***The Blues Is Dues –With Muddy
Waters’ Mannish Boy In Mind
FromThe Pen Of Frank Jackman
Johnny Prescott privately daydreamed
his way through the music he was listening to just then, the forbidden blues
music, the devil’s music in some quarters but colored music,( nigra music from his
Southern- born father, nigra being kinder that the n----r that he had come
North with and which Mother Prescott banned from the household under penalty,
well, it was not clear what penalty since no Prescott, young or old, was willing
to chance what that hellish thing might be in Johnny’s growing up 1950s household).
He was listening to that sacred music just then on the little transistor that
Ma Prescott, Martha to adults, had given him for Christmas after he has taken a
fit when she quite reasonable suggested that a new set of ties to go with his new
white long-sleeved shirts might be a better gift, a better Christmas gift and
more practical too, for a sixteen year old boy. No, he screamed he wanted a
radio, a transistor radio, batteries included, of his own so that he could
listen to whatever he liked up in his room, or wherever he was, and didn’t have
to, understand, didn’t have to listen to some Vaughn Monroe, Bing Crosby, Doris
Day, or Harry James 1940s war drum thing, sentimental journey thing, until the
boys come home thing, on the huge immobile radio downstairs in the Prescott
living room. That music and that monstrosity declared, Johnny declared, strictly
squaresville, cubed.
This blues thing, this roots music had
been a recent acquisition as Johnny one night, one Sunday night, got a late
night blues station with a big range out of Chicago. Previously he had been
entirely happy, innocently happy, to listen to, say, Shangra-la by The
Four Coins that a few months back he had been crazy for. Or that Banana Boat
song by The Tarriers that everybody was singing but which upon a recent listen had
made him think for a moment as it started its dreary trip through his ears that
he was not so sure that those ties wouldn’t have been a better deal, and more
practical too, if that was all the radio could produce. Yah, that so-called be-bop
Boston rock station, WAPX, had sold out to, well, sold out to somebody, because
except for late at night, midnight late at night, one could not hear the likes
of Jerry Lee, Carl, Little Richard, Fats, and the new, now that Elvis was gone,
killer rocker, Chuck Berry who had proclaimed loud and clear that Mr. Beethoven
had better move alone, and said Mr. Beethoven best tell one and all of his
confederates, including Mr. Tchaikovsky, that rock ‘n’ roll was the new sheriff
in town.
The bitter end came one Sunday afternoon
as Rainbow (where the hell do they get these creepy songs from he
thought) by Russ Hamilton blared on and on and he was then ready to throw in
the towel with vanilla music. (Johnny would not get hipped to the roots, to the
distinctions between that vanilla music being spoon-fed to he and his white
brethren and black-etched blues until much later when he headed south during
the early 1960s for the civil rights struggle and learned very quickly the
distinctions. Just then thought vanilla was just a feeling not a cultural statement.)
Desperately, later that same night, Johnny fingered the dial looking for some
other station when he heard this crazy piano riff starting to breeze through
the night air, the heated night air, and all of a sudden Ike Turner’s Rocket
88 blasted the airwaves. But funny it didn’t sound like the whinny Ike’s
voice that he knew from some Ike and Tina stuff so he listened for a little
longer, and as he later found out from the DJ it was actually a James Cotton
Blues Band cover. After that performance was finished, fish-tailing right after
that one, no commercial breaks, was a huge harmonica intro and what could only
be mad-hatter Junior Wells doing When My Baby Left Me splashed through. There
was no need to turn the dial further now because what Johnny Prescott had found
in the crazy night air, radio beams bouncing every which way, direct from
Chicago, and maybe right off those hard-hearted Maxwell streets, was Be-Bop
Benny’s Chicago Blues Radio Hour. Be-Bop Benny who started Chuck Berry, Little
Richard, and Fats Domino on their careers, or helped.
Now Johnny, like every young
high-schooler, every "with it" high schooler in the USA, had heard of
this show, because even though everybody was crazy for rock and roll, just then
like he said before, the airwaves sounded like, well, sounded like music your
parents would dance to, no, sit to at a dance, and some kids still craved high
rock. So this show was known mainly through the teenage grapevine but Johnny
had never listened to it because, no way, no way in hell was his punk little mother
bought Radio Shack transistor radio with two dinky batteries going to even have
the strength to pick up Be-Bop Benny’s live show out in Chicago. So Johnny, and
maybe rightly so, took this turn of events for a sign. And so when he heard
that distinctive tinkle of the Otis Spann piano warming up to Spann’s Stomp
and finished up with his Someday he was hooked.
And you know, as he listened to song
after song for several weeks, toes tapping, fingers popping, he started to see what Billy, Billy Bradley,
from over in Adamsville, meant when one night at a school dance where he had
been performing with his band, Billy and the Jets, mentioned in an intro to a
cover of Elmore James’ rendition of Dust
My Broom that if you wanted to get rock and roll back you had better listen
to blues, and if you wanted to listen to blues, blues that rocked then you had
very definitely better get in touch with the Chicago blues as they came north
from Mississippi and places like that.
Johnny who have never been too much south of Gloversville,
or west of Albany, and didn’t know too many people who had, couldn’t understand
why that beat, that da, da, da, Chicago beat sounded like something out of the
womb in his head. Sounded like some ten thousand years of human existence
seeking to wail, wail in the night. But when he heard Big Walter Horton wailing
on that harmonica on Rockin’ My Boogie he knew it had to be embedded somewhere
in his own genes.
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