemed thrilled at the sight of it. He started to play but a nurse appeared and said, “Who said he could have that thing?” “He was so crushed,” Smithline says. “Because that was really the best medicine you could give him.” Roy Book Binder visited him around then too. “He weighed maybe 90 pounds, and I’m holding his hand, and he didn’t have his glasses or his teeth,” Book Binder recalled. “I said, ‘Reverend Davis, beside the music, my entire circle of friends and everybody I know came from you.’ And he said, ‘I know.’ He knew he was the best. And I believe he was the best because God gave him the ability to convert souls with his music. And in a way, we were all kind of converted.”40 Davis fought on, appearing weak, then rallying to regain strength. He got out of the hospital for the last time on March 13. “He really was glad to get home again—­my, he has had plenty of sickness,” Annie wrote to Ernie Hawkins. After his release Davis tried to make his dream of opening his own church a reality. “He wanted to put up a church for God,” one of his friends, Sister Evangelist R. B. Artis, re255

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membered. “And he said, ‘God have been so very, very good to me, I feel like I should put up a church in remembrance for all the good he did for me, and I don’t have much time left to do it.’”41 Davis’s student John Townley recalled hearing that the Reverend had taken a young minister to a storefront space that he’d bought. “And he paced it off and sang a couple of notes and clapped his hands and tried to get the acoustics of the place. And he seemed quite pleased with it. And he was giving the stewardship of it to this young preacher. And it was clear that his time was not long and it wasn’t.”42 On April 1, Annie wrote to Stefan Grossman again. “He is improving very slowly. He is out of the hospital, thanks to God, but he is not doing as well as I would like for him. We will just hope for the best. We are praying and asking God to help him.” Davis was still seeing students, but now they were making most of the music. “He hardly played his guitar then, but he’d delight in hearing one of his visitors play for him,” Joan Fenton recalled. “Sometimes, he’d feel well enough to go to church or give a few lessons.” Woody Mann came by and couldn’t believe how the Reverend’s condition had deteriorated. In the past, Mann couldn’t keep up with the old man, who could play a song for forty minutes straight without coming up for air. Not anymore. “I have tapes of my lessons where he’s very tired, like he’s in the middle of a tune, he’ll just sort of drift off. ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’ And he’d say, ‘I’m just tired now.’ And I remember it kind of freaking me out because he never did that.”43 Allan Evans, one of Davis’s final guitar pupils, had a lesson in late April. “He was bone thin—­his clothing was too big for him. Mrs. Davis said, ‘Now, don’t tire him out!’ Davis insisted on going on for two and half hours. Then afterwards he wanted to arm wrestle.” Evans won.44 During Davis’s convalescence in March, some teenagers in Northport, Long Island, had gotten in touch, asking him to do a concert there. Annie had written to Ernie Hawkins: “He received a letter while he was in the hospital to do a concert on April 24. I said to him, ‘You are not able.’ But he thinks he can. I know better.”45 Northport, a village on Long Island’s North Shore, was a mix of blue-­collar and middle-­class commuters and artistic types, having once been home to Jack Kerouac. As in a lot of communities by the early 1970s, alienation, especially among young people, had reached 256

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epic proportions. “For us in Northport . . . there was a sense of things coming apart,” recalled Doug Menuez, then a fourteen-­year-­old ninth-­ grader at Northport Junior High. “A lot of drugs, everyone doing acid, almost as a political act. Protests against Vietnam, of course, even to the point where we had a riot at Northport High, setting fire to police cars and so forth.”46 When they weren’t getting stoned or tripping on Owsley acid, Menuez and his good friend Seth Fahey played in a blues combo with a group of other boys from the neighborhood, rehearsing songs by Muddy Waters and Little Walter in Fahey’s attic. Fahey, then fifteen years old, kept a notebook with phone numbers of jazz and blues performers in the hope of producing some concerts. He called up and spoke to both Annie and Gary, and they agreed on a fee of two hundred dollars. Fahey later sent a formal letter, which had arrived when Davis was in the hospital. Though vastly weakened and playing little guitar, Davis insisted on going ahead with the show. “I pleaded for him not to go but he went on,” Annie recalled.47 Menuez had printed tickets in his wood shop class, and Fahey’s mother, a painter, had silkscreened some posters, which the boys put up on telephone polls in Northport, around the town of Huntington, and at local colleges. Davis arrived in Northport the evening of April 24, and the boys took him to Fahey’s house, where his mom fed him lasagna and they got Davis ready for the show. Menuez recalled that Davis hardly looked like he could perform. “We had to cut his fingernails for him at Seth’s house. He was too weak and really ill . . . really frail. I thought he was going to die right there on Seth’s couch.” The concert took place in the basement of the First Presbyterian Church on Main Street. A sellout crowd of more than 250 people showed up, with some standing in the back. Sitting in the front row, Larry Conklin, a twenty-­one-­year-­old from Northport who’d just been sprung from the army, watched as the boys led a feeble-­looking Davis down the aisle and onto the stage. “He gets up on stage and he’s tuning his guitar and he’s shaking,” Conklin remembered. “And so some people are getting like, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’ . . . And some idiot way in the back yells, ‘Play your guitar!’” Then, Conklin said, Davis leaned in to the microphone: “I’m just waitin’ to be introduced.” 257

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Doug and Seth had been so nervous that they’d forgotten to make an introduction. After the oversight had been corrected, Davis launched into “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” Maybe it was being back in church, albeit not a Baptist one, or maybe it was adrenaline or the realization that he might not get another chance to perform. Whatever it was, “all that shaking was gone and the fire came out and, boy, everybody was riveted,” Conklin says. “And I tell ya, I think it was a great moment for everybody there that night.” “He just came to life and just ripped the shit out of that guitar,” Menuez says. “It was amazing. Everyone was like blown away.” “This is the song that I come to sing to you,” Davis said at one point, and he began the beautiful chordal introduction to “I Will Do My Last Singing.” It was his favorite original song, according to Annie, and he’d been performing it on stage for years, but with his decline it must have taken on new poignancy: I will do my last singin’ in this land, child, somewhere (×2) I don’t know and I can’t tell where

It may be somewhere sailin’ in the air

I will do my last singin’ in this land, child, somewhere

By the middle of the concert, Davis began flirting with the girls in the front row. “He was pretty randy there even for a very ill old man,” Menuez says. “Man, he was majestic, though. . . . He really played his heart out at that concert.” After it ended to a great ovation, the boys drove Davis home, arriving about midnight.48 Six days later, on April 30, Davis celebrated his seventy-­sixth birthday by attending an all-­day service at the Little Mount Moriah Baptist Church near 137th Street. On that Sunday morning, Davis preached, and in the afternoon he sang “Oh, Lord, I Want to Be Saved.” It was the last service the Davises would attend together.49 The following week, Davis complained of a pain down his arm. He refused to go to a doctor. Around May 3, Davis’s student John Mankiewicz came by, and Davis told Annie that she could sell all his guitars except his J-­200. “We all got to pass on,” he said. Mankiewicz and Larry Brezer, who’d just returned from Canada after almost a year away, convinced Davis to join them in the backyard to enjoy a breath of spring. Brezer and Davis talked about taking a train trip together.50 258

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Early on the morning of May 5, Annie decided to travel down to the Davises’ second house in Newtonville, New Jersey, where contractors were trying to fix a broken well, and Gary agreed to accompany her. Along for the trip was Mose, a tall, skinny young man about twenty-­one years old who lived a few doors down from the Davises, sometimes worked as a bill collector, and drove occasionally for the Reverend. He took the wheel of the Davises’ white Ford Galaxie, with Gary in the passenger seat and Brezer and Annie in the back.51 It was a bracing morning, in the midfifties, as they set out for the Verrazano Bridge. Two hours outside New York, they had just gotten off the New Jersey Turnpike at exit 7 in Bordentown when Davis suddenly made several jolts. Annie reached over the seat to comfort him, and Davis said, “Sweetheart, I’m leavin’ you this morning!” Then he collapsed. “We did everything we could to find a hospital,” Brezer says. About a half hour went by before they reached William B. Kessler Memorial Hospital in Hammonton, New Jersey.52 Davis had had a massive heart attack. Doctors took him inside and tried to revive him, shocking his heart with a defibrillator, to no avail. Decades of living hand to mouth, standing on street corners singing for twelve hours a day, had finally taken their toll. “We couldn’t save him,” the doctor told Annie. Davis was pronounced dead at 11:47 a.m. Annie took the news hard and had to be sedated. Later, she provided her husband’s details for the death certificate, giving his occupation as “Minister” and his business as “Church.” She made no mention of the music that had rescued them from threadbare poverty.53 Roy Book Binder, in Rhode Island for a gig, drove back to New York after Woody Mann called him with the news. The next day the Davises’ house was full of relatives from North and South Carolina. Annie said, “Roy, the best friend that we ever had is gone.”54 The Reverend had told Annie that he didn’t want his funeral held in an undertaker’s parlor. It took place at Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church on Hoe Avenue in the Bronx, where Davis had preached many times over the years. Book Binder, Mann, Larry Johnson, and other students of Davis’s were among the roughly seventy people who attended the open-­casket service. Ernie Hawkins drove in from Pittsburgh but didn’t stay. “I saw Annie. She was so out of it, it was so up259

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setting to me. And it was just so many people, and so I decided I really just wanted to see Annie and say ‘God Bless You’ and I got back in the car and drove home.”55 Phil Allen went with a friend and recalls his dismay at seeing the neighborhood. “We found our way to this extraordinarily desolate street and small stand-­alone church surrounded by tenements. And I couldn’t help feeling the sort of terrible injustice of this being the place where this extraordinary artist was having his funeral.”56 Davis didn’t get a grand send-­off like Lead Belly, with flowery tributes and songs from his admirers, or like Mahalia Jackson, whose death that January had brought out thousands of well wishers in Chicago. Instead, it was a simple service by and for the small black church community that meant so much to Davis. Indeed, aside from noting the young white people who had come to pay their respects, the minister didn’t talk about music at all. Understandably, the service left members of Davis’s musical flock wondering what was going on. “It was one of those funerals where the guy [minister] didn’t know the dead person,” John Mankiewicz observed.57 Annie was beside herself. Alex Shoumatoff was there, and he scribbled on the back of his funeral program: “The Reverend, lying in his casket wearing clear glasses that he never wore in his life but which I suppose were put on his head to give him added dignity, far outshone my own efforts to describe how great a man he was.” And: “Annie gave way to hysterical sobbing and screaming, ‘I got nobody left!’ and other outbursts of grief, for which her church and Christian friends were there to support her.”58 The next morning, four or five black hearses made their way to Rockville Cemetery in Lynbrook, New York, about a forty-­minute drive from the city. Book Binder, Johnson, Mann, and Mann’s friend Peter Burley followed in Book Binder’s red Volvo. Davis was laid to rest under a simple marker with his and Annie’s names chiseled side by side. Then the mourners made their way to the reception afterward. “It was a party, it was a Baptist funeral,” Mann says.59 Rev. Gary Davis’s death made only a small ripple in the media. In a brief, single-­column obituary, the New York Times called him “a blind gospel singer and ragtime guitarist whose blues-­tinted style influenced many younger performers.” The Village Voice briefly noted that 260

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Davis had said good-­byes to his friends before making “his final journey home.” A short obituary in Variety said Davis “sang the blues and gospel for audiences throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe,” but it called him only a player of the twelve-­string guitar.60 Down Beat praised him as “a brilliant guitarist” who “specialized in religious material” although he “occasionally performed secular songs.” The magazine erroneously reported that Davis had been on the way to a gig when he died, a fact repeated thereafter in many accounts of his life. Tim Ferris, writing in Rolling Stone, called Davis “one of the great blues singers,” pointing out correctly that Davis had “relaxed his ban on blues as he got older.” Ferris also noted that “Mrs. Davis has been unable to assemble a complete collection of his albums.”61 On June 23, Annie wrote to Stefan Grossman: “I guess Rev. Davis’s passing came as a shock to most of us. But God knoweth best and doeth all things well. So glad that during his lifespan, he made acquaintance with such great people as you.” She invited Grossman to visit her the next time he was in New York, something she never failed to do when writing to Davis’s former students. Larry Brezer stayed around for a few weeks after Davis died. Annie was hoping he would continue living in Jamaica and drive her to appointments and church functions, but as he recalled, “there was really no reason for me to do that.”62 About a month after his friend’s death, Larry Johnson tried to sum up the meaning of Davis’s life. “I admired him most for, first of all he being born blind, in the South, black, had everything against him. Everything. Nothing did he have in his favor. And he managed to become a master musician. And then he managed to influence other musicians from here to England. And I think for him to do that, even to keep a mind good enough to do that, is something else.”63 Brezer, who went on to become a dancer of note in Japan, offered this tribute to his blind teacher, without irony: “He faced adversity eyeball to eyeball and he never blinked.”64

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WHEN I DIE, I’LL LIVE AGAIN I think, like so many people, if he could have lived longer, eventually he would have gotten more appreciation than he ever did. David Amram

A

fter Davis’s death, his first New York student, John Gibbon, by ​then a practicing psychiatrist in Manhattan, submitted an affidavit in Queens County Surrogate’s Court swearing that to the best of his knowledge Annie was Gary Davis’s lawful wife, a stipulation that would save the Davises tens of thousands of dollars in estate taxes. Gibbon also avowed that Davis “didn’t have any natural children,” which would have complicated any inheritance.1 There’s no reason to suspect that Gibbon knew Gary Davis’s true marital history or about the children Davis mentioned during his 1950 interview with Elizabeth Lyttleton. In the United Kingdom, Robert Tilling wrote that “I know Gary was happy to leave his wife well cared for,” and he predicted that “Gary Davis will never be forgotten as a musician.” Yet in death as in life, Davis never seemed to get his due. Quietly, his music has been widely recorded in the decades since his passing, and his influence has arguably been greater than that of any other prewar country bluesman who lived to see the folk revival. Bob Dylan, Hot Tuna, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the Grateful Dead, and others have continued to dip into his catalog. In 1977, Jackson Browne recorded “Cocaine” for his album Running on Empty, which has sold more than seven million copies in the United States,2 giving Davis, posthumously, probably the biggest single royalty of his career. That royalty almost didn’t happen, because Browne thought he’d recorded a Dave Van Ronk song until he bumped into Van Ronk on the street. Excited by the prospect of a fat royalty check, Van Ronk 262

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asked which one of his songs Browne had covered, and Browne said “Cocaine Blues.” Van Ronk replied that it was Davis’s tune and directed him to Manny Greenhill. “Now get away from me before you see a grown man cry,” Van Ronk told him.3 There have been tribute records to Davis by Rory Block and the Chicago-­based guitar virtuoso Eric Lugosch. Another salute, Gary Davis Style, produced by Andy Cohen, featured performances by twenty artists influenced by Davis, from Blind Boy Fuller and Dave Van Ronk to Peter, Paul, and Mary. In 2007, gospel singer Marie Knight, Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s onetime singing partner, recorded her own tribute, entitled Let Us Get Together, in one of the few nods to the Reverend from the gospel mainstream. Many of Davis’s students—­including Stefan Grossman, David Brom­ berg, Woody Mann, Ernie Hawkins, Roy Book Binder, Nick Katzman, and Larry Johnson—­have gone on to successful recording careers, prominently featuring Davis’s guitar style or paying him homage on records and in concerts. Grossman, in particular, has devoted much of his musical life to honoring Davis and documenting his music and guitar techniques. He has produced more than half a dozen recordings from both live performances and private sessions, and his company, Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop, has released hundreds of instructional tapes, videos, DVDs, and digital downloads of lessons for guitarists, with many covering Davis’s music. (Happy Traum’s Homespun Tapes, like Grossman’s outfit, offers many tutorials featuring Davis’s techniques, including lessons by Book Binder and others.) Still, there’s a way in which Davis has continued to fall through the cultural cracks, never achieving the iconic status of a musician of his caliber. When Rolling Stone in 2011 published a list of the top one hundred guitarists of all time, Davis was conspicuously, though not surprisingly, absent. While Davis was enshrined in the Memphis-­based Blues Hall of Fame on May 6, 2009, he has not been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, though B. B. King, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Louis Armstrong, the Staple Singers, and Mahalia Jackson have, along with artists Davis influenced, like the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Jackson Browne, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Dion, and Donovan. One of Davis’s Gibson J-­200 guitars is part of the Rock and Roll Hall 263

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of Fame museum collection in Cleveland, on loan from Tiny Robinson’s family, though it’s not on public display.4 Lead Belly was inducted in 1988, with Pete Seeger on hand to celebrate his life and music, but Davis remains, decades later, absent from the rolls. In 2001, the state of North Carolina placed a “Bull City Blues” historical marker near the intersection of Fayetteville and Simmons streets in Durham’s old Hayti neighborhood to commemorate the contributions of African American musicians like Blind Boy Fuller and “Blind Gary Davis,” whose music “influenced generations of players.” In South Carolina, Davis’s birthplace, recognition has been scant. He’s not featured in any collections or academic exhibits, and he’s not listed on the state’s website among “famous South Carolinians,” though musician Darius Rucker of the rock group Hootie and the Blowfish makes the list, along with Vanna White, the letter-­turner on the television game show Wheel of Fortune. In New York, the city Davis called home the longest, he’s largely missing from the official record. At the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, a manila subject folder contains two items: a copy of a poster from an early sixties concert staged by Izzy Young, and a Village Voice review of a concert from 1971. Appreciations have come from his students, who in 2004 staged a tribute concert at Merkin Hall on West Sixty-­Seventh Street, featuring Hawkins, Book Binder and Jorma Kaukonen. In 2012, the fortieth anniversary of his death, Book Binder and Stefan Grossman came together at the reconstituted Gaslight club on MacDougal Street to honor Davis’s legacy in one of his old stomping grounds. If Davis has been overlooked as a secular artist, neither has he been heralded in gospel circles. Robert Darden’s 2004 history of gospel music, People Get Ready!, includes only one reference to “Blind Gary Davis,” in a discussion of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, where he notes that her career blossomed while Davis “remained a street singer.” Davis’s own church community, on the other hand, remained unaware of his stature as a musician. Rev. Frederick Crawford, the pastor at Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church, remembered Davis from his youth but was genuinely surprised to find out he was something other than a minister who played guitar and harmonica in church.5 264

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In a sense, Davis has been viewed in the music pantheon as neither fish nor fowl, not a blues singer, not a full-­fledged gospel performer, something not quite classifiable. His own choices as a musician have played a role in this, though they should not trump his exceptional talents and contributions to the music world. In 2010, Robert Tilling re-­released a Davis tribute book, Oh, What a Beautiful City, featuring remembrances by a great many musicians and music industry people. In 2013, the release of Harlem Street Singer, a documentary film on Davis’s life coproduced by Woody Mann, began to address the void in Davis scholarship and appreciation, and William Lee Ellis was preparing the first in-­depth analysis of Davis’s music. One of Davis’s greatest legacies is the untold number of students, famous and anonymous, whom he invited into his home and happily taught for a five-­dollar fee no matter how many hours the lessons lasted. They absorbed his and Annie’s generosity of spirit along with Davis’s guitar techniques: it’s no coincidence that many of Davis’s students became teachers themselves, eager—­and in many cases feeling obliged—­to pay forward their musical blessings to a new generation of guitarists ready to be dazzled by Rev. Gary Davis’s genius.

*

In the months after her husband’s death, Annie Davis had a hard go. In October 1972, she wrote to Stefan Grossman: “Mr. Greenhill called me today from Boston and he wanted to know how I was doing. I haven’t been feeling too well. I was in to see the doctor Friday. I was only trying to put the best on the outside [smile].”6 Annie continued getting quarterly installments from Davis’s estate. Gary had no life insurance policy, but shortly after his death, Annie was still receiving thousands of dollars in royalty checks, particularly from Atlantic Records for the Rolling Stones’ recording of “You Gotta Move.” However, with a $154 mortgage payment, the upkeep of two houses, and other expenses, Annie soon seemed to have trouble making ends meet, despite her husband’s wishes that she not have to go begging. She wrote again to Grossman in Rome in October 1973: “Stefan, you always tell me if I need anything to please let me know. Well, Stefan, at present I need a[n] apron full of money.”7 265

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She kept in touch with many of the Reverend’s former students, who visited her from time to time, especially in the first few years after he died. Perhaps no better example of the close bond formed between the Davises and Gary’s young students was the phone call Danny Birch made to Annie in the fall of 1974. On November 21, four Palestinian guerrillas in Dubai shot their way onto a British Airways flight that had been making a stopover on the way from London to Brunei and Calcutta. Demanding the release of other fighters held in Cairo, they ordered the plane flown to Tripoli and then Tunis, where they killed one passenger and threatened to blow up the plane. Birch, then twenty-­two, who had studied with Davis beginning in 1970, was one of the forty passengers remaining on board who were eventually freed after a harrowing four-­day ordeal.8 After they’d gotten safely off the plane, the hostages were each allowed to make a couple of international calls to loved ones. Birch called Annie Davis. “She was the person I wanted to contact. That was the one I made after I called my mother,” Birch says.9 In the fall of 1975 another former student, Geoff Withers, received a five-­dollar check in the mail from Annie, who sent the money after receiving the birth announcement for his daughter Hannah. He set up a savings account, and by 2012 it had grown to about thirty-­five dollars. “It was a very sweet gesture,” Withers says.10 There can be little doubt that Annie’s generosity caused some of the financial pressure she felt. At one point Annie took in a blind accordionist named Jimmy Kendrick, who had come to New York to sing on the streets to support his wife and children in Florida.11 If he paid any rent, which is doubtful, it couldn’t have been much. Many of Davis’s students, as might be expected, began losing touch or responding to letters less frequently. At some point Annie lost her home in Queens after assigning the deed to a relative who’d promised to let her continue living there. “Apparently they took the house and they got her out somehow,” Allan Evans says, a turn that would have devastated Gary Davis.12 Annie roomed with friends or relatives in Brooklyn, sleeping on couches at first. By her late nineties she ended up at a comfortable assisted-­living facility in Starrett City on Vandalia Avenue in Brook266

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lyn. Suffering from diabetes, she had a leg amputated in the fall of 1994. Country blues musician Ari Eisinger, who had recorded a cover of Davis’s blues “I’m Throwin’ Up My Hands,” showed up in 1997 to give Annie a royalty check for five hundred dollars, probably more than he owed. He wound up visiting her half a dozen times, playing spirituals as she sang along from her bed.13 She attended church regularly until her one hundredth year, becoming Mother Davis as she took on the role of an elder. Three weeks before her death, on December 29, 1997, at the age of nearly 102, she received a visit from Robert Tilling, his wife, Thelma, and Roy Book Binder. “Mother Davis beckoned us close to her, Thelma and Roy and I, and we bent over, inches from her face,” Tilling recalled. “And she sang, ‘Soon My Work Will All Be Done, Soon My Work Will All Be Done,’ and we all started to cry like babies. It was very poignant to me, that it was all about their faith and their hard life, in that little moment.”14 While Gary Davis had been unable to ensure that Annie would always have the home in Queens he’d worked so hard for, he did leave one abiding comfort: his music, which had sustained him throughout his hard life and which remained for her, too, a constant source of solace and inspiration until the day she died.

