The Mayor of MacDougal Street (23 page)

In any case, most of the people listening to folk music never thought much about the issue, for or against. The whole debate was a tempest in a teapot, generated by critics who needed something to write about. At the time, though, I got really annoyed by it, because these were songs, good songs, and what color is a song? But all sorts of erudite arguments were being made and ripostes being delivered, and though I was not the only white blues singer on the scene, I was sort of riding point, so a lot of the
garbage landed on my head. Then I snapped back in a very surly manner and said some things that, while I do not regret having said them, were an overreaction to the overreaction. Forty years later, on somber reflection, having fully studied the arguments on both sides, I have reached what I believe to be a measured and definitive judgment on the matter: Who cares?

Whatever my tastes, my voice sounded like it sounded. From the first moment I opened my mouth to sing, people did not hesitate to tell me that I had an unusual voice—though that was not exactly the way they usually phrased it. In retrospect, I think that having a rough voice was actually an advantage, because I had to learn how to sing, not simply make pretty sounds. And it fitted well with the sort of material that attracted me, which often was sung by people who did not have pretty voices.

At any rate, the Commons was a turning point for me. Along with providing a regular place for me to play, it was where I met a lot of the people who would become my closest friends and associates over the next few years. The sheer number of people who worked there militated for that: I once counted thirteen performers on a single night. That even included some poets, and we mixed pretty well, all things considered. Bob Kaufman was reading there fairly often, and John Brent, who was better known as a comedian with the Second City and subsequently the Committee, came across the street occasionally from the Gaslight.

One of the best friends I met there was Tom Paxton. The Commons was Tom’s first gig in the city; he was in the army and came in on weekend passes from Fort Dix. At that point he was not yet doing his own material. He was doing traditional folksongs, and he sounded a lot like Burl Ives—I can still hear Ives in his style. He may have already written his first song, or certainly would within a very short time, but that was not what he was doing onstage. From the beginning, though, he was a natural as a performer.

Two or three weeks after my arrival at the Commons, Jimmy decided to pull up stakes and head back to California, because his acting teacher was going out there. Some of the other performers went with him, and what with one thing and another I was shortly the only regular performer left. Then Rod MacDonald, who was running the place, asked me if I would be willing to book the entertainment, since he did not know from folk music; all he knew from was chess. That was fine with me, and of course I hired
my friends. I brought Paxton in on a regular basis, Casey Anderson, Billy Faier, a woman named Neila Horne who was a great songwriter and wrote several things I have kept in my repertoire, and the Reverend Gary Davis.

I had met Gary a couple of years earlier through Barry Kornfeld. Barry was studying guitar with him and sometimes acting as his “lead boy” (Gary was blind, and though he could get around his own turf pretty well, he needed someone when he ventured farther afield), and for a while got into the practice of bringing him down to Washington Square on Sundays. Gary would stand there in the circle in the middle of the square with Barry, who would usually be playing banjo while Gary played guitar. The first time I heard him was a shock I will never forget. I still cannot believe the things that man could do. He was unquestionably a genius, and he became my idol, my guitar guru. It took me a while to assimilate any of his techniques, but he was certainly the strongest single influence on my playing.

Gary was in his sixties by that time. He was an ordained minister and had been a street singer and preacher for most of his life. He was from South Carolina originally, but he had come up to New York in the early 1940s, and when I first heard him, he was still working in the streets of Harlem. He also used to preach sometimes in a storefront church, and his sermons were really remarkable. He would set up a riff on his guitar, and then he would chant his sermon in counterpoint to the riff, and when he made a little change in what he was saying, he would make a little change on the guitar. There was this constant interplay and interweaving of voice and guitar, and these fantastic polyrhythms would come out of that—I have never heard anything quite like it, before or since. He was a great singer, and I do not think he has gotten enough credit for that. There were a lot of similarities between his singing and Ray Charles’s, both in voice quality and in the way it fitted with his style of playing. He could shout when he needed to, but he could also be very sophisticated in terms of his phrasing and his use of dynamics.

