I Got a Song. Rick Massimo
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They were all black. Everyone’s looking at us. So the guy we picked up goes to this bar—not really a bar, more like a shelf—and he’s standing there, and this harmonica player is playing there with one microphone.”
The band consisted of their passenger, the harmonica player, and a drummer with a makeshift kit—“a bass drum, a cymbal stand, a snare, a hi-hat, and some device which looked like a drum but wasn’t really a drum—you could bang on it.” But the harmonica player was good enough, Jones says, to continue hanging around.
The good time didn’t last long. “Suddenly, we see this scuffle. And the guy we had brought in was involved in this scuffle. So the harmonica player says into the microphone, ‘GET OUT!’ And he’s looking right at us.
“We’re out of there. So we go out, across the street and get into the car. And it’s still pouring. And these guys come out and they’re throwing bottles.”
They escaped, but Jones says, “We were intrigued, so we didn’t go far.” They stopped for the night at a motel about twenty minutes away, then drove back the next day, still hoping to make contact with the harmonica player. Not only was the player gone; so was the bar. “The place was over with.” The bar was itself attached to a food store, and Rinzler went in to inquire about the situation, and came out saying, “The guy we brought in was a real badass guy. And he was the one who started the fight!”
No one knew who the harmonica player was—Rinzler learned he wasn’t from that town and had just blown in for the night—and the duo lost their quarry. There’s regret in Jones’s voice to this day as he remembers the lost opportunity. “We never found out who the hell he was. And I tell you, this harmonica player was unbelievable.”
He shrugs his shoulders: “Those are the risks.”
In Texas, they found the preacher/singer Doc Reese and surprised him on moving day: “We were helping him and talking with his wife and his kids.” Rinzler and Jones were familiar to Reese, an ex-convict, because Lomax had recorded him during his incarceration. Later, Reese’s lawyer drove up and advised the two to come over to his house to talk about groups and musicians to check out.
The police followed them to the lawyer’s house. But when Rinzler and Jones got to the lawyer’s house, the police stopped at the end of the driveway. “So the lawyer’s telling us about the choir they had, and he says, ‘Now, don’t worry about this police car. He will not move until you start moving. He will not come onto my property, because if he does I will shoot him.’ And we thought, ‘Oh, very interesting.’”
From there they headed to the Huntsville prison to scout singers, but they were pulled over. According to Jones, the officer invented a law that required all white people to notify him personally if they wanted to speak to a black resident, and he made them empty the car, looking for guns, pamphlets, tapes of Martin Luther King, or any other dangerous weapons. But thanks to Rinzler’s association with bluegrass king Bill Monroe, the search turned out to be the break the two scouts needed:
So [the cop] comes across this file box of Bill Monroe photos and letters to mail out. So he pulls them out and says, “What’s this?” Ralph says, “That’s photos of Bill Monroe.” “I know who that is; why do you have these photos?” So Ralph says, “I’m his manager.” The cop says, “I don’t believe this. Pack the car up. I happen to be a big fan of Bill Monroe’s.” So we pack the car up and he says, “I am gonna drive you to the line. You’re not going back to the lawyer; you have to go directly out.”
So we get beyond the town, and the car stopped. And he stopped because this is now state property, and a state police car is flagging us down…. The state police officer came over, who was white, and admonished the sheriff—“These people have an appointment with the superintendent of the prison; why are you bothering them?” So we got back in the car and followed this guy for an hour.3
In 1964, they were in Tennessee, looking for a black Sacred Harp singing group to balance the thirty-member white group from Georgia they had already signed up. They headed to a church where the occasion, known as a “singing,” followed the norm: hours of singing in the afternoon, then a big meal afterwards. The minister introduced them to the group and the congregation, saying they were the first white people to ever come to their church. After the singing, “which was great,” Rinzler and Jones joined the meal. “And this woman said, ‘I never sat beside anyone white. And I wouldn’t be able to touch that chicken after you touched it.’
“Pretty amazing. Those were the things that happened,” Jones said.
Usually, Jones says, it wasn’t difficult to find the people they were looking for: “Most of these people we found were stalwarts in their own community. Even if their community was a rough black section of town, they were all well known.” It also wasn’t too hard to get people to agree to come to Newport, particularly after the festival had been around for a few years. (Even in the Southern towns where they’d gotten hassled by the police, things would go more smoothly the next time, especially since they made a habit of sending clippings of the residents’ Newport exploits.)
There were exceptions, though. Jones remembers looking for the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Fiddle Player.” They found him digging a ditch outside his house, but he rebuffed their advances—“I don’t play the fiddle anymore,” Jones recalls him saying. “Because I have religion—my wife and me. It’s not a good instrument to play.”
Jones says that he and Rinzler spent two days trying to change his mind. He never relented on his claim of being the world’s greatest fiddle player. But he also never agreed to come to Newport and play.
DeFord Bailey (“the Harmonica Wizard”) was the first black man to play at the Grand Old Opry. He’d been playing “Pan American Blues” in 1927 and was a regular on the Opry in 1928, one of its charter members. While reportedly his race was no obstacle to the radio and touring audiences loving him, he was required to use separate accommodations and restaurants on the road.
By 1941, however, he was getting phased out of the Opry, not least because of the Opry’s licensing disagreement with ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Artists and Producers), which led in part to the founding of BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated). Bailey’s music was controlled by ASCAP, and he was told he’d have to learn new material. No one else had to do that, Bailey replied, and ignored the request. He was let go in May 1941, and in 1946, Opry founder George Hay’s history of the venue referred to him as “a little crippled colored boy who was a bright feature of our show for about fifteen years. Like some members of his race and other races, DeFord was lazy…. He was our mascot and is still loved by the entire company. We gave him a whole year’s notice to learn some more tunes, but he would not. When we were forced to give him his final notice, DeFord said, without malice, ‘I knowed it waz comin’, Judge, I knowed it waz comin’.’” Bailey, not surprisingly, saw it differently, claiming that he’d wanted to do different songs and was told to stick with what the audiences liked. “They seen the day was coming when they’d have to pay me right … and they used the excuse about me playing the same old tunes.”4
When Rinzler and Jones found him in Nashville, he was shining shoes. They asked him to come to Newport and play, but Jones says Bailey’s response was categorical: “He did not want to play for white people.” The pair would call on Bailey every time they came through Nashville, and it took three or four times to convince him to play.
It took three tries to get Pete Forge as well, Jones says. In that case, Rinzler’s Opry connections worked against them: “He felt that he had never been given his due. So he held it slightly against Ralph; he felt he’d be taken again.”
To this day, Jones kicks himself for not finding any good musicians in the Canadian Maritimes in the 1960s. He reasons that the generation that brought the region’s traditional music to the fore in the 1980s, such as Natalie MacMaster, the Rankins, Barra MacNeil and others, must have had parents and uncles who played and sang—although they got canned salmon, a sweater and a commitment from one singer.
Overall, Jones says his days on the road were “a little