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SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

G

ary Davis’s recorded output, spanning nearly forty years, fits neatly into three categories: formal studio sessions, recorded concerts, and private tapes made by guitar students and friends. Almost all his classic material is readily available on compact disc, and a large proportion can be had digitally. STUDIO SESSIONS

Davis’s supreme masterpiece remains his 1960 album for Prestige, Harlem Street Singer (BV 1015), with Rudy Van Gelder’s pristine engineering capturing Davis’s stellar guitar work and impassioned singing like lightning in a box. Davis’s other Prestige sessions, also recorded by Van Gelder, aren’t far behind: A Little More Faith (BV 1032, 1961), Say No to the Devil (BV 1049, 1962), and The Guitar and Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis (PR 14033, 1964). (Note that the “banjo” on the latter recording is actually a six-­string guitar-­banjo, or “gitjo,” not a five-­string banjo.) Close on the heels of the Prestige releases is Davis’s 1956 session for Riverside, American Street Songs (RLP 148), which he shares with Pink Anderson. Davis’s performance is brilliant, and the recording, while not quite as aurally satisfying as those made by Van Gelder, is fine. Davis’s 1969 outing for Adelphi, O, Glory: The Apostolic Studio Sessions (AD 1008), also deserves mention. If at age seventy-­three Davis is a tick less off the charts on the guitar, he makes up for it with his only studio recordings on five-­string banjo and piano and his first studio take of one of his all-­time great compositions “O, Glory” (a.k.a. “Oh Glory, How Happy I Am”). As a bonus, his wife, Annie, can be heard singing along in the background on a couple of songs. For Davis’s 1935 American Record Corporation sessions, plus other rarities from his early years in New York, Rev. Blind Gary Davis, 1935–­ 49, from Document Records (DOCD 5060), offers the most complete collection. While the sound pales compared to Davis’s best folk-­revival recordings, the chance to hear the Reverend in what was his late prime shouldn’t be passed up. 269

SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

RECORDED CONCERTS

The best-­recorded live album to date is Vanguard’s The Reverend Gary Davis at Newport (VMD 73008), which captures him in fabulous form at the 1965 festival. To hear the sixty-­nine-­year-­old Davis performing superb versions of guitar rags and shouting out spirituals like “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” is something special. When Davis performed with the New World Singers at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village in late January and early February 1963, Stefan Grossman was there to document it with his reel-­to-­reel recorder. Grossman finally issued the tapes in 2009 under the slightly erroneous title Rev. Gary Davis, Live at Gerde’s Folk City, February 1962 (SGGW 114/5/6). There’s a bit of hiss in the low-­fidelity recording, but the music—­including some rarities—­is wonderful and offers a good sample of Davis’s early sixties nightclub act, complete with Davis’s announcing his phone number for prospective students in the audience. PRIVATE TAPES

Davis allowed many of his guitar students to record their lessons, and other acquaintances had tapes rolling when he visited, whether he knew it or not. The best of the home recordings currently available are Fred Gerlach’s tapes circa 1957, first released in 1963 as Pure Religion and Bad Company (LA 12/14) on 77 Records in England and decades later under the same title on Smithsonian Folkways (SF 40035). (Despite what many discographies claim, this album didn’t originate on—­and was never released by—­Harry Oster’s Folk-­Lyric label.) The record includes a terrific selection of Davis’s spiritual and secular songs. Rev. Gary Davis: At Home and Church (SGGW 130/1/2), a three-­ CD box set issued by Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop, comprises recordings of Davis playing and teaching at home—­including a very naughty version of “Hesitation Blues”—­and sermonizing and performing at storefront churches. Two out-­of-­print home recordings that deserve to be re-­released are Ragtime Guitar (TRA 244), a fabulous all-­instrumental collection first issued on Transatlantic from Grossman’s tapes, and Document’s misspelled LP At Al Matthes (DLP 521), culled from recordings at Al Mattes’s house in Toronto circa 1966.

270

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Bob Dylan, Chronicles (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 1:191; Bob Weir quoted in Alan Paul, “Top Dog,” Guitar World 21, no. 3 (March 2001): 41, http://alan paulinchina.com/2011/01/from-­archives-­bob-­weir.html; Concert in Central Park, New York City, August 16, 1965, Alan Lomax Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. 2. Danny Kalb quoted in Robbie Woliver, Hoot! A 25-­Year History of the Greenwich Village Music Scene (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 46; Don Wilcock, “Blues Wax Sittin’ In with Jorma Kaukonen,” pt. 1, “Perfect Imperfection,” accessed November 8, 2011, http://bluesrevue.com/2011/05/the-­ezine-­jorma-­kaukonen-­part-­one-­5-­6-­11/#. 3. Barbara Dane, interview by author, September 23, 2010. For many interviews, subsequent e-­mail correspondence was used to clarify or confirm information. PROLOGUE

1. Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 255. 2. Frederic Ramsey Jr., “Leadbelly’s Legacy,” Saturday Review, January 28, 1950. 3. “Leadbelly Dies; Twice Sang His Way Out of Prisons,” New York Herald Tribune, December 7, 1949. 4. Robin Roberts, interview by author, July 18, 2011. Roberts was involved with Lomax in the planning of the concert, and she vividly recalled Martha’s comment about the prison movie. 5. “Memorial Concert Honors Lead Belly,” New York Times, January 30, 1950, 29; Tom Paley, interviews by author, August 7, 2010, and November 2, 2011. 6. Roberts, interview. 7. Alan Lomax, script and notes for the Lead Belly Memorial Concert, January 28, 1950, Alan Lomax Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. 8. John Cohen, interview by author, June 7, 2010. 9. Paley, interviews. 10. Cohen, interview. On other occasions, Cohen has recalled the second song as possibly being another of Davis’s original marching band arrangements, “Soldier’s Drill,” also known as “Civil War March” or “United States March.” 11. Roberts, interview. 12. “Memorial Concert Honors Lead Belly,” 29. 13. Dan Burley, “Dan Burley’s Clothesline,” New York Age, February 4, 1950, 6; William Lee Ellis, “I Belong to the Band: The Music of Reverend Gary Davis” (PhD diss., University of Memphis, 2010), 241. ProQuest (3448247).

271

NOTES TO PAGES 6–9 CHAPTER ONE

1. Unless otherwise noted, all song lyrics are copyright Chandos Music Inc. 2. For some details I’m indebted to Rick Bragg’s article on Laurens County in The New York Times (“In South Carolina Town, a Klan Museum Opens Old Wounds,” November 17, 1996); Frank Beacham, “A Visit to South Carolina’s Redneck Shop and Ku Klux Klan Museum,” Frank Beacham’s Journal, http://www.beachamjournal.com/journal /2010/04/a-­visit-­to-­south-­carolinas-­redneck-­shop-­and-­ku-­klux-­klan-­museum.html. 3. Mary Sherrer and Jennifer Revels, Historical and Architectural Survey of Western Laurens County, South Carolina (County of Laurens, SC, 1992). 4. 1900 United States Census, Agriculture Tables; Gary Davis Social Security application, December 19, 1962. Davis’s first marriage license indicates 1896 as the year of his birth, as does his World War I draft registration card. Various documents and accounts have also given 1895 and 1897: Davis’s blind school application of 1914 lists his birth year as 1897; his Durham welfare records give 1895, as does his second marriage license from 1943. It’s not possible to say with certainty which date is correct, although Davis himself consistently went by the 1896 date during the folk revival. 5. Rev. Gary Davis, interviews by Elizabeth Lyttleton, circa 1950–­51, Alan Lomax Collection (AFC 2004/004), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as Davis, Lyttleton interviews); Stefan Grossman, “A Rare Interview with Rev. Gary Davis,” Sing Out! 23, no. 1 (1974): 3; Alex Shoumatoff, “The Reverend Gary Davis,” Rolling Stone, December 23, 1971, 34. 6. Robert Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City”: A Tribute to Rev. Gary Davis (1896–­ 1972) (Sparta, NJ: Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop, 2010), 5; Gary Davis application to the South Carolina Institution for the Education of the Deaf and the Blind, Cedar Springs, SC (now the South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind), August 26, 1914. 7. Gary Davis welfare file, Durham County, North Carolina, case no. 282, July 1937. All references to the Gary Davis Durham welfare file are from the Stefan Grossman collection. The file is also housed in the Richard K. Spottswood Collection at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. 8. Ellis, “I Belong to the Band,” 507; Annie Davis, interview by Stefan Grossman, circa 1969; Davis, Lyttleton interviews. According to Ellis, poor southern blacks of this era often concocted a story about a doctor’s mistake to cover up for infant blindness related to a sexually transmitted disease in the mother. In Davis’s case, the actual cause will likely remain unknown. 9. Gary Davis application to the South Carolina Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Blind; Grossman, “A Rare Interview,” 3. 10. Davis, Lyttleton interviews; Treasurer’s Tax Duplicate of Laurens County, January 1, 1897. Billy Abercrombie, a descendant of the three Abercrombie brothers who first settled in upper Laurens County in the eighteenth century and who still farms in the area, remarks that “Davis is a common name around here. I imagine [Gary] was born around here between Rabun Creek and the Reedy River of Laurens County, which is near, if you look at a map.” Billy Abercrombie, interview by author, August 8, 2010. The location in Young’s township jibes with another interview in which Davis said he

272

NOTES TO PAGES 9–14

was born about nine miles from the town of Laurens. (See Shoumatoff, “The Reverend Gary Davis,” 34.) The Lyttleton interviews were originally transcribed in a style that aimed to capture Davis’s southern dialect. But by today’s standards, the renderings seem rather forced. I have opted to translate them into a more modern form, but I haven’t changed any of the words transcribed. 11. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 12. Death certificate of Lena Eveline Morris (née Evelina Davis), Durham County, North Carolina, June 28, 1934; Davis, Lyttleton interviews; Grossman, “A Rare Interview,” 2; Shoumatoff, “The Reverend Gary Davis,” 34. 13. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 14. Laurens County court records from 1901 indicate that a John Davis was found guilty of selling whiskey and having in his possession “contraband liquor.” (Laurens County Court of General Sessions Journal, 1901, p. 498.) The Laurens Advertiser reported (January 10, 1906, 1) that a John Davis was found guilty of violating liquor laws and ordered to pay a fine of $200 or “go to the chain gang for a year.” Davis being a common name in that part of the state, there’s no way to ascertain whether these episodes refer to Gary Davis’s father. 15. Concert in Central Park (see introd., n. 1). 16. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 17. Gordon Lutz, “The Roots of Gary Davis,” in Down Beat: Music ’73 (Chicago: Maher Publications, 1974), 22. 18. Abercrombie, interview. 19. Davis, Lyttleton interviews; Lutz, “The Roots of Gary Davis,” 22; Grossman, “A Rare Interview,” 3. 20. Davis, Lyttleton interviews; Sherrer and Revels, Historical and Architectural Survey of Western Laurens County. 21. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 22. I. A. Newby, Black Carolinians: A History of Blacks in South Carolina from 1895 to 1968 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973), 146–­48. 23. Rev. Gary Davis, private recording, Denver, 1968; Richard A. Noblett, Stephen T. Rye, and John Offord, “The Reverend Gary Davis,” Blues Unlimited, no. 25 (September 1965): 11 (hereafter cited as Noblett, Rye, and Offord, “The Reverend Gary Davis” 1965); Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 24. Works Progress Administraton, Inventory of Church Archives, 1936, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia; John Allen Middleton, Directory and Pre-­1900 Historical Survey of South Carolina’s Black Baptists (Columbia, SC: J.A. Middleton and Associates, 1992), 177. 25. Kimberly R. Kellison, “South Carolina Baptists, the Primitive-­Missionary Schism, and the Revival of the Early 1830s,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 110 nos. 3/4 (July–­ October 2009): 155–­57. 26. Aunt Kate [pseud.], “On Attending a Negro Revival,” The Laurens Advertiser, September 1, 1915. 27. James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, The Second Book of Negro

273

NOTES TO PAGES 14–18

Spirituals (New York: The Viking Press, 1926), 12. James Weldon Johnson wrote the text and his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, did the arrangements. 28. Newby, Black Carolinians, 151; Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 29. Newby, Black Carolinians, 49. 30. Annie Davis, Grossman interview. 31. Davis, Lyttleton interviews; Shoumatoff, “The Reverend Gary Davis,” 34. 32. Samuel Charters, Sweet as the Showers of Rain: The Bluesmen, Vol. II (New York: Oak Publications, 1977), 158. 33. Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 17–­18; Jeffrey J. Noonan, The Guitar in America, Victorian Age to Jazz Age (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 11–­12; Jas Obrecht, “Blues Origins: Spanish Fandango and Sebastopol,” Jas Obrecht Music Archive, http:// jasobrecht.com/blues-­origins-­spanish-­fandango-­and-­sebastopol/. 34. Rev. Gary Davis, Denver recording; Davis, Lyttleton interviews; Harold Becker, Blind Gary Davis (1963), film short. In another interview, Davis said his mother paid eighteen dollars for his first guitar, but that seems an unlikely amount for a poor sharecropper to have spent. (See Noblett, Rye, and Offord, “The Reverend Gary Davis” 1965, 10.) 35. Richard A. Noblett, Stephen T. Rye, and John Offord, “The Rev. Gary Davis,” Blues Unlimited, no. 39 (December 1966): 12 (hereafter cited as Noblett, Rye, and Offord, “The Rev. Gary Davis” 1966); Tim Ferris, “Gary Davis, 73 & Blind, Sees & Sings True Blue,” New York Post, June 20, 1969. 36. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 90; Stephen Calt, liner notes to Reverend Gary Davis: New Blues and Gospel, Vol. 1, Biograph Records BLP 12030, 1971. 37. Noblett, Rye, and Offord, “The Reverend Gary Davis” 1965, 11; Charters, Sweet as the Showers of Rain, 158. Davis said that he learned the carnival show number “Candy Man” from Will Bonds, a member of the string band with whom he played in Greenville as a teenager or young man. In another account, Davis told his student Stefan Grossman the song came from Porter Irving, a musician in Laurens, County. Stefan Grossman, interviews by author, May 25, 2010, and December 1, 2010. 38. Lynn Abbot and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, ‘Coon Songs,’ and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 26–­28. 39. Ibid., 210. 40. Dewey Markham, with Bill Levinson, Here Come the Judge! (New York: Popular Library, 1969), 45–­46. 41. Laurens Advertiser, October 24, 1900, 3. 42. Andre Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 83. 43. Davis, Lyttleton interviews; Rev. Gary Davis, interview by Larry Johnson and Lionel Rogosin, circa 1971, Alan Lomax Collection (AFC 2004/004), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. 44. Gerard J. Homan, “Rev. Gary Davis: The Early Years,” Blues World, no. 42 (Spring

274

NOTES TO PAGES 18–26

1972): 9; Bastin, Red River Blues, 171, 174. Although Davis recalled the date of his string band experience with Walker variously as 1910 or 1911, it might have been considerably later. Davis said on various occasions that he left Laurens County at age 20 or 21, and he told his student Stefan Grossman that he played with Walker when both men lived in the city of Greenville. Davis first shows up in Greenville about 1917 or 1918, prior to his first marriage. Walker is listed in the city directory for the years 1915, 1917–­19, 1924, 1931 and 1933. 45. Grossman, “A Rare Interview,” 36. 46. Elijah Wald, Josh White: Society Blues (New York: Routledge, 2002), 19; Grossman, interviews; Grossman, “A Rare Interview,” 36. Bruce Bastin rendered the quote incorrectly, changing the meaning: He wrote that Davis said he “didn’t even learn” any of Walker’s pieces because they were so difficult. (Red River Blues, 174). However, the quote is clearly discernible on Grossman’s interview tape as “didn’t ever learn.” 47. Gary Davis, interviews by Stefan Grossman, circa 1962–­1969. 48. Homan, “Rev. Gary Davis,” 9. 49. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 26. 50. Rev. Gary Davis, recorded at the UCLA Folk Festival, March 25–­27, 1964, D.K. Wilgus Collection, UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive. 51. Rev. Gary Davis and Jack Elliott, recorded at Indiana University, February 1, 1964, Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University, Bloomington. 52. Calt, liner notes to Reverend Gary Davis; South Carolina Institution for the Education of the Deaf and the Blind, Sixty-­Fifth Annual Report, 1913. For a further discussion of Evelina Cheek, see chap. 3, n. 5. 53. South Carolina Institution for the Education of the Deaf and the Blind, Sixty-­ Seventh Annual Report, 1915. 54. South Carolina Institution for the Education of the Deaf and the Blind, Sixty-­ Fifth Annual Report, 1913. 55. Bastin, Red River Blues, 172. 56. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 8. CHAPTER TWO

1. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 2. World War I draft registration card for Gary Davis, June 5, 1917, National Archives and Records Administration, microfilm roll SC36. 3. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 4. Ibid. 5. Davis, Johnson and Rogosin interview. 6. Wolfe and Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, 42; Wald, Josh White, 18. 7. John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 24. 8. Davis, Johnson and Rogosin interview; Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 9. Jerry Zolten, Great God A’mighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds: Celebrating the Rise of Soul Gospel Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12. A “J. Taggart” shows up

275

NOTES TO PAGES 26–32

on the rolls of the Blind School in Cedar Springs for the 1912–­13 school year. (See South Carolina Institution for the Education of the Deaf and the Blind, Sixty-­Fifth Annual Report.) 10. Wald, Josh White, 34. 11. April 3, 1920. Cited in Newby, Black Carolinians, 62. 12. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 13. Lutz, “The Roots of Gary Davis,” 22. 14. Terry Rowden, The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 15–­17; Grossman, “A Rare Interview,” 4. 15. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. Black insurance companies grew out of church relief societies that formed after the Civil War; they offered assistance for burials and funerals and sick benefits for the employed. See M. S. Stuart, An Economic Detour: A History of Insurance in the Lives of American Negroes (New York: Wendell Malliett and Company, 1940), 8–­9. 16. Marriage license of Gary Davis and Mary Hendrix, Greenville, South Carolina, June 17, 1919; 1920 United States Census, Greenville, South Carolina; Lutz, “The Roots of Gary Davis.” 17. Lutz, “The Roots of Gary Davis,” 23; Wald, Josh White, 15–­16. Josh White, who led around John Henry “Big Man” Arnold, a blind street singer from Greenville during the 1920s, recalled that Arnold sometimes made five hundred dollars in a week. 18. Bastin, Red River Blues, 183. 19. Newby, Black Carolinians, 200. 20. Asheville city directory, 1923, Wilson Library, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Andy Cohen, e-­mail correspondence with author, January–­February 2012 (Phelps grew up in Laurens County and knew Davis both as a boy and when Davis lived in Asheville, he told Cohen); Bastin, Red River Blues, 242. 21. Davis, Lyttleton interviews; Annie Davis, Grossman interview. 22. Bastin, Red River Blues, 173; Gary Davis Durham welfare file, July 21, 1937; Davis, Lyttleton interviews; North Carolina State Archives, correspondence with the author, June 21, 2011. 23. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid.; Paul Oliver, “Blind Gary Davis,” Jazzbeat 2, no. 8, 1965; Shoumatoff, “The Reverend Gary Davis,” 34; Tiny Robinson, Davis’s family friend in New York, told William Lee Ellis that Davis had two estranged daughters from South Carolina who visited him in New York. (Ellis, “I Belong to the Band,” 69.) There is no further evidence of this, and Davis himself never mentioned it to an interviewer or student. Robinson might have been referring to Annie Davis’s daughters, who visited from time to time. 26. Rev. Gary Davis documentary, produced by Joan Fenton, KPFK radio, circa 1973. 27. Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (New York: Stein and Day, 1970), 7. 28. Ernie Hawkins, interviews by author, January 17, 2006, October 6, 2010, June 2,

276

NOTES TO PAGES 32–35

2011; “Why the Blind Have the Best Memory: People with No Visual Experience Can Recall the Most Information,” The Daily Mail, April 28, 2013. 29. Hawkins, interviews. 30. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 31. Bastin, Red River Blues, 242. CHAPTER THREE

1. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume 11: 1911–­12 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 58; W. E. B. DuBois, “The Upbuilding of Black Durham: The Success of the Negroes and Their Value to a Tolerant and Helpful Southern City,” The World’s Work, no. 23 (November 1911–­April 1912): 334–­38. 2. DuBois, “The Upbuilding of Black Durham,” 334; Hill’s Durham City Directory, 1931, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 3. Coy T. Phillips, “City Pattern of Durham, N.C.,” Economic Geography 23, no. 4 (October 1947): 234; Hugh Penn Brinton, “The Negro in Durham: A Study of Adjustment to Town Life” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1930), v. 4. Fenton, Rev. Gary Davis documentary. The Durham Welfare Department said it had been aware of Davis since its establishment, in 1919 (Gary Davis Durham welfare file, “Social History,” undated, circa 1944). A Durham friend of Davis’s also told welfare workers that Davis had resided in the city for twenty-­one years, which was clearly not so, but it probably indicates that his visits were frequent. Gary Davis Durham welfare file, July 12, 1937. 5. Previous researchers (see Bastin, Red River Blues; Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City”) have identified a Durham woman named Belle Davis as Gary Davis’s mother. The confusion probably stems from the fact that Gary and Belle lived next door to each other at 410-­A and 410-­B Poplar Street in Durham beginning in the late 1930s. However, Belle Davis couldn’t be Davis’s mother and doesn’t appear to have been related to him. According to her Durham death certificate, she died in April 1938. Gary Davis’s welfare records indicate that his mother died in June 1934. Belle Davis is listed on her death certificate as single and Davis’s mother was a widow. Also, Davis said in an interview that his religious awakening occurred four months before his mother died (Davis, Lyttleton interviews). He was ordained a minister by 1937, which doesn’t fit in with the timing of Belle Davis’s death the following year. Lastly, Davis’s mother remarried at least twice after the death of his father around 1906, so it’s doubtful her last name at this time would be Davis. In fact, Davis did live with his mother, Lena Morris, in Durham until her death from heart disease on June 28, 1934. Lena Eveline Morris’s Durham death certificate lists Gary Davis as the informant, living at her address, 715 Whitted Street. “Lena” is probably a nickname for “Evelina.” (Four years earlier, the 1930 census shows Gary Davis living with Lena Morris at 5121/2 Pettigrew Street, with both listed as boarders in a shared home.) Morris’s occupation is given as a tobacco stemmer, the job Davis said his mother held. On her death certificate, Morris’s father is identified as Clay Martin, who

277

NOTES TO PAGES 35–40

had signed Davis’s blind school application along with Evelina Cheek in 1914. Davis’s 1962 Social Security application confirms that his mother’s maiden name was Martin. Evelina Cheek was not Davis’s grandmother, as previously speculated (see Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City”), but Davis’s mother, after her second marriage. In December 1917, at the age of thirty-­eight, Evelina Cheek married Will Morris, according to Laurens County marriage records; it was probably her third marriage. Both were then living in Fountain Inn, South Carolina. Evelina Martin must have married a man named Cheek sometime after the death of Davis’s father, John Davis, circa 1906. Those marriage records have not turned up. 6. Estelle Hodges, oral history interview, May 23, 1979, Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Durham County Code Book, 1940. The ordinance dated at least as far back as 1928. 7. Gary Davis Durham welfare file, July 16, 1931. Some blacks in the Carolinas, including the musician Sonny Terry, pronounced Davis’s first name “GAY-­ree” (see Bastin, Red River Blues, 266), which may account for the misspelling on the form. 8. Hodges, oral history interview. 9. William A. Amey, oral history interview, November 17, 1976, Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. South Pine is now called South Roxboro Street. The spelling of Pearl Osburn’s name is phonetic. 10. Grossman, “A Rare Interview,” 5. 11. Amey, oral history interview. Decades later, Amey pegged these memories to the early 1920s, maybe even as early as 1916–­17, but it’s impossible to know for sure when the events occurred. 12. Glenn Hinson, “The Bull City Blues,” North Carolina Bicentennial Folklife Festival Program (1976): 46, Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 13. Bruce Bastin, “Reverend Gary Davis’ Early Years,” in liner notes to Rev. Gary Davis: Demons and Angels, Shanachie 6117, 2001; Amey, oral history interview. 14. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 15. Amey put the incident at about 1953, but he said it was before Davis moved out of town, which would make it sometime prior to 1944. 16. Blind Boy Fuller Durham, North Carolina, Welfare Case File, Richard K. Spottswood Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. 17. Homan, “Rev. Gary Davis,” 10. Davis also discusses his meeting with Cora Mae on “Talk on Blind Boy Fuller,” on Reverend Gary Davis: At Home and Church, Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop SGGW 130/1/2, 2010, disc 2, track 17. 18. Grossman, “A Rare Interview,” 5. 19. Ibid.; Willie Trice, interviewed by Bruce Bastin, cited in Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 10. 20. Amey, oral history interview. 21. 1930 United States Census, Durham, Enumeration District 32–­10, Sheet 3-­B. 22. Hodges, oral history interview.