As for Gary’s guitar style, it was fantastically complicated and has never been successfully duplicated, even by his students. It was ragtimey more than bluesy, and he had unbelievable technique. More important, for my purposes, he was accessible. He gave lessons in his house and also had a succession of lead boys who helped him get around to concerts. The first I recall was a guy
named Johnny Gibbon, and then there was Fred Gerlach, Barry Kornfeld, Stefan Grossman, Roy Bookbinder—a whole succession of people who went on to be really fine guitar players.

I never took formal lessons from Gary, but I went over to his house a couple of times and I worked with him as often as I could, and whenever he was playing, I would just sit there and watch his fingers. We used to hang around for hours, and we would talk and I would ask him how to play one thing or another. He used to say, “Well, playing guitar ain’t nothing but a bag of tricks”—which I suppose is true in a way, but he had a very, very big bag. He was only too happy to show me things, and then I would try to play them, and he would cackle when I got them wrong, which was usually. He was an incredibly patient teacher when the mood was on him. Being blind, he had difficulty describing what it was he was doing, so his method was to play a thing over and over again, slow it down so you could see just where his fingers were going, and he would correct you by ear. He did not mind if it took two hours to get one lick across. On the other hand, he could be very irascible and unpredictable at times, so you would work on this lick or whatever it was, and a few days later you would run into him and play it, and he would growl at you, “Man, you’re stealing my stuff.”

He was sui generis, a unique man in so many ways. It was like W. C. Fields used to say about sex: “There are some things better and there are some things worse, but there’s nothing quite like it.” He was sly and sophisticated, he was naive and childlike, he was cheap, he was generous. He was a bundle of contradictions. And his guitar playing was the same way. He would play these incredibly complex, multipart ragtime compositions, and then turn around and do something like “Candyman,” this little, repetitive song that he had learned as a child in South Carolina. He didn’t often talk about how he learned, but of course Gary had his roots, too; he did not spring like Athena from the head of Zeus. He told me that when he was a little kid, he used to play a guitar someone had made for him out of a cigar box, and there was this guy that used to come through town who they called “the gittar man”—that was the only name they knew him by. He would come around once or twice a year, play in the streets, and pick up some money and move on, and “Candyman” was a piece Gary learned from the gittar man.

Gary was a very astute arranger, and thought his pieces through very thoroughly. He would take a song and analyze it, pick it apart and then reassemble it, sometimes while he was playing. It was an astounding process to watch, and I got a great deal from him, though I did not try to imitate his sound either as a singer or as a guitarist. For one thing, I knew that if I tried I would fail. But anything he did that I could assimilate and use, I would grab it. I messed around with a lot of his songs, and “Candyman” and “Cocaine Blues” became staples of my repertoire. I was particularly attracted to those because he did not perform them himself. Being a reverend, of the fundamentalist persuasion, he did not like to sing secular songs in any public situation. He especially would not sing blues, but any song that was not a religious song was the Devil’s music, and those two songs were particularly sinful. (At first, I did not know that a “candy man” was a pimp, and I could not understand Gary’s reluctance to perform that song. One time, I confronted him about it: “But Gary, that’s a children’s song.” He said, “Yeah, you get lots of children from songs like that.”)

Fortunately, he was a little more relaxed in private, and appropriately enough to his calling, he had no head for liquor, so after a drink or two you could sometimes put the arm on him to sing some blues or party songs. Something like “Cocaine Blues,” though, was a little too much for him, so he refused to sing it; he would just play the guitar part and speak the words in a sort of
recitatif
. I thought that was a pretty tenuous legal argument—I would have hated to be in his shoes when he had to face Saint Peter with the defense, “I didn’t
sing
it, I just talked it.”—but nothing would move him. As a result, when I recorded my version I just recited the lyric, and by now dozens of other people have done versions, but none of us ever found out what the melody was. That melody died with Gary.

