“Gee, But It’s Hard To Love Someone When That Someone Don’t Love You”-With Bessie Smith’s Down-Hearted Blues In Mind

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Otty Venise had to laugh, had to laugh right out loud about his situation. And if you knew Otty you knew that when that young white single man about town laughed out loud it meant nothing other than that he had woman trouble. Or was about to have woman trouble. This one would be of the latter sort. See Otty was in the dumps once again about his latest flame, this Laura Perkins, five feet six inches of slender brunette pale blues eyes and heartbreak, who had him jumping through hoops. Nothing new there since Otty had probably jumped through more hoops for more unrequited woman than any seven men, young or old, married or single. And with every single one of them, or at least as far back as he could remember, high school anyway back several years before if not earlier Otty would feel just a little bit better if he listened, endlessly listened as if time did not matter, or if time actually did stand still, if he played his old time collection of eight double-sided albums of Miss Bessie Smith put out many years before by Columbia Records (and before that the same configuration by Vanguard) and inherited from his uncle when that uncle unexpectedly passed away in 1971.

Here is what didn’t figure, didn’t figure to Otty, and certainly didn’t figure to any of his friends including when he had told her about his Bessie affliction that perfidious Laura. Here was a white guy, a guy who before he got out of high school did not know one black person personally and who did not know squat about the roots of black music in slavery times, in Mister James Crow times, in the great migration to the industrial North times who could only find solace in the raspy-throated voice of a black back forty acres and a mule Southern Delta woman when he was in one of his periodic dumps. And see too if you want to test out some theory of Mister Otty Venise’s love depressions one Miss Billie Holiday, a certified torch singer whom you would think would sent those blues away, did not do so. No, Miss Billie was reserved for when Otty and his latest flame were heating up their affair, when some sweet woman was “curling Otty’s toes” as he always liked to put his bouts of love-making.  

So Otty was on the afternoon we are trying to decipher his condition sitting in his small studio apartment a-flush the sides streets of Beacon Hill in Boston wading through the fourth side of the third double-album of Miss Bessie Smith because, well, you know the “because” if you have been reading between the lines here, Ms. Laura Perkins has given Otty his walking papers. Has told Otty that she can no longer take his drama every time they have a dispute about the “this and that” of the boy-girl love thing that seems to set Otty off. And, no, she has not found another guy yet so it was not some two-timing thing it was square on Otty’s shoulders that set Laura and those pale blue eyes away from his path. She said “don’t call I won’t answer, don’t write I will throw it in the wastepaper basket, don’t come looking for me at Jack’s Grille (and don’t talk to her if she is there alone or with company). Finis, done she said. And here is the killer for young Otty as is well known when Laura is done with a man, she is done.  

So if you are walking the back streets of Beacon Hill day or night these days and you hear some bluesy voice yelling out about being down-hearted, talking about being down-hearted since her baby doll left her, talking about how her man should come home  (come home not smelling of another woman too), talking about how her no good man has left her high and dry, talking about how she feels all used up (or worse for Otty that her man is all used up), about not playing second fiddle to some high yella woman, about how is she going to make it when that no good man who took her dough, took her sex, took her soul leaves by the back  door then you know one Otty Venise is still in high dudgeon. Thanks Bessie.