278

NOTES TO PAGES 40–49

23. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 24. Ibid. 25. Death certificate of Lena Eveline Morris, Durham County, North Carolina, June 28, 1934. 26. Homan, “Rev. Gary Davis,” 10; Oliver, “Blind Gary Davis,” 12; Annie Davis, letter to Alex Shoumatoff, January 8, 1971, Alex Shoumatoff collection; Rev. Gary Davis, recorded in conversation with Fred Gerlach and Tiny Robinson, circa 1957, in the Bronx and Manhattan, Allan Evans collection. 27. Daniel Beaumont, Preachin’ the Blues (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 32. CHAPTER FOUR

1. Gary Davis Durham welfare file, December 11, 1934. 2. Ibid., September 30, 1935; ibid., May 9, 1935. 3. Brownie McGhee, interview by Stefan Grossman, London, 1977. 4. Kip Lornell, “Living Blues Interview: J. B. Long,” Living Blues, no. 29 (September–­ October 1976): 13. 5. Ibid. 6. Open Durham (online archive of Durham, North Carolina, history), http://www .opendurham.org; Triangle Blues Society, http://triangleblues.com/bluestrail.html; Lor‑ nell, “Living Blues Interview,” 16. 7. Lornell, “Living Blues Interview,” 14; Bastin, Red River Blues, 220; Grossman, “A Rare Interview,” 5. 8. Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 85. 9. Elijah Wald, liner notes to Josh White: Free and Equal Blues, Smithsonian Folkways SFW40081, 1998; “Lombardo Suing on Brunswick’s 25c Disc Idea; Disc Firm’s Film Angle,” Variety, September 25, 1934. 10. Bastin, Red River Blues, 220; Grossman, “A Rare Interview,” 5. 11. Robert Tilling, “I Never Was Shy Around None of Those Guitar Players,” Blues & Gospel Rhythm, no. 169 (May 2002): 18–­19. 12. McGhee, interview; Dave Van Ronk, interview by Mike Joyce, 1977, cited in Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 33. 13. Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye, comps., Blues and Gospel Records, 1890–­1943 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 277, 121. 14. Ellis, “I Belong to the Band,” 183, 253; Frank Basile, liner notes to Demons and Angels: Rev. Gary Davis, the Ultimate Collection, Shanachie SHANCD 6117, 2001. 15. Basile, liner notes to Demons and Angels; American Record Corporation (ARC) session cards for Blind Gary, July 1935, Sony Music Entertainment Archives, New York, NY. On the session ledgers the duo is identified as “Blind Gary and George.” 16. Bastin, Red River Blues, 223. 17. ARC session cards. It’s unknown why Gary Davis became “Blind Gary” on those records. It’s probable that either Long or ARC’s director of artists and repertoire, Art Satherley, insisted on “Blind Gary” as a catchier name for marketing purposes. ARC then had a numbering system on the records themselves that was supposed to corre-

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NOTES TO PAGES 49–53

spond to the month and year of issue. The numbers didn’t always match the dates on the session cards, but they were usually pretty close. 18. Rowden, The Songs of Blind Folk, 78–­81; Ellis, “I Belong to the Band,” 540. The 1935 recording of “Lord, I Wish I Could See” first appeared on record in 1991 on Preachin’ the Gospel: Holy Blues, Columbia/Legacy CK 46779. A second take of “Lord, I Wish I Could See,” featuring a slightly different beginning and ending and a faster tempo, has survived but has never been commercially released. 19. ARC catalogue release cards, Sony Music Entertainment Archives, New York, NY; Roger Misiewicz and Helge Thygesen, comps., ARC Blues and Gospel Records, 1935–­ 38, http://www.bluesworld.com/ARC.pdf; David Jansen, liner notes to Sun Is Going Down, Folkways Records FW 03542, 1976. It’s unknown whether the hand-­marked sales numbers listed in ARC files represent final totals for Davis’s and Fuller’s 78s or just preliminary sales. 20. Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 94. 21. Richard A. Noblett, Stephen T. Rye, and John Offord, “Country Blues Special: The Rev. Gary Davis, Part 1,” Blues Unlimited, no. 38 (November 1966): 5; Bastin, Red River Blues, 222, 244. Long later recalled paying Davis $250 for the 1935 sessions. 22. The royalty figure shows up on a Notice of Coupling and Assignment for “I Am the Light of This World” b/w “I Am the True Vine,” October 22, 1935, Sony Music Entertainment Archives, New York, NY. 23. McGhee, interview. 24. Alex Van der Turk, Bob Eagle, Rob Ford, Eric LeBlanc, and Angela Mack, “In Search of Blind Blake,” Blues and Rhythm, no. 263 (October 2011): 10; Grossman, interviews (see chap. 1, n. 37). 25. Ralph Rush, “A Conversation with Larry Johnson,” Sing Out! 23, no. 3 (1974): 3. Long, who took the author credit on Fuller’s 1940 recording of “Step It Up and Go,” maintained that he retitled the song for Fuller based on a tune called “Touch It Up and Go” that other musicians were singing. See Bastin, Red River Blues, 228. The Memphis Jug Band recorded the similar “Bottle Up and Go” in 1932. 26. Noblett, Rye, and Offord, “Country Blues Special,” 5; Gary Davis Durham welfare file, December 24, 1935. 27. Gary Davis Durham welfare file, April–­May 1936. 28. Ibid., 1941 (full date not legible). 29. Ibid., July 21, 1937. 30. Shine On: Richard Trice and the Bull City Blues, directed by Kenny Dalsheimer and Jamie Hysjulien (Durham, NC: Groove Productions, 2000), DVD. There are no other accounts of Davis playing the drums or saxophone, but given his ability on guitar, banjo, harmonica, and piano, Trice’s recollection should be taken seriously. 31. Pete Oppel, “Lots of Whoops Ahead: Folk Harpist Sonny Terry Nears 70, A Healthy Optimist,” Dallas Morning News, March 4, 1981. 32. Tony Glover, notes to Sonny Terry, Whoopin’ the Blues, 1958–­1974 (Sparta, NJ: Vestapol Productions, 2004), DVD. 33. Davis, Grossman interviews (see chap. 1, n. 47).

280

NOTES TO PAGES 54–61

34. Dunstan Prial, The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 109. 35. John Hammond, with Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 199, 201; Elon College is now Elon. 36. Noblett, Rye, and Offord, “Country Blues Special,” 6; Lornell, “Living Blues Interview,” 17. 37. Bruce Bastin and John Cowley, “Uncle Art’s Logbook Blues,” Blues Unlimited, no. 108 (June–­July 1974): 16; Robert Darden, People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 152. 38. Bastin, Red River Blues, 249; Gary Davis Durham welfare file, April 14, 1939. Long later maintained that Davis’s voice “had a strain in it and [Davis] didn’t have the nerve to go back” and record. 39. Happy Traum, ed., Guitar Styles of Brownie McGhee (New York: Oak Publications, 1971), 8. 40. McGhee, interview. 41. Rev. James Herndon, interview by author, August 30, 2013. 42. Shirley Caesar, The Lady, the Melody and the Word: The Inspirational Story of the First Lady of Gospel (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998), 13–­14, 23–­24. 43. Darden, People Get Ready!, 140; Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 172; Ellis, “I Belong to the Band,” 268. 44. Herndon, interview; Amey, oral history interview. 45. Brinton, “The Negro in Durham.” 46. James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, The Book of American Negro Spirituals (New York: Viking Press, 1925), 36. 47. McGhee, interview. 48. Alan Smithline, interviews by author, August 14, 2010, and September 21, 2010. 49. Herndon, interview. 50. Alan Lomax, “List of American Folk Songs,” Library of Congress, September 3, 1940. 51. Richard Trice, interviews by Kenny Dalsheimer and Jamie Hysjulien for Shine On: Richard Trice and the Bull City Blues, 2000, transcript, Kenny Dalsheimer Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 52. Death certificate of Fulton Allen, Durham, North Carolina, February 13, 1941; Rev. Gary Davis, in conversation with Fred Gerlach and Tiny Robinson; Davis, Grossman interviews. 53. Gary Davis Durham welfare file, 1941 (full date not legible). 54. Ibid., October 14, 1941. 55. Ibid., November 10, 1941. 56. Ibid., April 13, 1942. 57. Ibid., 1943 (full date not legible). 58. Annie Davis, Grossman interview (see chap. 1, n. 8). Annie is identified as a widow in the 1940 Census, which lists her living at the South Blount Street address and working as a cook in a private home. 1940 United States Census, Raleigh, Enumeration District 92-­51, Sheet 5-­B.

281

NOTES TO PAGES 61–66

59. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 60. Annie Davis, Grossman interview. 61. Date given in Social Security records; it’s supported by the 1900 Census, which lists an Anna B., four years old, born February 1896 in North Carolina, with parents George McDowell (day laborer) and Marilla. On her 1943 license to marry Gary Davis, Annie’s age would be listed as forty-­four, putting the year of her birth in 1899. On her tombstone, the year is listed as 1895. Annie confirmed that her stepfather’s name was George (Annie Davis, Grossman interview). 62. Annie Davis, Grossman interview. 63. Annie Davis and Larry Johnson in conversation, recorded by Lionel Rogosin, May 1972, Alan Lomax Collection, Library of Congress. 64. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 65. Annie Davis, Grossman interview; Annie Davis and Larry Johnson conversation, Rogosin recording. 66. Marriage license of Gary Davis and Annie Hicks, Durham, North Carolina, November 13, 1943. She was then using the name Hicks. The 1930 Census shows her as Annie Wright, with husband Edward Wright (a hotel cook) and two daughters, Ruby, age five, and Elizabeth, age ten. She appears to have had more than one husband. (Davis’s Durham welfare file for August 29, 1944, confirms Annie’s daughter as Ruby Wright.) 67. Annie Davis and Larry Johnson conversation, Rogosin recording. 68. Smithline, interviews; John Townley, interview by author, July 8, 2010. 69. Gary Davis Durham welfare file, April 14, 1944; Calt, liner notes to Reverend Gary Davis (see chap. 1, n. 36). CHAPTER FIVE

1. Annie Davis, Grossman interview. 2. Ibid.; Calt, liner notes to Reverend Gary Davis; Annie Davis and Larry Johnson in conversation, Rogosin recording; 1940 United States Census, Raleigh. Ruby’s age is confirmed in Davis’s Durham welfare file, in a letter from the City of New York Department of Welfare to Durham welfare officials, August 29, 1944. 3. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 4. Ibid. 5. Laura Tosi, librarian at the Bronx County Historical Society, correspondence with author, May 22, 2012; Evelyn Gonzalez, The Bronx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 97, 99, 101. Morrisania is now called Claremont. 6. Gary Davis Durham welfare file, September 18, 1944. 7. Ibid., April 8, 1944. 8. Davis, Lyttleton interviews; Ray Allen, Singing in the Spirit: African-­American Sacred Quartets in New York City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 23. 9. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (1930; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), 163–­64.

282

NOTES TO PAGES 67–72

10. Herbert Collins, “Store Front Churches,” Negro American Literature Forum 4, no. 2 (July 1970): 64–­68; Rev. Frederick Crawford, interview by author, July 17, 2013. 11. Crawford, interview. 12. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. Texas native John Henry Faulk was a folklorist, hu‑ morist, and radio host. 13. Ibid. 14. Gary Davis Durham welfare file, August 29, 1944. 15. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 16. “Organ Grinders to Go,” New York Times, January 17, 1936; Susie J. Tanenbaum, Underground Harmonies: Music and Politics in the Subways of New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 234. 17. “Organ Grinders Will Go on Radio to Fight Ban,” New York Times, January 11, 1936; “Street Musicians Freed,” New York Times, May 9, 1936. 18. Patricia J. Campbell, Passing the Hat: Street Performers in America (New York: Delacorte Press, 1981), 11. 19. He went up the A (fifth) string to the twelfth fret and then down the low E (sixth) string. 20. Tim Ferris, “Rev. Gary Davis Dead at 76,” Rolling Stone, June 8, 1972. 21. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 22. Harlem Street Singer, directed by Simeon Hutner and Trevor Laurence (New York: Acoustic Traditions, 2013). 23. “Street Singer,” Our World, December 1951. 24. Pete Welding, liner notes to Philadelphia Street Singer, Blind Connie Williams, Testament Records T-­2225, 1995. 25. Glover, notes to Sonny Terry. 26. McGhee, interview. 27. Ellis, “I Belong to the Band,” 68. 28. Moses Asch, interview by Gary Kenton, November 1982, Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Tony Olmsted, Folkways Records: Moses Asch and His Encyclopedia of Sound (New York: Routledge, 2003), 39. 29. “Music: Offbeat,” Time, February 25, 1946. 30. Rev. Gary Davis session for Moses Asch, Smithsonian Folkways collection, Washington, DC. A careful examination of a tape of the session (which could have been transferred from acetate discs) raises significant questions about whether it’s from the time period claimed by Asch. At one point on the tape, Asch asks Davis how long it had been since he left his childhood home. Davis says, “I ain’t been home for thirty-­ two years,” and he adds, “Been here . . . goin’ on ten years.” Davis, it should be noted, was not a reliable source for remembering dates. Interviewed around 1969 by Stefan Grossman, Davis announced that “I been married thirty years today at twelve o’clock.” (Davis, Grossman interviews.) In 1969, Davis would have been celebrating his twenty-­ sixth wedding anniversary; he did not live to see his thirtieth. Nevertheless, thirty-­two years from the time Davis left Laurens County would place the session around 1949 or later. Davis had arrived in New York in 1944, so his calculation that he’d been in the city

283

NOTES TO PAGES 72–76

“goin’ on ten years” is even more problematic and could place the session as late as 1953. With the exception of a one-­minute filler tune, almost all the songs recorded by Davis clock in at four or five minutes long, which would have exceeded the three minutes of audio that could be captured on a 78, the prevailing record format circa 1945. However, a search of Asch’s business papers, account books, recording ledgers, royalty payments, production notes, and personal notes for the years 1944–­1957 yielded no information about the recording session. Given that Davis could be wildly off on his dates, a definitive answer to the question of the session date eludes us. 31. Rev. Gary Davis session for Moses Asch. 32. Ibid. 33. Ellis, “I Belong to the Band,” 345. 34. Edward A. Berlin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 46. 35. Stefan Grossman, Rev. Gary Davis: Blues Guitar (New York: Oak Publications, 1970), 14; Ronald Herder, ed., 500 Best-­Loved Song Lyrics (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), 400. Davis would sing, “There’s the Jap. Shoot ’em!” as late as 1964 during a concert at UCLA. 36. “Sebastopol. A Descriptive Fantaisie for the Guitar, by Henry Worrall,” Henry Worrall Collection, Kansas Historical Society, http://www.kansasmemory.org; Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–­1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 282. Solo guitar arrangements of John Philip Sousa marches also were fairly common by the late nineteenth century, and these arrangements may have filtered down to folk artists like Davis. Whether these parlor guitar renderings of Sousa approached the complexity of Davis’s presentation is an avenue for further research. Thanks to Jeffrey Noonan for helping locate Sousa sheet music for solo guitar. 37. Rev. Gary Davis session for Moses Asch. The Folkways collection was The Asch Recordings, 1939–­45, Volume 2, Folkways FW00AA3. Four other songs appeared in 1965 on the album Rev Gary Davis/Short Stuff Macon, XTRA 1009, which included material from the obscure blues singer Short Stuff Macon. “Soldier’s Drill” would also be known in Davis’s oeuvre as “United States March.” 38. Jim Capaldi, “Conversation with Mr. Folkways,” Folkscene, May 1978, 4, Samuel and Ann Charters Archives of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture, University of Connecticut Libraries. 39. Oscar Brand, interview by author, May 20, 2011. 40. Ibid. 41. Davis, Lyttleton interviews; Brand, interview. 42. Rev. G.  D. Davis, “Message from Heaven” (sheet music), Watkins School of Music, 1946, Stefan Grossman collection. It’s not clear what the middle initial stood for. 43. Rev. Gary Davis, recorded at the Sign of the Sun, San Diego, California, June 22–­ 23, 1962, Lou Curtiss Collection, Folk Arts Rare Records, San Diego, California. 44. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 13. It was probably his uncle William. 45. Davis, Grossman interviews. Stefan Grossman, one of the leading authorities on Davis, speculated that Davis’s left wrist had been broken and set out of position, en-

284

NOTES TO PAGES 76–82

abling him to maintain unorthodox hand positions when fingering chords on the guitar. While it’s possible that Davis got his hands mixed up or that he suffered another injury to his left hand, no evidence of this has come to light. 46. Gary Davis Durham welfare file, February 27, 1948. 47. Jonathan Gill, Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 293. 48. Ibid., 328. 49. Langston Hughes, “Down Under in Harlem,” New Republic, March 27, 1944, http://www.newrepublic.com/book/review/down-­under-­in-­harlem. 50. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 51. Ibid. 52. Grossman, “A Rare Interview”; Lawrence Cohn, liner notes to A Little More Faith, Prestige/Bluesville Records BV 1032, 1999 (orig. 1961). Davis would later say he had no fewer than five guitars stolen from him on the streets of New York. (Rev. Gary Davis, recorded at the Shaw Theatre, London, August 8, 1971, Richard Noblett collection.) 53. Gary Davis, New York City arrest record, Bureau of Criminal Identification, Police Department, City of New York, February 15, 1965; Bronx Court of Special Sessions docket book, May 7, 1948, Municipal Archives, New York City. 54. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 55. Ibid. 56. Annie Davis, Grossman interview. 57. Ibid. 58. Traum, Guitar Styles of Brownie McGhee, 13; Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 59. Smithline, interviews. 60. McGhee, interview. 61. Ibid. 62. Homan, “Rev. Gary Davis,” 10. It’s been suggested that the session was recorded earlier, circa 1945. (See Chris Smith, “A Number That (Almost) No Man Could Number,” Blues & Rhythm: The Gospel Truth, no. 117, March 1997.) But after an American Federation of Musicians 1948 ban on recording ended late that year, Continental geared up for new recording sessions, as did its newly formed sister label, Lenox. (See “Diskers Rush to Join AFM but Financial Requirements Prove Restrictive Factor,” Billboard, January 29, 1949; and “Gabor Drops 39-­Cent Pops; Label Snafu?” Billboard, August 28, 1948.) One of the sessions that took place soon after the ban included Big Boy Ellis, whose recordings had matrix numbers adjacent to Davis’s. It’s therefore likely that the January 1949 date is correct. CHAPTER SIX

1. Burt D’Lugoff, who along with his brother, Art, would later host midnight concerts featuring Davis and others, recalled seeing Davis perform at union rallies during the 1948 presidential campaign. Dr. Burt D’Lugoff, interview by author, May 10, 2011. 2. “Music: Out of the Corner,” Time, September 25, 1950. 3. Schwartz had come by his recording obsession after a traumatic childhood, when

285

NOTES TO PAGES 82–89

he was apparently afflicted with a temporary, anxiety-­induced blindness. As an adult he suffered from agoraphobia, a panic disorder that can make it difficult to be in open spaces outside of home. Patricia Sullivan, “Tony Schwartz; His Ads Targeted Viewer Emotions,” Washington Post, June 17, 2008; Margalit Fox, “Tony Schwartz, Father of ‘Daisy Ad’ for the Johnson Campaign, Dies at 84,” New York Times, June 17, 2008. 4. Asked by Stefan Grossman why he played with only two fingers, Davis replied, “Because that’s all you need.” Davis, Grossman interviews. 5. Schwartz began recording for Music in the Streets in the spring of 1950 and didn’t finish until the fall of 1957, shortly before the record’s release. No known documentation exists that would indicate when, during that period, he made each recording. 6. John Szwed, Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World (New York: Viking Penguin, 2010), 123–­24. 7. “Three Folk Music Concerts to Open in Lenox Saturday,” Berkshire Evening Eagle, June 27, 1950; Music Inn Archives, http://www.musicinn.org/history-­of-­the-­music-­inn .html. 8. “Three Folk Music Concerts.” 9. Music Inn Archives. 10. Szwed, Alan Lomax, 250. 11. Ibid., 260. 12. Ibid., 181–­82. 13. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. The Lomax Archive dates the interviews to circa 1951, but a topical reference to the death of the playwright George Bernard Shaw places at least some of the interviews in November 1950. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ellen Stekert, interview by author, July 1, 2010. 18. Cohen, interview (see prologue, n. 8) 19. Don Kent, liner notes to Reverend Gary Davis: Lord I Wish I Could See, Vol. 2–­1971, Biograph Records BLP 12034, 1971; Grossman, interviews. 20. Laurens Advertiser, February 7, 1912, 11. 21. Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (New York: Free Press, 2009), 55; Dave Van Ronk, with Elijah Wald, The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005), 133. 22. John Cohen, liner notes to If I Had My Way: Early Home Recordings of Reverend Gary Davis, Smithsonian Folkways SFW 40123, 2003; Robert Palmer, “Stovepipe and Slim Strum in Soho,” New York Times, January 14, 1977. 23. Gérard Herzhaft, Encyclopedia of the Blues (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997), 197; Davis, Grossman interviews; Palmer, “Stovepipe and Slim.” 24. Annie Davis, Grossman interview; Welding, liner notes to Philadelphia Street Singer. 25. James Robinson, interviews by author, May 27, 2010, July 18, 2011, and December 7, 2011; Dr. Alvin Singh, interview by author, April 25, 2011; Wolfe and Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, 251 (see prologue, n. 1).