You can listen to the records I did for Folkways, and then my first recordings for Prestige, and you will hear a huge difference in the guitar playing, and Gary is largely responsible for that change. I sometimes think that if he had not come along, I might as well have stuck with the ukulele. As I have said, it was not so much a matter of direct imitation, though for a while I changed from playing a Gibson J-45 to a J-200 because that was what he played. It was more that he reshaped my whole approach to the instrument. He used to call the guitar his “piano around
my neck,” and I adopted that pianistic approach. When I am working out arrangements, I very rarely listen to guitarists. I listen to people like Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and James P. Johnson, and try to apply their techniques to the guitar.

That was what got me into the whole business of playing classic ragtime. In the early 1960s I worked out an arrangement of a turn-of-the-century rag called the “Saint Louis Tickle,” and it provided the impetus for what became a quite thriving school of ragtime guitarists, people like Dave Laibman, Rick Schoenberg, Ton Von Bergeyk, and Guy Van Duser. I strongly suspect that something similar had been going strong at the turn of the century; the combination of elements is so logical and ragtime was so incredibly popular that it is very difficult to believe that this was not being done. But none was recorded, so I became known as the pioneer of fingerstyle ragtime. That was only possible because of what I picked up from Gary. For example, one thing that stopped fingerpickers from playing rags is that in most classic rags you have a section that involves a modulation into the key a fourth above where you started. If you start out in C—the most comfortable key for ragtime playing—by the time you get to the third part, you are in the key of F, and most fingerpickers were stuck on first-position chords and were not at all comfortable playing in F. But Gary had several arrangements in F, religious songs like “Blow, Gabriel” and one of his instrumental showpieces, John Phillip Sousa’s “United States March.” Once I had figured out what he was doing on that march, I simply applied that to the F section of “Saint Louis Tickle.” Likewise, I would have tried to play Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” in C, but I saw Gary fooling around with it, and he did it in A. It was like a light bulb going on: “Right, that’s it!” The rest of it came kind of easy, but only because Gary had shown me the way.

Gary was to Eastern Seaboard guitar what Art Tatum was to stride piano: he was not the most successful player on that scene, but none of the others had his range or his grasp of the instrument. Blind Blake had a terrific right hand and a very nice stride piano sound, but it was very mechanical. The same is true of Blind Willie McTell, although I think McTell had a nicer sense of harmonies and voicing. But when you study what Rev. Davis was doing with his right hand, you see that he doesn’t keep any pattern. He will start to go from a lower to a higher note and then switch right
in the middle of a measure to back-picking, from a higher to a lower note, or strumming a full chord, and never drop the time.

He had no equals, and he knew it. He was a merciless critic—I hardly ever heard him say a good word about another guitar player—and the thing is, he was almost invariably right. I remember hearing him do a parody of Lightnin’ Hopkins, just dripping acid, and what was so striking was that he knew exactly what Lightnin’ was doing and the parody was correct. One time I asked him about Blind Lemon Jefferson, who I still think is one of the greatest blues guitarists and singers of all time. Gary disagreed, and he started to play a very accurate pastiche of Lemon’s “Black Snake Moan,” and just opened his mouth and let out with this incredible, bloodcurdling scream. Then he stops and says, “Man, he couldn’t have sung no louder if someone was cutting his throat.” He was utterly ruthless. He did like Blind Blake, though. He used to say that Blake’s guitar playing was “right sporty.” That was the highest accolade I ever heard him pay another guitarist. He liked Lonnie Johnson too.

I will never forget one night I was playing at a club in Detroit and was in the midst of my Rev. Davis period. I must have done two or three of Gary’s things, or maybe even more, and when I came offstage, the owner comes and says, “There’s a friend of yours here,” and he leads me over to a table, and there are Rev. and Annie Davis. I thought, “Oh my God, why didn’t I just sing some Leadbelly songs?” But I sat down, and Rev. Davis turns to me and says, “That was right sporty guitar.” Oh, man! That was the highest compliment I have ever been paid in my life. I suspect he was just being kind, but it is one of my fondest memories.