286

NOTES TO PAGES 89–95

26. Peter Narváez, “Producing Blues Recordings,” Journal of American Folklore, no. 109 (1996): 452; Robinson, interviews. In July 1957, Davis was arrested in New York and charged with breaking section 1990 of the state penal code, which outlawed loitering on subway or railroad property. Gary Davis, New York City arrest record. 27. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 24. 28. Fred Gerlach, liner notes to Gallows Pole and Other Folk Songs: Fred Gerlach and 12-­String Guitar, Audio-­Video Productions A-­V 102, 1960; Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 25. 29. Singh, interview. 30. Barry Kornfeld, interviews by author, June 18, 2010, and November 1, 2011. 31. Dick Weissman, interview by author, December 27, 2010. 32. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 37. 33. Narváez, “Producing Blues Recordings,” 452; Kenneth S. Goldstein, interview by Neil Rosenberg, January 2, 1979. An unpublished excerpt of the Goldstein interview was provided to the author and used with permission; other portions of the interview appeared in Kenneth S. Goldstein, “A Future Folklorist in the Record Business,” in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, ed. Neil V. Rosenberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 34. Narváez, “Producing Blues Recordings,” 451; Manhattan White Pages, June 1951; Manhattan White Pages, Summer 1944–­Spring 1945. 35. Frank Hoffman, ed., Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1072; Olmsted, Folkways Records, 19, 30; Narváez, “Producing Blues Recordings,” 451. 36. Goldstein, interview. 37. Eldon Whitford, David Vinopal, and Dan Erlewine, Gibson’s Fabulous Flat-­Top Guitars: An Illustrated History and Guide (Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 1994), 79–­80; Grossman, interviews. By the 1950s, Gibson catalogs no longer gave list prices for guitars. 38. Harry West, interview by author, May 19, 2011; Happy Traum, interview by author, July 29, 2010. He probably played a J-­200 at least as early as 1950, when he told Elizabeth Lyttleton that he had a new Gibson guitar he’d bought for $253.80. 39. Traum, interview. 40. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 31. 41. Harlem Street Singer, Prestige/Bluesville BV 1015, 1960, compact disc, track 8. 42. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 43. Record Research 1, no. 4 (August 1955). 44. D’Lugoff, interview. 45. Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–­1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 105; Stephanie Gervis, “The Years Folk Music Grew Up—­and Old,” Village Voice, October 4, 1962. 46. Gervis, “The Years Folk Music Grew Up”; Israel G. Young, “Israel Young’s Notebook,” Sing Out! 18, nos. 2 and 3 (June–­July 1968): 47; Kornfeld, interviews; Manny Greenhill, interview by Ronald Cohen, June 21, 1990, Ronald D. Cohen Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

287

NOTES TO PAGES 95–101

47. Lawrence Cohn, liner notes to Gary Davis Style: The Legacy of Reverend Gary Davis, Inside Sounds 0508, 2002; Lawrence Cohn, interviews by author, May 27–­28 and June 28, 2010. CHAPTER SEVEN

1. Hank Reineke, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott: The Never-­Ending Highway (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 53, 67. 2. Roberta Freund Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues Styles in the United Kingdom (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007), 38–­39. 3. Brian Nicholls, “A Breath of the Real Thing,” Jazz Journal 8, no. 11 (November 1955): 25; Reineke, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, 132; Hutner and Laurence, Harlem Street Singer. 4. Arthur Jordan Field, “Notes on the History of Folksinging in New York City,” Caravan, June–­July 1959, 10–­11; John Wilcock, “Music-­Makers Quit the Square (But Only for the Wintertime),” Village Voice, October 26, 1955, 3. 5. Wilcock, “Music-­Makers Quit the Square,” 3. The popular Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow included Sonny Terry in its original 1947 run. 6. Alfred G. Aronowitz and Marshall Blonsky, “Three’s Company: Peter, Paul and Mary,” Saturday Evening Post, May 30, 1964, 35. 7. Goldstein, interview. 8. Kenneth Goldstein, “A Recording Session with Gary Davis and His ‘Harlem Spirituals,’” Record Changer 14, no. 8 (1956): 9. 9. Narváez, “Producing Blues Recordings,” 452; Goldstein, “A Recording Session with Gary Davis,” 9. 10. Oliver, Songsters and Saints, 221; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Rec­ ords, 481, 704, 772, 1002. 11. The poor transcription has Samson going to “Timothy,” rather than to the town of Timnath in Judah, as told in Judges 14:5. Thanks to Elijah Wald for pointing this out and sharing a copy of the undated broadside from the John Lomax Collection, University of Texas, Austin. 12. Davis, Grossman interviews; Gerlach, liner notes to Gallows Pole and Other Folk Songs; Hawkins, interviews. 13. Darden, People Get Ready!, 85; Ellis, “I Belong to the Band,” 278. 14. Ellis, “I Belong to the Band,” 286. 15. Davis, UCLA Folk Festival; Fenton, Rev. Gary Davis documentary. 16. Gary Davis agreement with Bill Grauer Productions, February 1, 1956. Courtesy of Riverside Music Archive. 17. “American Street Songs,” Billboard, August 4, 1956. 18. Lillian Webster Jones, “Voice, Guitar, and Blues,” Phylon Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1957): 96; Tristram P. Coffin, Midwest Folklore 7, no. 3 (Fall 1957): 188; Dick Weissman, “Recommended Records,” Caravan, December 1957. 19. Daniel G. Hoffman, liner notes to American Street Songs, Riverside Records RLP 148, 1956; Davis, UCLA Folk Festival; Goldstein, interview.

288

NOTES TO PAGES 101–108

20. Cohen, Rainbow Quest, 105; Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), 432. 21. Klein, Woody Guthrie, 432. 22. Israel G. Young, interviews by author, May 28, 2010, and May 29, 2010. 23. Barry Kornfeld, “The Folklore Center,” Caravan, August–­September 1958, 29–­30. 24. Young, interviews; Village Voice advertisement, July 31, 1957; Robbie Woliver, Bringing It All Back Home: Twenty-­Five Years of American Music at Folk City (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 16. Later on, the hours were noon to 9 or 10 p.m. 25. Kornfeld, “The Folklore Center,” 30; Village Voice, June 18, 1958. 26. Izzy Young, “The Folklore Center: 50 Years On!” Sing Out!, June 22, 2007; Young, interviews. 27. Young, interviews. 28. “At Home with the Reverend Gary Davis, 1957,” 7th Hour Blues (undated web magazine), accessed December 6, 2010, http://seventhhourblues.com. The now-­defunct magazine ran partial transcripts of private recordings of Davis made by Fred Gerlach circa 1957. The same tapes would yield Davis’s albums Pure Religion and Bad Company and the posthumously released Sun Is Going Down. CHAPTER EIGHT

1. Traum quoted in Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 31; Scott Barretta, ed., The Conscience of the Folk Revival: The Writings of Israel “Izzy” Young (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 11. 2. Jack Elliott, Jack Takes the Floor, Topic Records 10T15, 1958. 3. Ralph McTell, interview by author, August 21, 2013; John Renbourn, “Born of Skiffle and Blues,” Frets 10, no. 6 (June 1988): 50; Reineke, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, 120. 4. Keith Richards, with James Fox, Life (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2010), 104; the Rolling Stones, Voodoo Brew, Vigotone (bootleg), 1995. 5. Robert Greenfield, “The Rolling Stone Interview: Keith Richard,” Rolling Stone, August 19, 1971, 25. 6. Greil Marcus, The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York: Picador, 1997), 19. 7. Greenhill, Cohen interview (see chap. 6, n. 46); Manhattan Bureau of Vital Statistics, Certificate Number 13264, cited in Federal Bureau of Investigation File on Manuel A. Greenhill, 1956–­1973, and obtained by the author through the Freedom of Information Act (hereafter cited as Greenhill FBI file); Folklore Productions, http:// fliartists.com/about-­folklore/. 8. Greenhill, Cohen interview; Eric Von Schmidt and Jim Rooney, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 22. 9. Greenhill, Cohen interview; Charles Giuliano, “The David Wilson Interviews, Part One: Broadside and Folk Music in Harvard Square,” Berkshire Fine Arts, http:// www.berkshirefinearts.com/11-­04-­2010_the-­david-­wilson-­interviews-­part-­one.htm; Manny Greenhill, interview by Jim Rooney, February 1995.

289

NOTES TO PAGES 108–116

10. Greenhill, Cohen interview; Greenhill FBI file. 11. Mary Katherine Aldin and Eric Von Schmidt, “Last Chorus: Manny Greenhill,” Sing Out! 41, no. 2 (August–­October 1996): 31; Greenhill, Rooney interview. 12. Greenhill, Rooney interview. 13. Kornfeld, interviews (see chap. 6, n. 30); Barry Kornfeld, letter to Ray M. Lawless, January 6, 1959, included in questionnaire and correspondence with Kornfeld for the book Folksingers and Folksongs in America, Ray M. Lawless Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. 14. Mitch Greenhill, interviews by author, August 7, 2010, and October 18, 2011; Kornfeld, interviews. 15. Robert Gustafson, “Folksingers at the ‘Y,’” Christian Science Monitor, December 13, 1958, 13. 16. Jerome S. Shipman, “Reverend Gary Davis in Boston,” Jazz Journal 12, no. 3 (March 1959): 11. 17. Ibid. 18. Barretta, The Conscience of the Folk Revival, 11; Kornfeld, interviews. 19. Kornfeld, interviews. 20. Lee Hoffman, “My Folknik Days,” http://gary-­ross-­hoffman.com/Lee/bio-­folknik .html. 21. Van Ronk and Wald, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, 133–­36 (see chap. 6, n. 21). 22. Terri Thal, interview by author, November 7, 2011. 23. George Wein, Myself among Others (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), 205. 24. Ibid., 314; Kornfeld, interviews. 25. Israel G. Young, “Newport Folk Festival,” Caravan, no. 18 (August–­September 1959); “Hoots and Hollers on the Campus,” Newsweek, November 27, 1961, 84–­85. 26. Nat Hentoff, “Whose Festival?,” Village Voice, June 24, 1959, 13. 27. Kornfeld, interviews. 28. Ibid. 29. Jane Nippert, “Joan Baez Stars in Opening; Fans Cool to Protest Songs,” Newport Daily News, July 23, 1959, 1; Mark Morris, “Newport Report,” Gardyloo, 1959, 10; Robert Shelton, “Folk Joins Jazz at Newport,” New York Times, July 19, 1959, X7. 30. Robert Shelton, “Cream of the Newport Folk Festival,” New York Times, July 19, 1964, X11. 31. Young, “Newport Folk Festival”; Morris, “Newport Report.” 32. Irwin Silber and David Gahr, “Top Performers Highlight 1st Newport Folk Fest,” Sing Out! 9, no. 2 (Fall 1959): 21–­22; Young, “Newport Folk Festival,” 27. 33. Bill Bush, “Dion DiMucci,” Guitar Player, January 2006. Dion confirmed his age during the time of his lessons with Davis in correspondence with the author through Bill Bush, September 12, 2011. 34. Dion DiMucci and Mike Aquilina, The Wanderer Talks Truth (Cincinnati, OH: Servant Books, 2011), 97. 35. Kirsten Dahl, interview by author, May 11, 2011. 36. Ibid. 37. Dahl, interview; Joel Latner, interview by author, April 19, 2011.

290

NOTES TO PAGES 117–125

38. Woody Hochswender, “Picking the Blues in the Ohio Hills,” New York Times, February 3, 2002; Pete Madsen, “No Hesitation,” Acoustic Guitar 16, no. 3 (September 2005): 54–­55; Stefan Wirz, Ian Buchanan Discography, http://wirz.de/music/buchafrm .htm; John Milward, Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock ’n’ Roll (And Rock Saved the Blues) (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2013), 20. 39. Dahl, interview. 40. Ibid. 41. Tom Pomposello, “Living Blues Interview: Larry Johnson,” Living Blues, no. 16 (Spring 1974): 18. CHAPTER NINE

1. Barry Kornfeld, “Reverend Gary Davis—­Folksinger of the Streets,” Sing Out! 9, no. 4 (February–­March 1960): 4–­5. 2. Robert Shelton, “Indian Neck Folk Festival,” Caravan, June–­July 1960. 3. Israel G. Young, “Frets and Frails,” Sing Out! 10, no. 1 (April–­May 1960): 38. 4. Charlie Rothschild, interviews by author, January 19, 2011, and May 23, 2012; Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (New York: Broadway Books, 2008), 15. 5. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 71. 6. Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording (see chap. 4, n. 63). 7. Bronx, New York, White Pages, 1957–­62; Rothschild, interviews. 8. Kornfeld, interviews. 9. Jocelyn Arem, “Celebrating 50 Years of American Folk Music History: The Caffè Lena Collection Arrives at the Library of Congress,” Folklife Center News 32, nos. 1–­2 (Winter/Spring 2010). 10. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 41. 11. Cohn, interviews (see chap. 6, n. 47). 12. Ira Gitler, “Van Gelder’s Studio,” Jazz Times, April 2001; Marc Myers, “New Jersey Jazz Revolution,” Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article /SB10001424052970203806504577180932802903306.html. 13. Myers, “New Jersey Jazz Revolution.” Van Gelder, who has done thousands of sessions over the years, the vast majority of them with jazz artists, had no memory of Rev. Gary Davis or the four classic Davis LPs he engineered for Prestige when the author contacted him in the summer of 2010. 14. Lawrence Cohn, liner notes to Harlem Street Singer (see chap. 6, n. 41). 15. Cohn, interviews. 16. Ibid. See also Cohn, liner notes to Gary Davis Style (chap. 6, n. 47). 17. Goldstein, interview (see chap. 6, n. 33). 18. Weissman, interview (see chap. 6, n. 31). 19. Goldstein, interview. 20. Cohn, liner notes to Harlem Street Singer; Michel Ruppli, The Prestige Label: A Discography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 87–­88. 21. Ernie Hawkins, The Gospel Guitar of Rev. Gary Davis (Sparta, NJ: Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop, 2002), DVD, disc 3, track 3.

291

NOTES TO PAGES 126–134

22. Johnson and Johnson, The Second Book of Negro Spirituals, 108 (see chap. 1, n. 27). 23. John W. Work, American Negro Songs (New York: Crown Publishers, 1940), 113. 24. Gary Davis contract with Prestige Records, November 1, 1960. Courtesy of Prestige Music Archive. 25. Peter J. Welding, “The ‘Holy Blues,’” Saturday Review, February 25, 1961, 52. 26. Robert Shelton, “Complex Genre: Disks Reveal Variety in Gospel Music,” New York Times, March 19, 1961, X21. 27. Little Sandy Review, no. 9 (circa 1961): 42; Little Sandy Review, no. 11 (circa 1961): 3. The magazine often was undated. 28. Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, 133. 29. Jerry Rasmussen, interview by author, March 10, 2011. 30. Ibid. 31. Ben Wener, “Pop Life: Folk Never Grows Old—­It Just Grows,” Orange County Register, August 14, 1998. 32. Thal, interview. 33. Young, interviews (see chap. 7, n. 22). 34. Johnson and Johnson, The Book of American Negro Spirituals, 28 (see chap. 4, n. 46). 35. Tom Rush, interview by author, February 1, 2011. 36. Ibid. 37. “City Acts to Silence Minstrels’ Playing in Washington Sq.,” New York Times, March 28, 1961; Izzy Young quoted in Paul Hoffman, “Folk Singers Riot in Washington Sq.,” New York Times, April 10, 1961, 25; David Anderson, “Folk Singers Get Another Chance,” New York Times, May 13, 1961. 38. Wald, Josh White, 110 (see chap. 1, n. 46). 39. Earl R. Jones, interview by author, December 12, 2012; Earl Jones, undated correspondence with Ronald D. Cohen, provided by Cohen and used by permission; Arthur Alpert, “Prose of Washington Square Due for Recitation at Brighton Beach,” New York World-­Telegram and Sun, May 5, 1961. 40. Alpert, “Prose of Washington Square,” 82. 41. Jones, interview. 42. Jones, correspondence with Cohen. CHAPTER TEN

1. P. A. Harris, “20 Years Past Midnight Maria Muldaur Is Still Setting Her Musical Sights on the South,” St. Louis Post-­Dispatch, June 11, 1993. 2. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 3. Brooksie Eugene Harrington, “Shirley Caesar: A Woman of Words” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1992), 1. 4. Larry Brezer, interviews by author, June 27, 2011, and June 28, 2011. 5. Smithline, interviews (see chap. 4, n. 48). 6. Shoumatoff, “The Reverend Gary Davis,” 36 (see chap. 1, n. 5). 7. Danny Birch, interview by author, October 13, 2011. 8. Jones, interview.

292

NOTES TO PAGES 135–143

9. Rick Ruskin, interview by author, March 23, 2011. 10. Shoumatoff, “The Reverend Gary Davis,” 36. 11. Rev. Gary Davis, Sun of Our Life: Solos, Songs, A Sermon, 1955–­1957, World Arbiter CD 2005, 2002, compact disc, track 17. 12. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 13. Davis, UCLA Folk Festival (see chap. 1, n. 50). 14. Davis, Lyttleton interviews. During his sessions with Elizabeth Lyttleton, Davis on a number of occasions preached sermons to a small audience in his Bronx apartment. 15. Jn 9:4 (AV). 16. Davis, Reverend Gary Davis: At Home and Church, disc 3, track 8 (see chap. 3, n. 17). 17. Davis, Sun of Our Life, track 18. 18. Reverend Gary Davis: At Home and Church, disc 3, track 8. CHAPTER ELEVEN

1. Shelton, “Indian Neck Folk Festival” (see chap. 9, n. 2). 2. Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, 161; Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), 97. 3. Robert L. Jones, interview by author, July 20, 2010. 4. Little Sandy Review, no. 22 (circa 1962): 13–­14. 5. Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions, 1960–­1994 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 5. 6. Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan (London: Continuum, 2000), 292. 7. Earl Crabb, interview by author, February 21, 2013. Crabb, then a student at nearby Williams College, drove Dylan and Davis to the concert. 8. Phil Allen, interview by author, April 5, 2011. 9. Grossman, interviews; Smithline, interviews. Grossman recalled Davis making the comment about Dylan’s voice when Dylan appeared with Davis and Eric Von Schmidt in New York, circa 1962. 10. Hugh Romney–­Elisabeth Djehizian marriage license, City of New York, July 10, 1961; Wavy Gravy (aka Hugh Romney), interview with author, March 1, 2012. 11. Wavy Gravy, interview. Davis had religious texts printed in Braille in children’s books, according to his student Ernie Hawkins (Hawkins, interviews). It’s possible Davis grabbed the wrong text that afternoon, or perhaps Romney committed the cardinal sin of judging a book by its cover. 12. Shelton, No Direction Home, 131. 13. Cohn, interviews; Davis, Lyttleton interviews. 14. Hawkins, The Gospel Guitar of Rev. Gary Davis, disc 4, track 2 (see chap. 9, n. 21). 15. “New LP Releases,” Billboard, September 18, 1961; Little Sandy Review, no. 17 (circa 1962): 2. 16. Gary Davis contract with Prestige Records, April 14, 1961. Courtesy of Prestige Music Archive.

293

NOTES TO PAGES 144–152

17. This is according to Noel Paul Stookey. See Ellis, “I Belong to the Band,” 74. 18. It appears on Dylan’s Live at the Gaslight 1962, which had circulated as a bootleg for years before its official release in 2005. 19. David Wilson, interview by author, May 5, 2012. 20. Jack Landrón (aka Jackie Washington), interview by author, October 30, 2010. 21. Ibid. 22. Michael Selkin, “Folksong Concert: Lion about Music,” Columbia Daily Spectator, March 22, 1960. 23. Bernie Pearl, interview by author, September 12, 2012; Betsy Siggins, interview by author, August 12, 2010. 24. Siggins, interview. 25. Landrón, interview; “Folk Singer Washington Beaten by Boston Police,” The Justice, December 11, 1962, 1; William Goldsmith, “Right in Our Backyard,” The Justice, February 24, 1963, 4. 26. Rush, interview (see chap. 9, n. 35). 27. Landrón, interview. 28. Ibid. 29. Bronx, New York, White Pages, 1961. The descriptions of the apartment and its environs come from interviews of various students and acquaintances, including Stefan Grossman, Larry Cohn, Harold Becker, and John Townley. 30. Cohn, interviews; Grossman, interviews. 31. Larry Cohn, liner notes to Say No to the Devil, Prestige Bluesville BV 1049, 1962. 32. Lk 21:28 (ESV). 33. Allan Evans, liner notes to The Sun of Our Lives, Arbiter Records Arbiter 2005, 2002. Stefan Grossman adds the key of B (Grossman, interviews), and Davis himself said he could also play in both E flat and A flat. See Noblett, Rye, and Offord, “The Rev. Gary Davis” 1965. 34. Samuel Charters, interview by author, October 22, 2010; Narváez, “Producing Blues Recordings” (see chap. 6, n. 26). 35. Grossman, interviews. 36. Ibid.; Mark Humphrey, “Stefan Grossman: A Retrospective,” http://www.guitar videos.com/about-­us/our-­history. 37. Grossman, interviews. 38. Rory Block, interview with Holger Petersen, CBC Radio, August 12, 2012, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=XezkOvmB8U4. 39. Grossman, interviews. 40. North Peterson, interview with author, December 9, 2010. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Diary entries provided by North Peterson and used with permission. 44. Rev. Gary Davis, Reverend Gary Davis: At Home and Church, disc 1, track 6. 45. Cohen, Rainbow Quest, 127; “Hoots and Hollers on the Campus,” Newsweek, November 27, 1961.

294

NOTES TO PAGES 153–160

46. Recording of the 1962 University of Chicago Folk Festival, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. 47. Bob Kass, interview by author, April 16, 2012. 48. Heylin, Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions, 8; Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, 176. 49. Lyle Lofgren, private home recording of Rev. Gary Davis and Elizabeth Cotten, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 4, 1965. 50. Von Schmidt and Rooney, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, 75 (see chap. 8, n. 8). Von Schmidt mistakenly puts this meeting in 1960. 51. Ibid., 72. Fuller’s 1936 recording was called “Mama, Let Me Lay It On You.” 52. Von Schmidt and Rooney, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, 72; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 131 (see chap. 4, n. 13). 53. Irwin Silber, “Folk Songs and Copyrights,” Sing Out! 9, no. 4 (February–­March 1960): 36; A. L. Lloyd, “Who Owns What in Folk Song,” Sing Out! 12, no. 1 (February–­ March 1962): 41. 54. David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 167–­68; Ronald B. Standler, “Music Copyright Law in the USA,” http://www.Rbs2.com. 55. Silber, “Folk Songs and Copyrights,” 32; Colin Escott, liner notes to Bob Dylan, Bootleg Series, vol. 9, The Witmark Demos: 1962–­64, Columbia Records 88697 76179 2, 2010. 56. Silber, “Folk Songs and Copyrights,” 32. 57. “Nancy Whiskey,” The Scotsman, February 5, 2003. 58. Cynthia Gooding, “Concerning Copyrights,” Sing Out! 11, no. 1 (February–­ March 1961): 25. 59. Von Schmidt and Rooney, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, 75. 60. Escott, liner notes to Bob Dylan, Bootleg Series, vol. 9; Eric Von Schmidt, interview by Larry Jaffee, Song Talk 3, no. 2 (1993): 13, quoted in “Larry Jaffee Telephone Interview,” Bob Dylan’s Musical Roots, http://www.bobdylanroots.com/inter03.html. 61. Von Schmidt, interview; Mitch Greenhill, interviews (see chap. 8, n. 14). When Columbia Records released Dylan’s Bootleg Series, vol. 9, The Witmark Demos: 1962–­64 in 2010, the author credit for “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” also included Dave Van Ronk with Davis and Von Schmidt. Mitch Greenhill, Manny’s son, who now runs the family’s music publishing firm, Chandos Music, says he has always believed that Dylan in part copied Van Ronk’s arrangement of the song. 62. Peter Morton Coan, The Harry Chapin Story (New York: Citadel Press, 2001), 84. 63. Words and music by Harry F. Chapin, Chapin Music. Transcribed from Dance on the Band Titanic (Elektra Records, 1977). C H A P T E R T W E LV E

1. M. William Krasilovsky, interview by author, February 2, 2011. 2. Aronowitz and Blonsky, “Three’s Company,” 30 (see chap. 7, n. 6). 3. William Ruhlmann, “Peter, Paul and Mary: A Song to Sing All Over This Land,”

295

NOTES TO PAGES 160–167

Goldmine, April 12, 1996; Aronowitz and Blonsky, “Three’s Company,” 30; The Peter, Paul and Mary Songbook (New York: Pepamar Music Corp., 1965), 5. 4. Ruhlmann, “Peter, Paul and Mary”; Aronowitz and Blonsky, “Three’s Company,” 30, 32. 5. Milt Okun and Richard Sparks, Along the Cherry Lane (Beverly Hills, CA: Classical Music Today, 2011), 79. 6. Ibid., 88; Village Voice, September 14, 1961. 7. Aronowitz and Blonsky, “Three’s Company,” 32. 8. Ruhlmann, “Peter, Paul and Mary.” 9. Aronowitz and Blonsky, “Three’s Company,” 30. 10. Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, 139. 11. Krasilovsky, interview. 12. Ibid. 13. Registration number EU 711091, US Copyright Office, March 16, 1962. 14. Mike Gross, “MPHC Grossing $1 Million Yearly in Its Folk Operation,” Billboard, March 20, 1965; The Peter, Paul and Mary Songbook, 23. 15. Cohen, Rainbow Quest, 191; Aronowitz and Blonsky, “Three’s Company,” 30. 16. Krasilovsky, interview; Gary Davis Social Security application, December 19, 1962. Davis received Social Security number 102-­38-­8945. 17. Krasilovsky, interview. 18. Jansen, liner notes to Sun Is Going Down (see chap. 4, n. 19); Rev. Gary Davis, Rev. Gary Davis: Live at Gerde’s Folk City, February 1962, Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop SGGW 114/5/6, 2009, disc 1, track 6; Davis, recorded at the Sign of the Sun (see chap. 5, n. 43); Annie Davis, Grossman interview. Davis’s New York welfare records were destroyed probably by 1970, so the exact date he left the welfare rolls is unknown. 19. Peterson, interview. 20. Grossman, “A Rare Interview.” 21. Registration No. EU 745630, US Copyright Office, November 15, 1962. 22. Rebecca Kuzins, “The Last Coffeehouse,” Los Angeles Magazine, February 1985, 216–­18. 23. “White Blues Singer,” Ebony, November 1959, 149–­50. 24. Dane, interview (see introd., n. 3). 25. “Nitery Reviews,” Variety, June 7, 1962, 9; Dane, interview. 26. Ed Pearl, interview by author, July 20, 2010. 27. Rod Campbell, “Mr. Roots?” Folk Roots 14 nos. 7 and 8 (January–­February 1993): 30–­31. 28. Jas Obrecht, “Ry Cooder—­Talking Country Blues and Gospel,” Jas Obrecht Music Archive, http://jasobrecht.com/ry-­cooder-­talking-­country-­blues-­and-­gospel/. 29. Dane, interview. 30. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 34. 31. Jerry Houck, interview by author, August 1, 2011. Houck worked at the Sign of the Sun at the time of Davis’s engagement. 32. Rev. Gary Davis, recorded at the Sign of the Sun.

296

NOTES TO PAGES 168–174

33. It seems related to the hymn Always Bear Your Burdens with a Smile, published in 1924 by Albert C. Fisher. 34. Michael Cooney, interview by author, December 7, 2011. 35. Timothy Kahan, “‘Cosmic’ in the Heart of Lake George Village—­Coffee House to ‘Enhance Communications,’” Schenectady Gazette, June 20, 1962. 36. Rev. Gary Davis, Rev. Gary Davis: Live at Gerde’s, disc 1, track 11. 37. “Twenty-­One Negro Spirituals, Americana No. 3,” recorded by South Carolina Project Workers, Effingham, SC, 1937, accessed June 22, 2013, at The American Mosaic: The African American Experience, ABC-­CLIO; Hawkins, The Gospel Guitar of Rev. Gary Davis, disc 2, track 2. 38. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 19. 39. The details of their arrangement were spelled out in Davis’s probate file after Davis’s death. Gary Davis probate file, Queens County Surrogate’s Court, May 1972. 40. Greenhill, Cohen interview. 41. Grossman, interviews. Chandos applied for copyright on “Cocaine” in 1968. 42. Annie Davis to Manny Greenhill, March 5, 1963, Folklore Productions collection. 43. Dave Hucker, “From the Hip,” The Beat 26, no. 1, 2007, http://www.technobeat .com/HUCKER2/HIP.html. 44. Johnson and Johnson, The Second Book of Negro Spirituals, 100. 45. Grossman, “A Rare Interview” (see chap. 1, n. 5); Stefan Grossman, Best of the Transatlantic Years, Castle Communications ESM CD 437, 1996, track 4; Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, 135. 46. Derrick Stewart-­Baxter, “Blind Gary Davis: Pure Religion & Bad Company,” Jazz Journal, February 1963, 30–­31. 47. Paul Hostetter, e-­mail correspondence with author, October 2011. See also Ellis, “I Belong to the Band,” 72. 48. Hostetter, e-­mail correspondence. Various discographers and writers have said Pure Religion and Bad Company came out originally on Harry Oster’s Folk Lyric label (FL-­125) in the United States. This appears to be false. Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz, who purchased the entire Folk Lyric catalog from Oster in 1970, says that “Folklyric LP 125 was never issued and there were no tapes on hand.” (Chris Strachwitz, e-­mail correspondence with author via Alan Balfour, September 25, 2011.) The Pure Religion sessions finally had an American release in 1991 on a Folkways CD. 49. Bosley Crowther, “Screen: Cry of Anguish for the Young,” New York Times, June 28, 1963, 19; Harold Becker, interview by author, May 24, 2011. The film has usually been given an erroneous 1964 release date. 50. Becker, interview. 51. Crowther, “Screen: Cry of Anguish for the Young,” 19. 52. Philip R. Ratcliffe, Mississippi John Hurt: His Life, His Times, His Blues (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 124; Beaumont, Preachin’ the Blues, 14, 17 (see chap. 3, n. 27). 53. Bruce Jackson, “Newport: The Who, What, When, Why and How of America’s

297

NOTES TO PAGES 174–182

Biggest, Most ‘Successful,’ Most Controversial Folk Festival,” Sing Out! 16, no. 4 (August–­September 1966): 9. 54. Beaumont, Preachin’ the Blues, 144; Kornfeld, interviews. 55. Stefan Grossman, comments on stage at the Gaslight, New York City, May 26, 2012; recording of Rev. Gary Davis at Simon Prager’s, home, London, August 8, 1971, Richard Noblett collection; John Dyer, interview by author, July 19, 2011; Davis, Grossman interviews. Hurt had a song called “Candyman” that seems at least distantly related to Davis’s. 56. Grossman, interviews; Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 46. 57. A June entry in Peterson’s diary mentions the Ford. Both Peterson and John Townley remembered the car as a Fairlane. 58. Townley, interview (see chap. 4, n. 68). 59. Ibid. 60. William Hawkins, e-­mail correspondence with author, June 6, 2012. 61. “Blind Rev. Gary Davis,” Variety, November 13, 1963, 60; Folklore Productions press release, circa November 1963, Ray M. Lawless Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1. Charters, Sweet as the Showers of Rain, 158 (see chap. 1, n. 32). The session occurred on March 2, 1964. 2. Charters, interview. A six-­string banjo is tuned the same as a guitar, E-­A-­D-­G-­ B-­E, from low to high. 3. Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, 136. 4. Steven Calt, Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 220. 5. Charters, interview; Gary Davis contract with Prestige Records, signed by Tiny Robinson, March 2, 1964. Courtesy of Prestige Music Archive. 6. Samuel Charters, “Reverend Gary Davis,” in Rev. Gary Davis/Blues Guitar, by Stefan Grossman (New York: Oak Publications, 1974), 97. 7. Queens County, New York, deed, March 26, 1964. 8. Israel G. Young, “Frets and Frails,” Sing Out! 14, no. 1 (February–­March 1964): 59, 61; Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording. 9. Robert Tilling “Reverend Gary Davis: A Personal Tribute,” Blues World, no. 43, summer 1972; Robinson, interviews (see chap. 6, n. 25). 10. Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording. 11. Doris Houston, interview by author, June 16, 2010. 12. Cohn, interviews. 13. Rev. Gary Davis, recorded at Buck’s Rock Camp, New Milford, Connecticut, August 12, 1970, Bob Carlin Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The descriptions of the home come from various students, including Stefan Grossman, Rick Ruskin, David Bromberg, and Phil Allen. In the days of alphabetical phone exchanges, “AX” stood for “Axtel.” 14. Gary Davis probate file.

298

NOTES TO PAGES 183–191

15. Rev. Gary Davis and Jack Elliott, Indiana University concert (see chap. 1, n. 51); Jerry Johnson, “A Review of the Jack Elliott–­Rev. Gary Davis Concert,” IU Folksong Club Newsletter 2, no. 4 (February 1964): 2. 16. Rev. Gary Davis, recorded at the UCLA Folk Festival. 17. Roy Book Binder, interview by author, August 8, 2012. 18. Jesse Kincaid, interview by author, June 20, 2011. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. 1 Peter 3:1, 3:7 (KJV). 22. Hiley H. Ward, “Guitarists Have Folk Wedding,” Detroit Free Press, February 17, 1969; Shoumatoff, “The Reverend Gary Davis,” 35; Book Binder, interview. 23. In the version of the song on the Pure Religion and Bad Company LP, Davis sings of “peace breakers” instead of tattlers. While Davis fairly closely follows the lyrics of the song as compiled by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson in 1926, neither the tattlers nor the peace-­breakers appear in their rendering of the tune. (See Johnson and Johnson, The Second Book of Negro Spirituals, 100.) 24. Rev. Gary Davis, UCLA Folk Festival recording. 25. Ibid. 26. Kincaid, interview; David Bromberg, interview by author, December 22, 2010. Bromberg recalled Davis showing him the gun and shooting it off in the house. 27. Kincaid, interview. 28. Richard Noblett, interview by author, July 23, 2011. 29. Joe Boyd, interview by author, July 10, 2010. 30. Mitch Greenhill, interviews. 31. Ratcliffe, Mississippi John Hurt, 161; Pleasant “Cousin Joe” Joseph and Harriet J. Ottenheimer, Blues from New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 163–­64. 32. Joe Boyd, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2006), 37; Rush, interview. The story about Brownie McGhee and the guitar comes from, among others, Davis’s student Rick Ruskin. 33. Robert Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2002), 187. 34. Transcript of private recordings made by Fred Gerlach; Gayle F. Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-­and-­Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), 47. 35. Boyd, interview. 36. McTell, interview (see chap. 8, n. 3). 37. Noblett, interview. 38. Ratcliffe, Mississippi John Hurt, 121; Boyd, interview. 39. Boyd, interview. 40. Cited in Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 91. 41. Boyd, interview. 42. Neil Henderson, “Destination Manchester,” Modculture, http://www.modcul ture.co.uk/feature-­destination-­manchester/; Joseph and Ottenheimer, Blues from New Orleans, 164–­65.

299

NOTES TO PAGES 191–203

43. Joseph and Ottenheimer, Blues from New Orleans, 165; Johnnie Hamp, e-­mail correspondence with author, July 2011. 44. Rev. Gary Davis, Manchester Free Trade Hall 1964, Document DOCD 32-­20-­14, 2008, tracks 5 and 7. 45. G. E. Lambert, “The American Folk, Blues and Gospel Caravan,” Jazz Journal 17, no. 6 (June 1964): 11. 46. Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied, 187. 47. Simon A. Napier, “The Folk Blues and Gospel Caravan,” Jazz Monthly, July 1964, 6–­7. 48. Boyd, interview. 49. Whitney Balliett, “Jazz Concerts: Sweet Tedium and Crippled Crabs,” New Yorker, May 30, 1964, 134. 50. Ruskin, interview. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Dean Meredith, “Reverend Gary Davis—­Some Reminiscences,” Blues Magazine 2, no. 2 (1976): 29–­31. All the details of the visit come from Meredith’s account. 54. Sally Kempton, “Keep on Truckin’ Mama, Truckin’ My Blues Away,” Village Voice, September 17, 1964, 1. 55. Peterson, interview. 56. Robinson, interviews; Queens County Court docket, December 21, 1964, retrieved from microfiche. 57. Robinson, interviews. CHAPTER FOURTEEN

21.

1. Bruce Conforth, interview by author, July 12, 2011. 2. Steve Katz, interview by author, June 23, 2010. 3. Jon Sievert, “Lately It Occurs to Me . . .” Best of Guitar Player: Grateful Dead, 1993, 4. North Peterson, “My Favorite Smile,” The Life, Spring 1962, 14. 5. John Mankiewicz, interviews by author, May 25, 2011, and May 26, 2011. 6. Birch, interview (see chap. 10, n. 7). 7. Mankiewicz, interviews. 8. Davis, Sun of Our Life, track 17 (see chap. 10, n. 11). 9. Bromberg, interview. 10. Brezer, interviews (see chap. 10, n. 4). 11. Smithline, interviews; Mankiewicz, interviews. 12. Alex Shoumatoff, interview by author, January 9. 2011. 13. Ibid. 14. Ken Kipnis, interview by author, October 31, 2010; Bromberg, interview. 15. Woody Mann, interviews by author, July 2006 and November 27, 2012. 16. Ruskin, interview. 17. Katz, interview. 18. Smithline, interviews.

300

NOTES TO PAGES 204–213 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1. Detroit Free Press, January 1965, cited in Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 42–­43. 2. Ibid. 3. Janis Ian, Society’s Child (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008), 40–­41. 4. Ibid., 47–­48. 5. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 75. 6. Hawkins, interviews. 7. Ibid. Hawkins remembered the storefront as being in Queens, but his description sounds remarkably like the music shop Davis would open officially in January 1966 in his old Bronx neighborhood. 8. Ibid. 9. Lyle Lofgren, interview by author, January 24, 2011. 10. Susan Ware, ed., Notable American Women (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 136–­37. 11. Davis and Cotten, Lofgren recording (see chap. 11, n. 49). 12. Brezer, interviews. 13. Boyd, interview (see chap. 13, n. 29); Brendan Power, interview by author, February 6, 2011. 14. Power, interview. 15. Ibid. 16. Bob Groom, “Reverend Gary Davis on Stage at the Free Trade Hall,” Blues World, no. 3 (June 1965): 7; concert program for the American Folk Music and Blues Tour. 17. Power, interview. 18. Buffy Sainte-­Marie quoted in Woliver, Hoot!, 45–­46 (see introd., n. 2); Herb Gart, e-­mail correspondence with author, February 17, 2011. 19. Mamie Lang, “A Bow to the West,” Times of London, January 5, 2003; Mamie Lang, e-­mail correspondence with author, June 9, 2011. Mince and tatties is a Scottish dish of minced beef and mashed potatoes. 20. Alastair Cochrane, “Recollections of Gary Davis,” Document Records, http:// www.document-­records.com/show_news.asp?articleID=377. 21. McTell, interview. 22. Ibid.; Simon Napier, “On the Spot Report: American Folk and Blues Tour,” Blues Unlimited, no. 24 (July–­August 1965): 7. 23. Noblett, Rye, and Offord, “The Reverend Gary Davis” 1965, 10; “Negroes Burned at Stake,” Laurens Advertiser, August 24, 1904, 1. 24. Noblett, Rye, and Offord, “The Reverend Gary Davis” 1965, 11. At five foot eight, Davis wasn’t tall, but perhaps his musical stature added inches to his frame. 25. Harvey Shield, interview by author, February 1, 2011. 26. Ernie Santosuosso, “At Newport Festival: Baez, Stellar Lineup Stir 8500 Folk Fans,” Boston Globe, July 23, 1965, 13; Lee Zhito, “Newport Folk Festival Hit as Artistic and Financial Success,” Billboard, August 8, 1965; “N’port Folk Fest Pulls Tall 200G,” Variety, July 28, 1965, 91. 27. Chris Morris, interview by author, June 12, 2012; Hutner and Laurence, Harlem Street Singer.

301

NOTES TO PAGES 214–222

28. Szwed, Alan Lomax, 333 (see chap. 6, n. 6) (Szwed mistakenly describes this as a Newport preview concert, taking place a day before the festival; the preview concert was actually a separate event with different performers); Murray Schumach, “Shrieks of 55,000 Accompany Beatles,” New York Times, August 16, 1965. 29. Concert in Central Park (see introd., n. 15). 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid.; Smithline, interviews. 32. Carnegie Hall seventy-­fourth season program, 1965, 11. 33. Jack Newfield, “Sing-­Ins March to Village at 5 a.m.,” Village Voice, September 30, 1965; Dane, interview. 34. William Borders, “Marchers Heckled Here—­ Eggs and a Can of Paint Are Thrown,” New York Times, October 17, 1965, 1, 43; William Travers and William Rice, “Paint, Fists Greet Viet Protesters,” New York Daily News, October 17, 1965, 3, 54. 35. Douglas Robinson, “Violence Breaks Out in Several Communities—­Pickets Arrested,” New York Times, October 17, 1965, 1, 43; Jules Rothstein, “Peace March Down 5th Avenue,” Hunter Arrow, November 1, 1965, 8. 36. Mark Ross, interview by author, February 22, 2012. 37. Annie Davis, letter to Arthur Gabel, February 15, 1966, Folklore Productions collection; Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording; Hawkins, interviews. 38. Barbara Dane, “The Re-­discovered Blues Man: He Knows Where He’s At,” Sing Out! 16, no. 2 (April–­May 1966): 47. 39. Kincaid, interview (see chap. 13, n. 18). 40. Israel G. Young, “Frets and Frails,” Sing Out! 16, no. 3 (June–­July 1966): 35; Israel G. Young, interviews by Richard Reuss, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1965–­1967; Registration number EU 834792, US Copyright Office, July 13, 1964. 41. Kincaid, interview; Taj Mahal, interview by author, September 20, 2013. Columbia finally released the record, with twenty-­two tracks, in 1992. 42. Jack Gould, “TV: Pete Seeger Makes Belated Debut,” New York Times, November 15, 1965, 75. 43. Hawkins, interviews. 44. Ernie Hawkins, The Gospel Guitar of Rev. Gary Davis (Sparta, NJ: Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop, 2014), 22. This book is distinct from the DVD set of the same name. 45. “Grace Notes; The Long Line of Street Performers,” Boston Globe, October 5, 1981. 46. David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? The Ballad of Pete Seeger (New York: Villard Books, 2008), 331. 47. Donovan Leitch, The Autobiography of Donovan: The Hurdy Gurdy Man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 109. 48. “History of the Cambridge Folk Festival,” Cambridge Folk Festival, http://www .cambridgefolkfestival.org/history-­of-­cambridge-­folk-­festival/. 49. Itineraries for all four of Davis’s UK tours were compiled by Robert Tilling. Courtesy of Richard Noblett. 50. Tony Wilson, “Rev. Gary Davis,” Melody Maker, July 30, 1966.

302

NOTES TO PAGES 222–230

51. Mudcat music forum, http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=63810; Terry Silver, e-­mail correspondence with author, July 19, 2012. CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1. Cohen, e-­mail correspondence (see chap. 2, n. 20). 2. Crabb, interview (see chap. 11, n. 7); Liz Blum, interview by author, March 7, 2013. 3. Howard Ziehm, interview by author, July 15, 2011. 4. Will Romano, Big Boss Man: The Life and Music of Bluesman Jimmy Reed (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2006), 158; Russ Wilson, “Folk Fest Fails as Concert,” Oakland Tribune, January 20, 1964. 5. Barry Melton, interview by author, November 9, 2010; Barry Melton, “A Life in the Counterculture,” in Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now, ed. Alexander Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 147–­53. 6. ED Denson, “’Twas Brillig and the Rev. Gary Davis . . . ,” Berkeley Barb, March 4, 1966, Berkeley Folk Festival Archive, Northwestern University. 7. Ibid. 8. Ralph J. Gleason, “It Started with That Belly Dancer,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 28, 1966. The Vietnam Day Committee, formed in Berkeley in 1965 by Jerry Rubin and other activists, spearheaded anti-­war marches locally and across the nation. 9. Michael Clechik, “Reverend Gary Davis: Sermons and Seagrams,” Daily Californian, March 3, 1966, Berkeley Folk Festival Archive, Northwestern University. 10. “Reverend Gary Davis: Twas Brillig,” Berkeley in the Sixties, http://berkeleyfolk .blogspot.com/2011_02_01_archive.html. 11. Ed Pearl, interview. 12. Barry Olivier to Ed Pearl, May 18, 1967, Berkeley Folk Festival Archive, Northwestern University. 13. Paul Swenson, “Folk and Rock Wed at Berkeley,” Deseret News, July 5, 1967; Ralph J. Gleason, “Havens a Hit at Folk Festival,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 5, 1967. 14. Leigh Cline, interview by author, June 28, 2010; Peter Goddard, “2,100 Dig the Festival,” Globe and Mail, August 12, 1967; Richard Flohil, interview by author, February 14, 2012. 15. Flohil, interview; Brian Cruchley, “Mariposa: A Battle between Acoustic and Electric Guitar,” Toronto Daily Star, August 14, 1967; Goddard, “2,100 Dig the Festival.” 16. Bev Lamb, “My Folk Origins,” http://bevlamb.ca/touchstone/intro.html. 17. Flohil, interview; Ruskin, interview. 18. Ellis, “I Belong to the Band,” 286–­87. 19. Dick Waterman, Between Midnight and Day: The Last Unpublished Blues Archive (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003), 55; Cruchley, “Mariposa.” 20. Beaumont, Preachin’ the Blues, 144–­45; Book Binder, interview; Dick Waterman, interview by author, July 19, 2012. 21. Meredith, “Reverend Gary Davis—­Some Reminiscences,” 31 (see chap. 13, n. 53).

303

NOTES TO PAGES 231–239 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1. Young, Reuss interviews (see chap. 15, n. 40). 2. Ibid.; Book Binder, interview. 3. Rev. Gary Davis, recorded at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, March 6, 1967, Lou Curtiss Collection, Folk Arts Rare Records, San Diego, California. 4. Rev. Gary Davis, Live and Kicking, Just a Memory Records JAM 9133-­2, 1997, track 2. 5. Roy Book Binder, interviewed on WBBC radio, New Milford, Connecticut, summer 1969, Bob Carlin Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 6. Rev. Gary Davis, recorded at Buck’s Rock Camp (see chap. 13, n. 13); Bob Carlin, interview by author, June 8, 2011. 7. David Amram, interview by author, February 24, 2011. 8. John Ullman, interviews by author, August 23, 2010, and September 15, 2010. 9. Townley, interview; John Townley, liner notes to O, Glory: The Apostolic Studio Sessions, Adelphi Records AD 1008, 1973. 10. Geoff Withers, interview by author, September 1, 2011; Ralph Rush, “A Conversation with Larry Johnson,” Sing Out! 23, no. 3 (1974): 3. 11. Townley, interview. Townley never released the batch of secular songs from the session, the tapes of which were lost in a fire; in any event, that part of the session, Townley says, “wasn’t all that great.” 12. Ibid. 13. Townley, liner notes to O, Glory. 14. Pete Welding, “Rev. Gary Davis,” Down Beat 41, no. 2 (January 31, 1974): 23. 15. Tim Ferris, “Gary Davis, 73 and Blind, Sees and Sings True Blue,” New York Post, June 20, 1969. 16. Book Binder, WBBC radio interview. 17. Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (London: Continuum, 2003), 591. Chandos acquired all of Davis’s publishing rights from Robbins Music in 1977. 18. Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording; Annie Davis to Stefan Grossman, May 6, 1970, Stefan Grossman collection. 19. Rob Fleder, “The True Blues and Gospel,” Sing Out! 20, no. 2 (November–­ December 1970): 34–­36. 20. Annie Davis to Alex Shoumatoff, December 28, 1970, Alex Shoumatoff collection. 21. Oliver Trager, The American Book of the Dead: The Definitive Grateful Dead Encyclopedia (New York: Fireside Books, 1997), 90, 326–­27. 22. “Bob Weir on the Reverend Gary Davis,” 7th Hour Blues, accessed July 18, 2010, http://seventhhourblues.com (now defunct); Sievert, “Lately It Occurs to Me . . . ,” 21 (see chap. 14, n. 3). 23. Sievert, “Lately It Occurs to Me . . . ,” 8. 24. Arlene R. Weiss, “Jorma Kaukonen Interview: The Acoustic Blues Journeyman

304

NOTES TO PAGES 239–248

Returns Home,” Guitar International, http://guitarinternational.com/2011/06/16/jorma -­kaukonen-­interview-­the-­acoustic-­blues-­journeyman-­returns-­home/. 25. John Kruth, “Jorma Kaukonen: The Embryonic Journey Continues,” Sing Out! 54, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 41; Mary Campbell for the Associated Press, “Hot Tuna’s Real Cool,” Springfield Union, November 4, 1971. 26. John Dyer, interview by author, July 19, 2011. 27. American Film Institute Catalog: Feature Films 1961–­70 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Howard Thompson, “‘Black Roots,’ a Film of Racial Concern,” New York Times, September 25, 1970. 28. Lionel Rogosin, http://www.lionelrogosin.org/AboutLR.html; conference program and abstracts, Temple University Fourth Annual Anthropological and Documentary Film Conference, March 10–­13, 1971. 29. “Filmmaker Rogosin Gets European Backing but Short Shrift from PTV,” Variety, July 7, 1971, 35. 30. Thompson, “‘Black Roots’”; Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 19. 31. Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording; Davis, interview by Johnson and Rogosin (see chap. 1, n. 43). 32. Annie Davis to Alex Shoumatoff, March 18, 1970, Alex Shoumatoff collection. 33. Brezer, interviews. 34. Bromberg, interview. 35. Ibid. 36. Brezer, interviews. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

1. Marriage license 5323, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, February 20, 1971; Hawkins, interviews. 2. Annie Davis to Ernie Hawkins, February 23, 1971, Ernie Hawkins collection. 3. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 49. 4. Hank O’Neal, “Sherman M. Fairchild,” accessed July 17, 2011, http://www.hank oneal.com. The site has since undergone reconstruction, and as of June 2014 the article has not yet been reposted. 5. Farnsworth Fowle, “Sherman Mills Fairchild Is Dead at 74; I.B.M. Heir Invented an Aerial Camera,” New York Times, March 29, 1971; Greenhill FBI file (see chap. 8, n. 7); Hank O’Neal, e-­mail correspondence with author, August 28, 2010. 6. “After the Brawl Is Over,” New York Times, March 19, 1971, 38; Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 49. 7. Tilling, Oh, What a Beautiful City, 52. 8. Brezer, interviews. 9. Paul Oliver, review of Lord, I Wish I Could See, Jazz and Blues, May 1972, 21–­22. 10. Szwed, Alan Lomax, 318. 11. Chris Strachwitz, interview by author, September 7, 2010. 12. Ibid. 13. Registration number EP 289682, US Copyright Office, June 30, 1971.

305

NOTES TO PAGES 248–254

14. Strachwitz, interview. 15. Ibid.; Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 273, 1046. 16. Strachwitz, interview. 17. Tom Pomposello, “Mississippi Fred McDowell,” Guitar Player, November 1977; Grossman, interviews. Sam Cooke, who was managed by Allen Klein, released a secular version of “You Gotta Move” in 1963. 18. Strachwitz, interview. 19. Smithline, interviews. 20. Waterman, interview. 21. Chris Strachwitz sued ABKCO and the Rolling Stones for $700,000 in federal court in California on behalf of Tradition Music and Chandos, Greenhill’s publishing company (Strachwitz v. Jagger, United States District Court for the Northern District of California, filed July 6, 1976). In 1978, the two sides reached an out-­of-­court settlement, with ABKCO’s lawyers acknowledging that “Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, The Rolling Stones, and their publishers and agents, Allen Klein and ABKCO Music, Inc., have [relinquished] any interest they may have had or at any time claimed in the version of ‘You Gotta Move.’” Future pressings of Sticky Fingers, as well as of the Stones’ Love You Live LP, which had come out in September 1977 and which included a version of “You Gotta Move,” would give McDowell and Davis the author credit. 22. Book Binder, interview. 23. Tilling, UK tour itineraries (see chap. 15, n. 49); Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording. 24. David Harrison, Blues Unlimited, no. 85 (October 1971): 20. 25. Ibid. 26. Andrew Means, “Jonathan Kelly—­Star of Cambridge,” Melody Maker, August 7, 1971, 37. 27. R. J. Bater, “The Holy Blues,” B.M.G., December 1971. 28. Noblett, interview. 29. Karl Dallas, “Song of a Preacher Man,” Melody Maker, August 21, 1971, 14. 30. Karl Dallas, “Davis: Preaching at St. Pancras,” Melody Maker, August 14, 1971, 18. 31. Dallas, “Song of a Preacher Man”; Smithline, interviews. 32. Koenraad Nijssen, “Festival Highly Controversial” [in French], Memoire Rock 60/70 (Belgian music festival history website), http://www.memoire60-­70.be/Chro nique_1966_1972/Jazz_Bilzen_Festival_1971.htm. 33. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 20; Smithline, interviews. 34. Annie Davis, letter to Alex Shoumatoff, December 28, 1970, Alex Shoumatoff collection. 35. Annie Davis to Stefan Grossman, October 21, 1971, Stefan Grossman collection. Rolling Stone would report after Davis’s death that he’d suffered an earlier stroke and was in and out of the hospital. Tim Ferris, “Rev. Gary Davis Dead at 76,” Rolling Stone, June 8, 1972, 6. 36. A copy of the will was included in Gary Davis’s probate file, Queens County Surrogate’s Court, May 1972. Many of Davis’s students, including Alan Smithline and Larry

306

NOTES TO PAGES 254–261

Brezer, remembered Davis’s difficulties with Annie’s daughters. Smithline, interviews; Brezer, interviews. 37. Gary Davis probate file. 38. Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording; Book Binder, interview. 39. Rev. Gary Davis to Ernie Hawkins, January 13, 1972, Ernie Hawkins collection. 40. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 20; Mankiewicz, interviews; Smithline, interviews. John Milward, “The Sons of Gary Davis,” No Depression, Fall 2009, 121. The heart attack could not be independently confirmed. 41. Annie Davis to Ernie Hawkins, March 15, 1972, Ernie Hawkins collection; Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 25. 42. Tilling, “Oh, What a Beautiful City,” 64. In an interview with the author decades later, Townley recalled having gone to the church with Davis. But the earlier version of the story is probably the more accurate of the two. There is no evidence that Davis actually purchased a church. 43. Joan Fenton, “Rev. Gary Davis, 1896–­1972,” Sing Out! 21, no. 5 (1972): 4; Mann, interviews (see chap. 14, n. 15). 44. Allan Evans, interview by author, January 17, 2011; “Allan Evans on the Techniques of Rev. Gary Davis,” 7th Hour Blues, accessed December 22, 2011, http://www .seventhhourblues.com (now defunct). 45. Annie Davis to Hawkins, March 15, 1972. 46. The accounts of the concert are from Doug Menuez, interview by author, November 8, 2010; Seth Fahey, interview by author, March 15, 2011; and Larry Conklin, interview by author, July 20, 2011. 47. Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording. 48. Menuez, interview; Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording. 49. Robert Tilling, “Reverend Gary Davis: A Personal Tribute,” Blues World 43 (Summer 1972): 5; Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording. 50. Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording; John H. Mankiewicz, “A Young Man’s Memories of the Reverend,” Los Angeles Herald-­Examiner, October 15, 1978. 51. Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording; Shoumatoff, “The Reverend Gary Davis,” 35; Brezer, interviews. 52. Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording; Brezer, interviews. 53. Brezer, interviews; Death Certificate of Gary Davis, New Jersey Department of Health, May 5, 1972, Sheldon Harris Collection, Blues Archive, University of Mississippi; Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording. 54. Book Binder, interview. 55. Allen, interview; Hawkins, interviews. 56. Allen, interview. 57. Mankiewicz, interviews. 58. Gary Davis funeral program, May 11, 1972, Alex Shoumatoff collection. 59. Mann, interviews. 60. “Rev. Gary Davis, 76, Blind Gospel Singer,” New York Times, May 8, 1972, 40; Ira Mayer, “Riffs,” Village Voice, May 18, 1972, 51; “Rev. Gary Davis,” Variety, May 10, 1972.

307

NOTES TO PAGES 261–267

61. “Final Bar,” Down Beat 39, no. 13 (July 20, 1972); Ferris, “Rev. Gary Davis Dead at 76,” 6. 62. Annie Davis to Stefan Grossman, June 23, 1972, Stefan Grossman collection; Brezer, interviews. 63. Annie Davis and Larry Johnson, Rogosin recording. 64. Brezer, interviews. EPILOGUE

1. Gary Davis probate file. 2. Robert Tilling, “Gary D. Davis: A Personal Tribute,” Jazz Journal 25, no. 7 (1972): 19; Recording Industry Association Gold and Platinum Database, http://www.riaa.com /goldandplatinumdata.php?content_selector=gold-­platinum-­searchable-­database. 3. Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, 170. 4. J-­200, with a natural wood finish, probably made toward the end of 1960, serial number A35252. 5. Darden, People Get Ready!, 199; Crawford, interview (see chap. 5, n. 10). 6. Annie Davis to Stefan Grossman, October 16, 1972, Stefan Grossman collection. 7. Gary Davis probate file; Annie Davis, letter to Ernie Hawkins, April 20, 1978, Ernie Hawkins collection; Annie Davis to Stefan Grossman, October 17, 1973, Stefan Grossman collection. 8. “Hijackers Free All but 3 in Crew at Tunis Airport,” New York Times, November 25, 1974. 9. Birch, interview. 10. Withers, interview (see chap. 17, n. 10). 11. Evans, liner notes to The Sun of Our Lives (see chap. 11, n. 33). 12. Evans, interview. 13. Ibid.; Joseph Taubman, letter to Manny Greenhill, September 8, 1994, Folklore Productions collection; Ari Eisinger, interview by author, February 21, 2001. 14. Robert Tilling, interview by author, December 19, 2010.

308

INDEX Abercrombie, Billy, 272n10 Abercrombie, Jonathan McCall, 8–9 Aberdeen (Scotland), 222 ABKCO (music publisher), 248–49, 306n21 Actor’s Playhouse, 105 Adams, Derroll, 208 Adderley, Cannonball, 123 Adelphi Records, 235 African American churches, 57; American popular music, influences on, 56; black migration, 66; as escape route, 26; harmonizing vocal groups of, 58; storefront Baptist churches, 67 African Americans: black migration, 64; church, importance of to, 12; cocaine, use among, 87–88; Dozens, 21; freed blacks, and sharecropping, 7; great migration, 29; poll tax, and literacy testing, 7; tobacco work, as segregated, 35 Alabama, 247 Allen, Cora Mae, 39, 54 Allen, Fulton, 38–39, 44. See also Fuller, Blind Boy Allen, Phil, 140, 237, 260, 298n13 Almanac Singers, 108 Alpert, Arthur, 131 American Blues and Gospel Caravan, 186, 190, 208 American Federation of Musicians, 285n62 American Folk Blues Festival, 186 American Folk Music and Blues Tour, 208–10 American Record Corporation (ARC), 44–45, 49–52, 98, 179, 279–80n17 American roots music, 186 American Square Dance Group, 103 American Street Songs (album), 98, 100–102, 116 American Tobacco Company, 34, 36 Amey, William A., 34, 36–39 Amram, David, 233, 262 Anderson, Pink, 29, 98, 100, 125 “The Angel’s Message to Me,” 49 Animals, 195 Anthology of American Folk Music (Smith), 107, 112 Apostolic Studios, 235 Arhoolie Records, 248, 297n48

Armstrong, Louis, xv, 32, 80, 157, 165, 188, 263 Armstrong, Paul, 225 Arnold, John Henry “Big Man,” 276n17 Artis, R. B., 255–56 Asch, Moses, 71–74, 92, 283–84n30 Asch Records, 71 Asheville (North Carolina), 29, 33 Ash Grove (folk club), 145, 165–66, 177, 183, 186, 227, 234 Ashton-­under-­Lyne (England), 222 Atlantic Records, 248–49, 265 Atwater, Wilbert, 37–38 Austin, Gene, 32 Autry, Gene, 92 “Baby, I Don’t Have to Worry (‘Cause That Stuff Is Here),” 47, 50 “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” 139, 153–54, 157, 207. See also “Baby Let Me Take You Home” “Baby, Let Me Lay It on You,” 153–54, 156–58, 179, 195. See also “Baby Let Me Take You Home”; “Can I Do It for You?”; “Please, Baby” “Baby Let Me Take You Home,” 195. See also “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down”; “Baby, Let Me Lay It on You” “Baby, You Gotta Change Your Mind,” 47 Baez, Joan, 112–13, 115, 144, 152, 170, 187, 213 Bailey, Charley, 37 Baldry, Long John, 212, 222 “Bale of Cotton,” 156 Balliett, Whitney, 192–93 Band, 157 Barber, Chris, 96 Barber, Philip, 83 Barber, Stephanie, 83 Barnard, Al, 240 Barnsley (England), 222 Barthol, Bruce, 225 Basho, Robbie, 225 Basie, Count, 2, 54, 181 Bastin, Bruce, 29–30, 49, 54, 275n46 Bater, R. J., 251 Bates, Deacon L. J., 41. See also Jefferson, Blind Lemon

309

INDEX

Beatles, 107, 195, 210, 214, 220 Bechet, Sidney, xv, 2 Becker, Harold, 173–74 Beecher, Bonnie, 139 Beiderbecke, Bix, 32 Berkeley (California), 224, 227 Berkeley Barb (newspaper), 226 Berlin, Irving, 159 Berry, Chuck, 106 “Betty and Dupree,” 20 Bibb, Leon, 114 “Big House Bound,” 54 Bikel, Theodore, 145, 152 Bilzen (Belgium), 253 Biograph (record label), 245, 247 Birch, Danny, 134, 199, 266 Birmingham (England), 190, 209 Bitter End (music club), 160–61 Black Roots (film), 240–41 “Black Woman and Poison Blues,” 49 Blake, Blind, 19–20, 32, 51, 166 Blake, Eubie, 2 Bleecker Street Cinema, 241 Blind Gary Davis (documentary), 173–74 Block, Rory, 149, 263 Blood, Sweat, and Tears, 198 “Blow, Gabriel,” 12, 110 Blue Note (nightclub), 123 blues, 16 Blues Advice (Hawkins), 244 Blues Hall of Fame, 263 “Bluesman,” 158 Blues at Newport, 114 Blues Project, xvi Blues Unlimited (magazine), 212 Bluesville, 127 Blum, Liz, 224 Bob Dylan (Dylan), 153–54, 157 Bonds, Will, 274n37 Book Binder, Roy, 183, 229, 231, 237, 250, 255, 259–60, 263–64, 267 Bootleg Series, Vol. 9—­The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964 (Dylan), 295n61 Boston (Massachusetts), 111, 146; folk scene in, 144 Bound for Glory (musical tribute), 101 Bowers, Carl, 145–46 Boyd, Joe, 187–92, 208 “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (and Playing Guitar at the Same Time),” 21, 82, 179, 182– 83, 252. See also “The Twelve Sticks” Brand, Oscar, 64, 74–75, 115, 144–45, 152, 215 brass bands, 18

Brezer, Larry, 133, 200, 208, 230, 242–43, 245– 47, 254, 258–59, 261, 306–7n36 Brighton (England), 192, 212, 251 Brighton Beach (Brooklyn), 130–31 Brinton, Hugh Penn, 57 Bristol (England), 189, 251 Britain, 186–87, 241, 252; folk scene in, 108; skiffle craze in, 96. See also England; Scotland; United Kingdom British invasion, 210 Broadside (folk magazine), 144 Bromberg, David, 93, 200, 202, 243, 263, 298n13, 299n26 Bronx, 67, 146–47. See also New York City Brooklyn, 67, 88, 131, 194. See also New York City Brooklyn State Hospital, 194 Brooks, Roosevelt, 30 Broonzy, Big Bill, 55, 71, 83, 106, 186, 197 Brown, James, 181 Brown, Rev. Thomas H., 255 Brown, Willie, 85 Browne, Jackson, 262–63 Brownie McGhee’s Home of the Blues (guitar school), 79 “Brown Sugar,” 248 Bruce, Jack, 253 Buchanan, Ian, 116–17, 121–22, 129, 172, 239 “Buck Rag,” 179. See also “Fast Fox Trot” Buck’s Rock Work Camp, 233 Bull City Red, 44–50, 53, 94. See also Washington, George Burke, Thomas, 37 Burley, Dan, 5 Burley, Peter, 260 Byrds, 226, 231 Cabale (nightclub), 224 Caesar, Shirley, 57–59, 125, 133 Café Le Hibou (coffeehouse), 176 Cafe Society (club), 131, 188 Cafe Yana, 144, 176 Caffè Lena, 121–22, 234 Calloway, Cab, 188 Cambridge (England), 251 Cambridge (Massachusetts), 130, 145–46, 154; folk scene in, 138 Cambridge Folk Festival, 222 Campbell, Patricia J., 68 Canada, 178, 261 “Candyman,” 298n55 “Candy Man,” 16, 19, 72, 88, 97, 106, 139, 143– 44, 168, 172, 175, 179, 183, 186, 199, 206, 211, 218, 221–22, 247, 251, 274n37

310

INDEX

“Can I Do It for You?,” 154. See also “Baby, Let Me Lay It on You” “Can’t Be Satisfied,” 179 Cantini, Pete, 193 Caple, Joyce, 168 Caple, Shirley, 168 Caplin, Arnie, 245, 247 Caravan (folk fanzine), 111, 115 Caravans, 56, 59, 125 Carlin, Bob, 233 Carnegie Hall, 215 Carolinas, 25 Carter, Bo, 19 Carter Family, 125 Casady, Jack, 120 Center Rabun Baptist Church, 13 Chandler, Chas, 195 Chandler, Len, 70, 141, 143–44, 217 Chandos Music, 171, 237, 295n61, 304n17, 306n21 Chapin, Harry, 158 Chapin, Tom, 158 Charles, Ray, 70 Charlie Poole and His North Carolina Ramblers, 240 Charters, Samuel Barclay, 178–80, 183 Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group, 156 Cheek, Evelina, 22, 277–78n5. See also Davis, Evelina; Morris, Evelina Cheeks, Julius “June,” 26 Cherry Lane Theatre, Swapping Song Fair concerts at, 94–95 Chess Mate (coffeehouse), 204 Chicago (Illinois), 29, 32 Chicago Folk Festival, 152 Chicago Folklore Society, 153 “Children of Zion,” 12, 72, 209, 219–20, 237, 246 “Cincinnati Flow Rag,” 20, 179. See also “Slow Drag” “Cindy,” 97 Circle in the Square Theatre, midnight folk concerts at, 94–95 civil rights movement, 211, 213 Civil War, 6–7 “Civil War Parade,” 73. See also “Soldier’s Drill” Clancy, Paddy, 94–95 Clancy, Tom, 95 Clapton, Eric, 209, 212 Clayborn, Rev. Edward, 31, 49, 246 Cleethorpes (England), 222 Cline, Leigh, 228 Club 47 (folk club), 144–45, 176, 186, 189 “Cocaine.” See “Cocaine Blues”

“Cocaine Blues,” 16, 87–88, 96, 105–7, 139, 143–44, 172, 175, 189, 191, 199, 206, 212–13, 247, 262–63 Cochrane, Alastair, 211 “Coco Blues.” See “Cocaine Blues” Coffin, Tristram P., 101 Cohen, Andy, 224, 263 Cohen, John, 4, 81, 86–89 Cohn, Lawrence, 95, 119, 122–23, 142, 147, 181 Coigny, Frederika, 97 Coleman, Walter, 154 Collier, Jim, 240 Collins, Judy, 170, 219 Collins, Shirley, 248 “Colours,” 219 Coltrane, John, 123 Columbia (South Carolina), 24 Columbia Records, 31, 99, 153, 186, 218 Commons (folk club), 128, 160 Conforth, Bruce, 197 Conklin, Larry, 257 Conquerer (record label), 45, 49 Continental Records, 79–80, 285n62 Cooder, Emma, 166 Cooder, Ry, 166, 183, 186, 218 Cooney, Michael, 168 Copyright Act (1909), 155 Coryell, Larry, 253 Cosmic Coffee House (folk club), 168 Cotten, Elizabeth, 145, 156, 207–8 cotton, 9–10 counterculture, 224 The Country Blues (Charters), 178 Country Joe and the Fish, 225 Les Cousins (club), 222 Crawford, Rev. Fletcher, 67 Crawford, Rev. Frederick, 67, 264 Crawford, Rev. Jeremiah, 67 Cream, 231 “Cross and Evil Woman Blues,” 46, 49 “Crow Jane,” 20 Crowther, Bosley, 174 “Crucifixion,” 72, 142 Dahl, Kirsten, 117 Dallas (Texas), 25 Dallas, Karl, 252–53 Dane, Barbara, xvi, 114, 165–67, 183, 215 Darden, Robert, 264 Darin, Bobby, 164 Darling, Erik, 143, 160, 168 Darling, Harold, 167–68 “Darling, You Don’t Know My Mind,” 16

311

INDEX

Davidson, Harold, 186 Davis, Annie, xvi, 2, 8, 15, 29–30, 41, 61–62, 64–68, 72, 78–79, 85, 88–89, 111, 117, 121, 132–33, 137, 146, 151, 163–67, 171, 173, 180– 81, 183, 185, 189, 193, 199, 205, 217, 223, 233, 235, 236, 238, 242, 244, 247, 253–61, 265; age of, 282n61; buys first car, 176; death of, 267; generosity of, 266; as lawful wife, 262. See also Hicks, Annie Belle Davis, Belle, 277n5 Davis, Evelina, 7–8, 16. See also Cheek, Evelina; Martin, Evelina; Morris, Evelina Davis, James, 26 Davis, John, 7, 9, 273n14, 277–78n5 Davis, Miles, 123 Davis, Rev. Gary, xv–xvi, 6, 14, 20, 23, 25–26, 45–46, 53–55, 57, 64, 96–97, 108, 111, 130–31, 160, 162, 168, 170, 214, 218, 234, 242, 244, 257, 277n4, 284–85n45, 285n1, 291n13, 293n11, 294n33, 295n61, 298n55, 299n23, 304n17, 306n21, 307n42; abandonment of, 9; affairs of, 184–85; American Folk Music and Blues Tour, 208–13; American Street Songs sessions, 100, 102; as arranger, brilliance of, 127; arrest of, 78, 196; Asch Records, recording for, 71–73; as aspirational, xviii; “back picking” of, 88; in Belgium, 253; Biograph sessions, 245–47; birth of, 7; birthplace of, 8; Black Roots, appearance in, 240–41; blind grant of, 59–60; as blind man, stigma of, 27–28; blues, first exposure to, 16; blues, refusal to perform, xvi, 75; as blues cat, 37; bookings, slowing down of, 233; break up, of first marriage, 30; British tours of, 186–92, 222; in Bronx, 146–47; buys first guitar, 16; cabaret identification card (union card), obtaining of, 120–21; at Caffè Lena, 121–22; childhood of, 9; in choir, 13; church, as true calling of, 132–34, 137; church music of, 56–57; on college circuit, 135–36; Continental Records, recording for, 79–80; as contradictory, 146, 148; copyright issues, 154, 157–58, 171, 248–50; copyright protection, 237–38; covers of, 105–7, 143–44; cultural obscurity of, xvi; dark side of, 124; death of, 259–61, 306n35; on discrimination, 85; dozing, on stage, 84, 95; and draft, 24; and Dylan, 139–40; in East Bronx, 65; education of, 21; in England, 105, 172, 250–53; estate of, 254–55; evangelism of, 13, 39; as exploited, 144; financial problems of, 43; fingerpicking style of, 4; first car of,

312

176; first memory, of hearing a guitar, 17; folk enthusiasts, interest in, 86–87; at folk festivals, 138–39, 152–53; Folklore Center, visits to, 103–4; folk revival, 74–75, 101, 132; folk scene, influence on, xvi, 86–87; fortitude of, 180; funeral of, 260; at Gerde’s Folk City, 120–21; gospel music/repertoire of, xvii, 233, 235; in Greenville, 25–28; Greenwich Village folk scene, 128–29, 141, 161; guitar, learns to play, 15; The Guitar and Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis recording, 178–79; guitar pyrotechnics of, 48; guitar students of, 79, 89–90, 112, 115–18, 149–51, 197–208, 243, 256, 263, 265; guitar technique of, 2–3, 21, 24, 29, 32, 58–59, 88, 110, 175; guns, fondness for, 146, 176, 185, 193–94, 196, 299n26; in Harlem, 70, 76–78; harmonica playing, 15; health of, 254–55, 258; as heavy drinker, 30, 223–30; height of, 301n24; “holy blues” of, 101; as home owner, 180–82; home recordings of, by John Cohen, 87–89; idealization of, xvii; independence of, 27; influence of, 262; jam sessions, 90–91; at Lead Belly Memorial concert, 2–5, 81; legacy of, 265; A Little More Faith recording sessions, 141–43; magnetism of, 2; marijuana, fondness for, 190; marriage, to Mary Hendrix, 28; marriage, to Annie Belle Hicks, 62–63; marriage license of, 272n4; midnight folk concerts, 95; as minister, 31, 41, 60–61, 66–68, 204; “Miss Bozo,” 236, 241; “Miss Gibson,” 92–94, 135, 197, 209; “Miss Ready,” 194; mortality, pondering of, 237; mother, rejection of, 9–10; music, themes of, 9; musical influences on, 17–19, 32; musical virtuosity of, xvi–xvii; Music Inn performances of, 83–84; music store of, 217; name of, 279–80n17; as “New Act,” 176–77; at Newport Folk Festival, 113–15, 175, 213; New York debut of, 81; New York, early days in, 83; O, Glory sessions of, 235–36; payment of, disputes over, 50; performances of, improvisatory element of, 57; personal salvation, 10; poverty of, xv, xvii, 5, 10, 79, 117; Pure Religion and Bad Company recording, 171–73; racism toward, 145; recognition of, 169; recording sessions of, 45–49, 51–52, 55, 79–80, 87–89, 91–92, 94, 98–102, 122–27, 141–43, 147–48, 171–73, 178–79, 235–36, 245–47; religion of, 13; religious awakening of, 40; as religious composer, 75–76; rent parties, 37; repertoire of, 19,

INDEX

28–29, 41–42, 49, 61; Riverside recording sessions of, 98–100; rock, influence on, 59, 238–40; rock era, contribution to, as unrecognized, 195; royalties of, 127, 143, 163, 179–80, 262–63, 265; sacred and secular, tension between, 33; sales of, 50; Say No to the Devil recording sessions of, 147–48; secular repertoire of, 172–73, 182–83, 231– 32; sense of humor, 129; sermonizing of, 182–83; sermons of, 135–36; and sharecropping, 10–12; showmanship of, 2–3, 182–83; sight, loss of, 8; “Sing for Peace” concert, 215; in Sing Out!, 119; sin, preoccupation with, 10; song credits, overlooking of, 221– 22; spirituals, love of, 33; Stinson Records sessions, 91–92, 98; as street musician, xvii, 2–3, 24–25, 28, 35–36, 61, 68–70, 82–83, 111; in string band, 18; success, view on, 164; as surrogate father, 200; suspicious nature of, 50; taped oral history of, 84–86; as teacher, influence of, 39, 198; as teacher, qualities of, 198; television appearances of, 219–21; at tobacco warehouses, 37–38; tribute rec­ ords to, 263; at UCLA Folk Festival, 183, 185; as underappreciated, 263–65; as unrecognized, xv–xvi, 119–20; voice of, 2, 110, 127; in Washington Square Park, 111; weapons of, 38; wedding ceremony, performing of, 244–45; welfare checks of, 65; West Coast tour of, 165–68; will of, 306–7n36 Davis, William, 28 “Death Ain’t Nothin’ but a Robber,” 126 “Death Come to My House, He Didn’t Stay Long,” 126. See also “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” 9, 117, 126, 139, 144, 173, 202, 216, 237–39, 241, 258. See also “Death Come to My House, He Didn’t Stay Long” Debury, Theodore, 255 Decca, 49 Deep Purple, 213 de Heredia, Countess Carlos M., 83 Denson, E D, 226 Denver Folklore Center, 234 Detroit (Michigan), 193, 204 “Devil Got My Woman,” 218 DiMucci, Dion, 115–16, 263 Dion and the Belmonts, 115 Dixie Hummingbirds, 26 Djehizian, Elisabeth, 141 D’Lugoff, Art, 94–95, 285n1; midnight concerts of, 108

D’Lugoff, Burt, 94, 285n1 Dobell, Doug, 171 Donegan, Lonnie, 96, 156 Donovan, 106, 210, 219–22, 263 Doors, 233 Dorsey, Thomas A., 41. See also Georgia Tom Down Beat (magazine), 261 Drifters, 58 DuBois, W. E. B., 34 Dunham Jubilee Singers, 47 Durham (North Carolina), 33; black churches of, 56–58; crime in, 38; Hayti section of, 34, 35–36, 38, 56, 58, 264; street musicians in, 36–37 Dyer, John, 203, 240 Dylan, Bob, xv, 93, 103, 112, 138, 141, 153–54, 157–58, 179, 187, 195, 213–14, 218, 224, 262– 63, 295n61; Davis, influence on, 139–40 Earthy! (Darin), 164 Eddie Head and His Family, 47 Eddie Outlaw & Rev. Gary Davis Record Shop, 217 Edinburgh (Scotland), 220, 222 The Ed Sullivan Show (television program), 91 Edwards, Esmond, 122 Ed Young Fife and Drum Band, 213–14 Ehlert, Bill, 225 Eisinger, Ari, 267 Electric Circus (rock club), 236; First Generation Blues concert series at, 237 Ellington, Duke, 157 Elliott, Ramblin’ Jack (Elliot Charles Adnopoz), 88, 96–97, 105–6, 140, 143–44, 172, 182, 189, 208, 211–12, 262 Ellis, Big Boy, 285n62 Ellis, William Lee, 5, 100, 265, 276n25 “Embryonic Journey,” 239 England, 105, 172, 208, 211–12, 250. See also Britain; United Kingdom English Folk Dance and Song Society, 208 Episode Six, 213 Essex (England), 222 Estes, Sleepy John, 140 Europe, 88, 97, 107, 212, 261 Europe, Jim, 73 Evans, Allan, 256, 266 “Evil Hearted Woman,” 48 Fabian, 107 Fahey, John, 174 Fahey, Seth, 257–58 Fairchild, Sherman M., 245–46

313

INDEX

Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation, 246 Fairytale (Donovan), 221 Faithful, Marianne, 212 Farrell, Wes, 195 “Fast Fox Trot,” 179. See also “Buck Rag” Faulk, Johnny, 67 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 83, 108 Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), 43 Federal Writers Project, 169 Fenton, Joan, 256 Ferris, Tim, 261 Fifth Peg, 120. See also Gerde’s Folk City Fillmore East, 238 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 186 Fleder, Rob, 238 Flohil, Richard, 228–29 Florida Blossom minstrel show, 17 “Florida Blues,” 18 folk circuit: racism on, 145; “rediscovered” bluesmen, 170, 174–75 folk festivals, 112–15, 138–39, 152, 159, 174–75, 183–85, 213 Folklore Center, 102, 104, 113, 149, 160, 201, 231, 233; as Grand Central Station, of folk revival, 103 Folklore Productions, 129 Folk Lyric (record label), 297n48 folk music, 113, 231; on college campuses, 152; copyright issues, 154–58; ebbing of, 234; folk boom, 81, 165, 178; interest in, 104, 110; as menace, 130–31; rock era, effect on, 214; and Tin Pan Alley, impact on, 159 folk revival, xv, 57, 63, 71, 74, 92, 97, 101, 107, 124, 132; country blues singers, 119–20; and Folklore Center, 103 folk rock, 231 Folksinging Project, 159, 218 “Folksong Festival” (radio show), 74 Folk Sound U.S.A. (television program), 160 Folkways Records, 71, 74, 82, 105, 107, 112, 131, 178, 297n48 Forman, Geno, 154 Fountain Inn (South Carolina), 24–25 Fowler, Craig, 16 Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, 231, 235 Frazier Family, 249 Freedberger, Peter, 121, 129–30, 144 Freedmen’s Bureau, 7 Free Will Baptist Church, 41 Free Will Baptist Connection church, 41

“Freight Train,” 156, 207 From Spirituals to Swing concert, 2–4, 54, 81 Fuller, Blind Boy, 2, 39, 44–51, 53–55, 154, 157, 263–64; death of, 59. See also Allen, Fulton Fuller, Blind Boy No. 2, 60. See also McGhee, Walter “Brownie” Fuller, Jesse, 105–6, 109, 144 Gallagher, Rory, 253 Garcia, Jerry, 239 Gardyloo (magazine), 111 Gart, Herb, 210 Gary Davis Style, 263 Gaslight Cafe (folk club), 128, 141, 160, 174, 205, 243, 249; reconstituted version of, 264 Gaslight II, 250 Gate of Horn (folk club), 112, 159 Gates, Rev. J. M., 31 Gerde’s Folk City (folk club), 120–21, 128, 139. See also Fifth Peg Georgia, 19, 212 Georgia Sea Island Singers, 213–14 Georgia Tom, 41. See also Dorsey, Thomas A. Gerlach, Fred, 90, 104–5, 171, 183, 188, 289n28 Gerlach, Nick, 183 Germany, 24, 241 Gershwin, George, 159 “Get Right Church,” 26, 69, 87. See also “Morning Train” Gettleman, Carl, 216 Gibbon, John, 89–90, 98, 100, 116, 262 Gibson, Bob, 113 Gilbert, Ronnie, 82 Gillan, Ian, 213 Gillespie, Dizzy, 80 Glasgow (Scotland), 211 Glasgow Concert Hall, 211 Gleason, Ralph, 226 Glover, Roger, 213 “God Moves on the Water,” 100 “God’s Gonna Separate,” 142 “God Will Take Care of You,” 236 “Goin’ to Sit Down on the Banks of the River,” 59, 114–15, 125, 149. See also “I Won’t Be Back No More”; “We Will March through the Streets of the City” Golden Vanity (folk club), 111, 144–45, 189 Goldstein, Kenneth, 91–92, 96, 98, 101–2, 122– 24, 142–43, 147–48, 178 Goldwater, Barry, 82 Gooding, Cynthia, 113, 156 Goodman, Benny, 54, 188 “Good Night Irene,” 82

314

INDEX

Gordon, Lou, 94–95 gospel, 9, 25, 58–59, 80; Pentecost church spirituals, 58 Gould, Jack, 219 Grant, Ulysses S., 7 Grant Brothers, 88 Grateful Dead, 126, 216, 235, 238, 262–63; Davis, influence on, 239 Gray Court (South Carolina), 9, 13 “The Great Change in Me,” 48, 136 Great Mississippi Flood, 44 Green, Archie, 152 Greenberg, Morris, 108 Greenhill, Manny (Mendel Greenberg), 95, 107–8, 118, 129, 138, 144, 157–58, 165, 169, 171, 174, 176–78, 187, 204, 222–23, 227, 230, 237, 246, 248–50, 263, 265; Davis, managing of, 109–11, 170 Greenhill, Mitch, 145, 187, 295n61 Greenville (South Carolina), 24–28 Greenville County, 25–26 Greenwich Village, xv, 108, 111–12, 131; basket houses of, 128; Folklore Center, 102–3; folk scene, 138–39, 141, 160. See also New York City Grenada TV, 191 Groom, Bob, 209–10 Grossman, Albert, 112–13, 159–62, 170, 213 Grossman, Herbert, 149 Grossman, Ruth, 149 Grossman, Stefan, 20, 51, 53, 78, 87, 93, 140, 149–51, 158, 164, 171–72, 175, 202, 205, 237–38, 243, 249, 251, 253–54, 256, 261, 263–65, 274n37, 274–275n44, 284–85n45, 294n33, 298n13 Guest, Roy, 208, 222 The Guitar and Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis (Davis), 178–79 Gustafson, Robert, 110 Guthrie, Anneke, 91 Guthrie, Woody, 2–4, 70–72, 83–85, 90, 92, 96– 97, 105, 108, 138–40, 153, 194–95; musical tribute to, 101–2 Guy, Buddy, 263 Hammond, John, 2, 54–55, 81, 153 Hammond, John P., 117 Hamp, Johnnie, 191 Handy, W. C., 2–3, 18, 151 “Hang On Sloopy,” 195 Hansen, Barry (aka Dr. Demento), 143 “A Hard Rain’s A-­Gonna Fall,” 140 Harlem, 45, 66–67, 78–79, 88, 172; as danger-

ous, 76–77; street singers in, 70. See also New York City Harlem Street Singer (Davis), 122–23, 126, 136, 141–43, 149, 205, 265; as masterpiece, 124; reviews of, 127–28 Harms Inc., 159 Harris, Scrap, 37 Harrison, David, 250 Harrison, George, 220 Hawkins, Ernie, 32, 125, 143, 169, 197, 205–6, 217, 219, 244–45, 255–56, 259, 263–64, 293n11 Hawkins, Sheila, 176 Hawkins, William, 176 Hays, Lee, 82 “He Knows How Much We Can Bear,” 72 Hellerman, Fred, 82 “Hell Fighters,” 73 Hendrix, Jimi, xvi, 233 Hendrix, Mary, 28–30, 46, 63 Hentoff, Nat, 113 Herman’s Hermits, 210 Herndon, Rev. James, 56–59 “Hesitating Blues,” 18 “Hesitation Blues,” 18, 117, 151, 172, 239, 240, 247 Hicks, Annie Belle, 61. See also Davis, Annie Hines, Earl “Fatha,” 165 Hinson, Glen, 37 Hinton, Mary, 52–53, 60, 62, 76 Hodges, Estelle, 35–36, 40 Hoffman, Daniel G., 101 Hoffman, Lee, 111 “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand,” 16, 147 Holiday, Billie, 181 Holly, Buddy, 116 Homespun Tapes, 263 Hood, Clarence, 205 Hooker, John Lee, 90, 119, 263 hootenannies, 81, 86, 128, 132 Hopkins, Sam “Lightnin’,” 90, 119, 178, 217 Hoskins, Tom, 174, 189–90 Hostetter, Paul, 172–73 Hotel Tape (Dylan), 139 Hot Tuna, 117, 120, 126, 216, 239, 262 Hot Tuna (Hot Tuna), 240 House, Son, xv, 41, 44, 85, 140, 174, 229 House Committee on Un-­American Activities, 83, 108 “House of the Rising Sun,”153 Houston, Cisco, 71, 120 Houston, Doris, 181 Houston, Peter, 181 Hughes, Langston, 77

315

INDEX

Hull (England), 222 Hunter College, 192; Vietnam protest at, 216 Hurt, Mississippi John, xv, 19, 41, 112, 174–75, 187, 189, 192–93, 219, 298n55 Hutner, Simeon, 70 “I Am the Light of This World,” 47, 125, 136 “I Am the True Vine,” 47. See also “Lord, I’m the True Vine” Ian, Janis (Janis Fink), 205 “I Belong to the Band,” 48, 123, 125, 241 “I Cannot Bear My Burden by Myself,” 80 “I Can’t Make This Journey by Myself,” 92 “I Decided to Go Down,” 148 “I Don’t Want No Jim Crow Coffee,” 131 “If I Had My Way,” 87, 100, 161–63, 169, 175–76, 180, 213. See also “If I Had My Way I’d Tear the Building Down”; “Samson and Delilah” “If I Had My Way I’d Tear the Building Down” (Johnson), 99 “If the River Was Whiskey,” 240 “I Got a Little Mama, Sweet as She Can Be,” 191 “I Heard the Angels Singing,” 246 “I’ll Be All Right Someday,” 142. See also “We Shall Overcome” “I’ll Do My Last Singing,” 246 “I’ll Fly Away,” 142 “I’m Climbin’ on Top of the Hill,” 47 “I’m Going to Walk through the Streets of the City,” 125 “I’m Gonna Meet You at the Station,” 80 Imlach, Hamish, 211 “I’m a Rattlesnakin’ Daddy,” 47 “I’m a Soldier (in the Army of the Lord),” 214 “I’m Throwin’ Up My Hands,” 46, 49, 172, 179, 267 In Concert (Peter, Paul, and Mary), 163 Indiana Folksong Club, 182–83 Indian Neck Folk Festival, 119, 138–39, 154 Irving, Porter, 87, 274n37 “I Saw the Light,” 48, 94 “It’s Hard to Be Blind,” 139. See also “Lord, I Wish I Could See” “It’s Tight Like That,” 41 Ives, Burl, 71 “I Will Do My Last Singing,” 258 “I Won’t Be Back,” 125 “I Won’t Be Back No More,” 114. See also “Goin’ to Sit Down on the Banks of the River” Jackson, Mahalia, 41, 153, 189, 260, 263 Jack Takes the Floor (Elliott), 105 Jagger, Mick, 248, 306n21

Jamaica (Queens), 180–81, 196 James, Skip, xv, 41, 112, 174–75, 218 Janes, Loring, 184 Jansch, Bert, 106, 222 jazz, 16–17 Jazz Age, 32 Jazz Journal (magazine), 110, 171, 191 Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 3, 25, 32, 41, 46. See also Bates, Deacon L. J. Jefferson Airplane, 117, 120, 231, 263 “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well,” 92 Jim Crow laws, 7 Jimi Hendrix Experience, 231 John, Elton, 253 Johnson, Blind Willie, 32, 49, 99–100, 143, 162, 175 Johnson, James Weldon, 14, 58, 66, 68, 126, 129, 171, 299n23 Johnson, J. Rosamond, 171, 299n23 Johnson, Larry, 24, 51, 200, 235, 240, 242, 259–61, 263 Johnson, Lonnie, 32, 51 Johnson, Lyndon B., 82, 213 Johnson, Robert, xvi, 44, 55, 122, 198, 239 Jones, Bessie, 214 Jones, Earl, 131, 134 Jones, Lillian Webster, 101 Jones, Robert L., 139, 154 Joplin, Scott, 73, 179, 245 Joseph, Pleasant “Cousin Joe,” 187, 190–91 “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” 141 Kalb, Danny, xvi, 144 Kansas Joe, 154 Kass, Bob, 153 Katz, Steve, 198, 203 Katzman, Nick, 263 Kauffman, Joanne, 244 Kaukonen, Jorma, xvi, 117–18, 120, 239–40, 264 Keele (England), 222 Keele Folk Festival, 222 Keepnews, Orrin, 98, 100 “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning,” 12, 117 Kendrick, Jimmy, 266 Kennedy, Flo, 240–41 Kentucky, 19 Kerouac, Jack, 256 Kincaid, Jesse Lee, 183–86, 193, 218 King, B. B., 263 King, John, 43 Kingston Trio, 107, 110, 112–15, 155–56, 160, 163, 165

316

INDEX

Kipnis, Ken, 201 Kirkpatrick, Rev. Frederick D. (Brother Kirk), 240 Klay, Bernie, 233 Klein, Allen B., 248, 306n21 Klein, Estelle, 229–30 Knight, Marie, 249, 263 Korner, Alexis, 222 Kornfeld, Barry, 90–91, 95, 105, 109–11, 113–14, 118–19, 121, 129, 143, 175 Kossoy Sisters, 101 Krasilovsky, M. William, 159, 162–63 Ku Klux Klan, 6–7 Ku Klux Klan Museum and Redneck Shop, 6 La Guardia, Fiorello, 68 Laibman, David, 179 Lake George Village (New York), 168 Lamb, Bev, 228 Lampell, Millard, 101 Landrón, Jack, 144–46. See also Washington, Jackie Lang, Mamie, 211 The Last Waltz (Band), 157 Laurence, Trevor, 70 Laurens (South Carolina), 6 Laurens County (South Carolina), 6–7, 16, 18, 22, 23, 25, 87, 88; black church services in, 13–14; cotton in, 9, 10; KKK, influence in, 6–7; riot in, 7; violence in, 14 Ledbetter, Huddie (Lead Belly), 4–5, 25, 70–72, 74, 82–83, 86, 89–90, 92, 96, 143, 156, 194, 260, 264; death of, 1; memorial to, 1–3, 81 Ledbetter, Martha, 1–2, 89, 122 Lee, Robert E., 7 Lenox (record label), 80, 285n62 “Let Us Get Together,” 85, 110, 125, 167, 237 Let Us Get Together (Knight), 263 Lewis, Furry, xv, 112, 119–20, 178 Lewis, Jerry Lee, 106 Lieberson, Goddard, 54–55 Liggett & Myers, 34–35 Lightnin’ Strikes (Hopkins), 217 “Like a Rolling Stone,” 140 Lindsay, John, 68 Lippmann, Horst, 186 “Little Boy Lost in the Wilderness,” 148 “A Little More Faith,” xviii A Little More Faith (Davis), 141–43 Little Richard, 106 Little Sandy Review (magazine), 127, 139, 143 Little Walter, 257 Live/Dead (Grateful Dead), 238

Liverpool (England), 190 Lloyd, A. L., 155 “Lo, I Be with You Always,” 72 Lofgren, Elizabeth, 207 Lofgren, Lyle, 207 Lomax, Alan, xv, 1–3, 24–25, 55, 59, 74, 81, 112, 213–14, 240, 248; anti-­Communist sympathies, 83; self-­exile of, 84 Lomax, John, 1, 24–25, 83, 99 London (England), 186, 209, 220, 222, 252 Long, James Baxter “J. B.,” 44–46, 49–51, 53–56, 59–60, 279–80n17, 280n25 “Looking for My Woman,” 50 “Lord, I Feel Just Like Goin’ On,” 137, 173 “Lord, I’m the True Vine,” 47. See also “I Am the True Vine” “Lord, I Wish I Could See,” 10, 49, 185, 280n18. See also “It’s Hard to Be Blind” Lord, I Wish I Could See (Davis), 247 “Lord, Stand by Me,” 94, 164 Los Angeles (California), 165–66, 183 Louisiana State Penitentiary, 1 Love You Live (Rolling Stones), 306n21 Lugosch, Eric, 263 lynching, 6, 14, 26 Lyttleton, Elizabeth, 84–86, 287n38 Macon, Short Stuff, 284n37 MacRae, Josh, 211 Mahal, Taj (Henry Saint Clair Fredericks), 186, 218 “Make Believe Stunt” (aka “Maple Leaf Rag”), 20 Malcolm X, 214 “Mama, Let Me Lay It on You,” 51, 154 “Mamie,” 46 Manchester (England), 191, 209, 222, 251 Mankiewicz, John, 199–200, 255, 258, 260 Mann, Woody, 202, 256, 259–60, 263, 265 “Maple Leaf Rag,” 179, 183 Marcus, Greil, 107 Margolin, George, 97 “Marine Band,” 4 Mariposa Folk Festival, 228, 230 Markham, Dewey “Pigmeat,” 17 Martin, Clay, 22, 277–78n5 Martin, Evelina, 8. See also Davis, Evelina Martin, William, 15 Massachusetts Police Division of Subversive Activities, 108 “Masters of War,” 140 “Matchbox Blues,” 46 Mayall, John, 212

317

INDEX

Mayo, Margot, 103 McAdoo, Bill, 130–31, 194 McCarran Act, 83 McCarthyism, 84 McCormick, Mack, 217 McCurdy, Ed, 101 McDowell, George, 61 McDowell, Mississippi Fred, 142, 165, 215, 248–50 McEwen, Alexander, 91, 98 McEwen, Rory, 91 McGhee, Stick, 71 McGhee, Walter “Brownie,” 2, 47, 51, 53, 55–56, 58, 60, 65–66, 70–72, 79, 80, 83, 90–92, 95, 98, 100–101, 113, 144, 152, 165, 186–88, 190–91, 197, 299n32. See also Fuller, Blind Boy No. 2 McLean, Joseph, 21 McPhatter, Beulah, 58 McPhatter, Clyde, 58–59 McPhatter, Rev. George, 58 McTell, Blind Willie, 41 McTell, Ralph, 106, 189, 211 “Meet You at the Station,” 56 Melody Maker (magazine), 222, 251 Melotone (record label), 49 Melton, Barry, 225–26 Memphis Jug Band, 88 Memphis Minnie, 32, 154, 157 Memphis Slim, 113–14, 186 Menuez, Doug, 257–58 Meredith, Dean, 194, 230 “Message from Heaven,” 75 “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore,” 156 “Midnight Special,” 97 Miles, Lizzie, 165 Minnesota Party Tape (Dylan), 139 minstrel shows, 16, 200, 232–33; sideshow tents, 17 Missionary Baptist Church, 132 Missionary Baptist Connection church, 66 Missionary Baptist movement, 13 “Mississippi River,” 49 Mississippi Sheiks, 18–19 Mitchell’s Christian Singers, 55, 236 Monk, Thelonious, 123, 157, 197–98 Monterey Pop Festival, xvi Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin), 70, 82 “Morning Train,” 26. See also “Get Right Church” Morris, Chris, 213 Morris, Evelina, 35, 277n5; death of, 40. See also Davis, Evelina

Morris, Mark, 114–15 Morris, Newbold, 130 Morris, Will, 277–78n5 Morton, Jelly Roll, 83, 112 Moses, Robert, 130 “Motherless Children,” 142 “Mountain Jack,” 171 Mount Calvary Baptist, 58 Mount Calvary Holy Church, 57 Mount Vernon Baptist Church, 56 Muldaur, Maria (Maria D’Amato), 132 Murray, Tom, 161 Music Inn, 83–84 Music Publishers Holding Corp. (MPHC), 159, 161–62, 218 Music in the Streets (album), 82–83, 286n5 Muste, Rev. A. J., 216 M. Witmark and Sons, 157, 159, 218 “My Father Is a Husbandman,” 47 “My Soul Is a Witness for My Lord,” 99 “My Sweet Joy,” 219 Napier, Simon, 192, 212 National Education Television, 241 National Organization for Women (NOW), 232–33 New Blues and Gospel (Davis), 247 New England, 109, 121, 144 New Jersey, 19, 88 New Lost City Ramblers, 4, 87, 209 New Orleans (Louisiana), 32 Newport Folk Festival, 112–15, 159, 174–75, 213 Newport Folk Festival Foundation, 213 New School, 75 Newtonville (New Jersey), 181 New York Age (newspaper), 5 New York Association for the Blind, 65 New York City, xv, xvii, 29, 32, 39, 79, 111, 120–21, 130, 176, 216, 264; black migration to, 64; folk scene in, 71, 138, 144; street music, ban on, 68, 70; street sounds of, 82. See also Bronx; Brooklyn; Greenwich Village; Harlem New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 264 New York Times (newspaper), 4–5, 260 New York World-­Telegram (newspaper), 131 Nicholls, Brian, 96–97 Noblett, Richard, 186, 189, 212, 252 Noonan, Jeffrey, 284n36 “No One Can Do Me Like Jesus,” 147 Norfolk (Virginia), 28 North Carolina, 29, 38, 61, 264

318

INDEX

Northport (New York), 256 “Norwegian Wood,” 220 “Now I’m Talking about You,” 47 Oberlin College, 152 Oby, Rev. Howard, 141 Ochs, Phil, 209 Odetta, 108, 113, 215, 218, 233 O, Glory: The Apostolic Studio Sessions (Davis), 235 “Oh, Deed I Do,” 222 “Oh Glory, How Happy I Am,” 168–69, 206, 219, 221, 235, 237. See also O, Glory “Oh, Had I a Golden Thread,” 219 “Oh, Lord, I Want to Be Saved,” 258 “Oh Lord, Search My Heart.” See “O Lord, Search My Heart” Oh, What a Beautiful City (Tilling), 265 OKeh (record label), 31, 49 O’Kelly, William, 62 Okun, Milt, 160 “Old Time Religion,” 167, 183 Oliver, Paul, 247 Olivier, Barry, 227 “O Lord, Search My Heart,” 38, 47–50, 98, 239 On the Bowery (film), 241 O’Neal, Hank, 245 “On Patrol in No Man’s Land,” 73 Oriole (record label), 45, 49 Osburn, Pearl, 36, 57 Oster, Harry, 297n48 Ottawa (Ontario), 176 Our Singing Country (Lomax and Lomax), 24 Outlaw, Eddie, 217 “Out on the Ocean Sailing,” 236 Paley, Tom, 4 Paramount (record label), 31, 45, 126 Paramount Jubilee Singers, 99 Paramount Theatre, 195 Paris (France), 192 Patton, Charley, 44 Paul Butterfield Blues Band, 213 Paxton, Tom, 141, 216, 219 Pearl, Bernie, 145 Pearl, Ed, 145, 165–66, 227 Peebles, McKinley, 88–89. See also Sweet Papa Stovepipe People Get Ready (Darden), 264 People’s Songs, 81, 86, 97 Pepamar Music, 162 Perfect (record label), 49 Perls, Nick, 174, 238

Peter, Paul, and Mary, 98, 112, 160–62, 164, 169, 180, 213, 218, 263 Peter, Paul, and Mary (album), 161, 163–64 Peterson, North, 150, 152, 164, 195 Phelps, Walt, 29 Phillips, Shawn, 219–21 Phillips, William “King,” 18 Pickow, George, 94–95 Pinson, Buddy, 8 Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), 206, 244 “Please, Baby,” 179. See also “Baby, Let Me Lay It on You” Podunavac, Bozo, 236 Power, Brendan, 209 Prager, Simon, 252 “Precious Lord,” 192 Prelutsky, Jack, 149 Presley, Elvis, 107 Prestige Bluesville, 147 Prestige Records, 122–23, 127, 173, 178, 234–35, 291n13 Protestantism, 13 “Pure Religion,” 171, 184–85, 192, 228 Pure Religion and Bad Company (Davis), 171–73, 189, 289n28, 297n48, 299n23 Quiet Knight (nightclub), 234, 236 race records, 31; market for, 45 “Rag Mama,” 47 ragtime, 16 Raim, Walter, 165 Rainbow Quest (television program), 219, 221 Rainey, Ma, 165 “Ramblin’ Around,” 139 Rasmussen, Jerry, 128 Ratisseau, Elizabeth, 168 Rau, Fritz, 186 Reconstruction, 7, 22 record industry: blues, 45; blues and gospel recordings, 45; copyright issues, 105–6; “dime-­store labels,” 45, 50; spirituals, 45 Record Research (magazine), 94 Redcar (England), 222 Reed, Jimmy, 224 Renbourn, John, 106 Retort Coffeehouse, 193 Reuss, Richard, 218 Reverend Gary Davis: 1935–1949 (Davis), 238 Rev. Gary Davis: The Holy Blues (Davis), 237 Rev Gary Davis/Short Stuff Macon, 284n37 Richards, Keith, 106–7, 118, 248, 306n21 Richardson, J. P. “The Big Bopper,” 116

319

INDEX

Rising Sons, 166, 186, 218 Ritchie, Jean, 4, 72, 113–14, 218 Ritter, Tex, 92 Riverside Records, 98, 120, 122–23, 127, 234 Robbins Music, 237, 304n17 Roberts, Robin, 1, 3–4 Robinson, Earl, 94 Robinson, Jim, 122, 181, 196 Robinson, Tiny, 8, 71, 122, 142–43, 147, 196, 254, 264, 276n25. See also Singh, Queen “Tiny” “Rock Island Line,” 96, 156 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 263–64 Rodgers, Jimmie, 105 Rogosin, Lionel, 240–42 Rolling Stone (magazine), 261, 263, 306n35 Rolling Stones, 4, 186, 210, 247–50, 263, 265; lawsuit against, 306n21 Romeo (record label), 45, 49 Romford Folk Club, 212 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 77 Rose, Rev. T. T., 99 Ross, Mark, 216 Rothschild, Charlie, 120–21, 170 Rotolo, Suze, 141 Rubin, Jerry, 303n8 Rubinstein, Sholom, 219 Rucker, Darius, 264 Running on Empty (Browne), 262 Rush, Tom, 130, 146 Ruskin, Rick, 134, 193–94, 202, 228–29, 244, 298n13, 299n32 Russell, Bert, 195 Sainte-­Marie, Buffy, 208–11, 222 “Salty Dog,” 82 “Samson and Delilah,” 87, 99–100, 110, 114, 125, 144, 164, 175, 229, 238; copyright issues over, 161–62. See also “If I Had My Way”; “The Sermon of Samson” San Diego (California), 167 “San Francisco Bay Blues,” 105–6 Saratoga Springs (New York), 121 Satherley, Art, 278–79n17 Saturday Review (magazine), 122 Savoy (record label), 123 “Say No to the Devil,” 148 Say No to the Devil (Davis), 147 Schoenberg, Rick, 179 Schwartz, Tony, 83, 285–86n3, 286n5; “Daisy” ad of, 82 Scotland, 208, 211. See also Britain; United Kingdom Scott, W. M., 28

Scruggs, Earl, 114–15 Seattle Folklore Center, 234 “Sebastopol,” 73 Second Book of Negro Spirituals (Johnson), 14 Second Fret (folk club), 210 Second Great Awakening, 13 Second Southern Baptist Church, 134 Seeger, Charles, 207 Seeger, Peggy, 72, 207 Seeger, Pete, 2, 4, 70–71, 81–84, 90, 94, 97, 101, 108–9, 113–14, 144, 160, 207, 215, 217, 219–21, 240, 264 Seeger, Ruth Crawford, 207 Seeger, Toshi, 219 Selma (Alabama), 214 Selmer’s (guitar shop), 209 “Semper Fidelis,” 72 Sensational Nightingales, 26 “The Sermon of Samson,” 164. See also “Samson and Delilah” 77 Records, 171 “Shady Grove,” 156 “Shake, Sugaree,” 207 “Shake My Mother’s Hand for Me,” 36 sharecropping, 10–12; and freed blacks, 7 sheet music, 15, 75–76 Shelton, Robert, 114–15, 119, 127, 138 “She’s Funny That Way,” 51, 225, 247, 251 “She Wouldn’t Say Quit,” 232–33, 251 Shield, Harvey, 212–13 Shiloh Baptist Church, 244 Shines, Johnny, 179 Shipman, Jerome S., 110 Shoumatoff, Alex, 133, 135, 201, 242, 254, 260 Shultz, Arnold, 19–20 Siggins, Betsy, 145 Sign of the Sun bookstore, 167 Silber, Irwin, 155–56, 215 Silver, Terry, 222 Singh, Dr. Alvin, 90 Singh, Queen “Tiny,” 71, 90–91, 98, 122, 171; jam sessions, 89. See also Robinson, Tiny The Singing Reverend (Davis), 92–93 Sing Out! (magazine), 104, 115, 119–20, 155–56, 180 “Slow Drag,” 179. See also “Cincinnati Flow Rag” Smith, Bessie, 41, 165, 176 Smithline, Alan, 62, 79, 133, 200, 203, 215, 249, 253, 255, 306–7n36 Society’s Child (Ian), 205 “Soldier’s Drill,” 18, 72, 143, 284n37. See also “Civil War Parade”; “United States March”

320

INDEX

Song Festival of American Ballads, 83 Song Swappers, 160 “Song of the United States Army Bugle Corps,” 73 “Song to Woody,” 153 “Soon I Will Be Done,” 153. See also “Soon My Work Will All Be Done” “Soon My Work Will All Be Done,” 14, 153, 167, 171, 235, 267. See also “Soon I Will Be Done” Sound Recordings Act (1971), 155 Sousa, John Philip, 18, 31, 72–73, 284n36 South Carolina, xvii, 14, 148, 169, 212, 264; antebellum order in, 7; interracial marriage, ban on in, 7; Missionary Baptist movement in, 13 South Carolina Institution for the Education of the Deaf and the Blind, 21–22 “South Carolina Rag,” 20 Spann, Otis, 190 Spartanburg County, 25–26 Speir, H. C., 44 Spence, Joseph, 166 Spencer, Annie, 9, 12–13 Spencer, Bill, 121 Spencer, Pasqualina “Lena,” 121–22 spirituals, 14, 45, 129, 186, 188 Spiro, Phil, 174 Sprung, Roger, 97 Stanley, W. E., 52, 65 Stanley Brothers, 114, 219 Staples, Pops, 228–30 Staples, Purvis, 230 Staples Singers, 228–29, 263 Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop, 263 Stekert, Ellen, 86–87, 210 “Step It Up and Go,” 51, 280n25 Stewart, Al, 253 Stewart-­Baxter, Derrick, 172 Sticky Fingers (Rolling Stones), 247, 248, 306n21 Stinson Records, 91–92, 105, 120 Stinson Trading Company, 91–92 St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, 56 “St. Louis Tickle,” 179 Stone, I. F., 94 Stookey, Noel Paul, 160–61 Strachwitz, Chris, 224, 225, 248–49, 297n48, 306n21 “Sun Goin’ Down,” 136 Sun Is Going Down (Davis), 289n28 Supreme Court, 7 Surrealistic Pillow (Jefferson Airplane), 239

Swansea (Wales), 222 Swarthmore College, 152 Sweet Papa Stovepipe, 88. See also Peebles, McKinley “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” 156 Szwed, John, 302n28 Taggart, Blind Joe, 26, 31, 49, 126, 275–76n9 “Take a Whiff on Me,” 88 Tampa Red, 41 Tarriers, 156 Taylor, Mick, 249 “Tell It to Me,” 88 Terkel, Studs, 113 Terry, Sonny (Sanders Terrell), 2, 53, 55, 65–66, 70–71, 83, 86, 90–92, 94–95, 101, 113, 144, 147, 152, 165, 186–88, 190–91 Thal, Terri, 112, 129 Tharpe, Sister Rosetta, 55, 80–81, 133, 186–90, 192, 249, 263–64 “There’s Destruction in This Land,” 87, 235 “There Was a Time That I Was Blind” (“Lord, I Wish I Could See”), 98 “This Land Is Your Land,” 102 Thompson, Howard, 241 Tilling, Robert, 178, 253, 255, 262, 265, 267 Tilling, Thelma, 267 “Time Is Drawing Near,” 72, 147–48 Tin Pan Alley, 155, 159 Titanic, 100 “Tom Dooley,” 107 Topic Records, 105 Townley, John, 62–63, 176, 234–36, 256, 307n42 Tradition Music, 306n21 Traum, Happy, 93, 105, 263 traveling carnival shows, 16–17 Travers, Mary, 97–98, 160–61 Travis, Merle, 20 Trice, Richard, 52–53, 59 Trice, Willie, 39, 46 Troubadour (folk club), 222 “Tryin’ to Get Home,” 125–26. See also “Waded in the Water Trying to Get Home” Tucker, Ira, 26 Tuft, Harry, 234 “Twelve Gates to the City,” 48–49, 87, 92, 98, 125, 134–35, 143–44, 229, 233 “Twelve King Fishers,” 220 “The Twelve Sticks,” 21, 82, 208. See also “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (and Playing Guitar at the Same Time)” “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” 82

321

INDEX

UCLA Folk Festival, 183, 185 Ullman, John, 223, 234 Unicorn (folk club), 144 Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church, 67, 259, 264 Union Square Music Shop, 91 United Dollar department store, 44 United Kingdom, 74, 171, 189, 211, 222, 241. See also Britain; England; Scotland United States, 24, 88, 127, 171, 173, 178, 186, 189, 192, 210–11, 241, 261, 297n48; recording industry in, 31; shifting musical tastes in, 231 “United States March,” 284n37. See also “Soldier’s Drill” “Universal Soldier,” 210, 222 University of Alberta, 230 University of Bristol, 250 University of California at Berkeley, 152; folk festival, 221 Valens, Ritchie, 116 Van Bergeyk, Ton, 179 Vancouver (BC), 242 Van Gelder, Rudy, 123–24, 141, 143, 147, 178, 291n13 Vanguard Records, 114, 213 Van Ronk, Dave, 47, 88, 93, 111–12, 128, 139, 141, 143–44, 153–54, 157, 160–61, 179, 207, 233, 262–63, 295n61 Variety (magazine), 176–77, 261 Vaughan, Sarah, 80 Verve Folkways (record label), 217 Victor Military Band, 240 Victor Talking Machine Company, 32 Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), 226, 303n8 Vietnam War, 213–14; anti-­war protests against, 215–16 Village Gate (club), 94, 215 Village Voice (newspaper), 113, 161, 195, 260 Vocalion (record label), 49, 99 Von Schmidt, Eric, 154, 157, 295n61 Voting Rights Act, 214 “Waded in the Water Trying to Get Home,” 126. See also “Tryin’ to Get Home” “Wagoner’s Lad,” 219 Wald, Elijah, 288n11 Walker, Blind Willie, 30, 51 Walker, Joe, 30 Walker, N. F., 22 Walker, Willie, 18–19, 274–75n44 Waller, Fats, 181, 245 Ward, Clara, 133

Ward, Hiley H., 204 Warhol, Andy, 247 Warner Bros. Music, 159, 180, 218 Warner Bros. Records, 161, 163 Washington (North Carolina), 31 Washington, Aaron, 29, 33 Washington, Booker T., 34 Washington, George, 44. See also Bull City Red Washington, Jackie, 144. See also Landrón, Jack “Washington Post March,” 73 Washington Square Methodist Church, 243 Washington Square Park, 90, 131; “beatnik” riot in, 130; folk scene of, 97–98, 111, 139, 160 Waterman, Dick, 174, 229, 250 Waters, Ethel, 80 Waters, Muddy, xv–xvi, 85, 186–87, 191–92, 257 Watkins, Parker, 70 Watkins School of Music, 75 Watson, Arthel “Doc,” 109, 183, 222 Watson, Merle, 222 Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney), 141, 293n11 Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, 210 Weavers, 4, 74, 81, 143, 156, 160 Weems, Rev. T. E., 99 Wein, George, 112, 186–87, 192 Weir, Bob, xv, 198, 231, 238–39 Weissman, Dick, 91, 101, 124 Welding, Peter J., 127, 236 “We Shall Overcome,” 142, 216. See also “I’ll Be Alright Someday” WEVD, 71 “We Will March through the Streets of the City,” 125. See also “Goin’ to Sit Down on the Banks of the River” “When the Saints Go Marching Home,” 36 Whiskey, Nancy, 156 Whiskey a Go Go (music club), 186 “Whistlin’ Blues,” 247 Whitaker, Ella, 52 White, Bukka, 174, 175 White, Josh, 25–26, 47, 71, 74, 83, 92, 96, 126, 131, 186, 197, 208, 276n17 White, Vanna, 264 Whitely, Ray, 92 White Rock Baptist Church, 56 Who, 212 “Wild Horses,” 248 Wilkins, Robert, 41 Williams, Blind Connie, 70, 89 “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown,” 244 Wilson, David, 144

322

INDEX

Wilson, Russ, 225 Wilson, Tony, 222 Winslow, Tom, 245–47 Wisconsin Chair Company, 32 Withers, Geoff, 235, 266 WNJU (television channel), 219 WNYC, 74 Woliver, Robbie, 103 Wolverhampton (England), 222, 251 Wood, Ron, 106 Woodstock (documentary), 141 Woollard, Ken, 250 WOR, 3 Work, John W., 126 World War I, 24, 73 World War II, 73, 186 Worrall, Henry, 73 “Worried Man Blues,” 156

Yancey, Mama, 165 Yardbirds, 186, 209 Yarrow, Peter, 160–61 Yazoo Records, 238 “You Can Go Home,” 48–49 “You Got to Go Down,” 10, 48–50, 98 “You Got to Move,” 4, 69, 92–93, 142, 183, 193, 248–50, 265, 306n21 “You Gotta Move.” See “You Got to Move” “You Mus’ Hab Dat True Religion,” 171 Young, Israel Goodman “Izzy,” 105, 111, 113, 115, 120, 129–30, 152, 160, 180, 201, 204, 218, 231, 233–34, 264; background of, 102–3; as folk revival’s chief diarist, 104 Youngman, Henny, 102 youth movement, 130 Ziehm, Howard, 224

323