Part of the fascination that the blues holds for us in the late 20th or early 21st centuries is its connection to a completely different life and time. We look at pictures of Muddy Waters' house -- basically a wooden box overlooking a cotton field -- and think "No wonder he had the blues!" Now that most of the first generation of blues artists have passed on (John Lee Hooker being, arguably, the last), that connection will be maintained by a series of "as told to" autobiographies of the second generation.
Henry Townsend, who began his career playing guitar in the mid-1920s in St. Louis, is the latest to join this trend with his book A Blues Life. It reads like a transcript of a long monologue. Bill Greensmith has taken the original source interviews and woven them seamlessly into a chronological history of Townsend's life. The voice is Henry Townsend's, and Greensmith allows him to tell his story. In describing St. Louis's Booker Washington Theatre he has this to say:
"...I found ways that I could sneak in there. I couldn't go in--they wasn't going to allow that [he was only nine years old]--but I could get in back and sneak in--get backstage or something like that--and that's when I'd get a chance to see these people. I could hear it out there, but I couldn't go out there where the entertainment was going at...that's when I first got the chance to see...Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Peg Leg Bates, these are some of the things that I could never forget. That was some excitement for me."
He names drops many more, including Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson, whose guitar playing influenced Townsend to pick up the guitar.
Townsend describes pranks which don't sound so bad in the telling -- but in the social context of 1930s St. Louis caused him some trouble with the law. Selling stolen batteries led to forced confessions or a police beating.
"I was a Johnny Pegg's one time playing guitar, and the police pulled the wagon up the house and marched us all out of there. Getting arrested was a pretty common thing at that time. A black man or woman really didn't have to do anything; it was a game for the police. It was sad, but this is the way it was. They would get kicks out of this kind of thing. When they would arrest you they didn't expect nothing out of you, because most of us didn't have nothing to pay them."
Townsend reminisces about Roosevelt Sykes and Walter Davis and his personal anecdotes make them come alive ... but not half as alive as the picture he paints of himself.
"I don't think anyone drank anymore than Henry Townsend and Roosevelt Sykes. And by the same token I don't think anyone ever drank less than my other associate, Walter Davis. If he drank a half pint in his whole lifetime, that's more than I know him to drink. He'd say, "Give me a shot." He'd get him a whiskey glass and just cover the bottom of the glass and throw it up. And it was effective to him, that two or three drops. A teaspoon was it for him. Now you wouldn't get him to do that no more in two years--he just wasn't designed to fool with it. Roosevelt and I was just like fishes, but we never went to the extreme. Like now if I drink, I'll get a little loud in conversation but I'll be rational. I won't get so I won't know what I'm saying or droopy lipped, and I've maintained that all my life."
He concludes by wondering whether the man was right when he said "Muddy Waters just sung his way into hell" and whether that applied to himself as well, but he decides...
"I don't sing lies, and a tune sure can't condemn you... Who said who I'm doing it for, the Devil or God? What tells you I'm doing it for the Devil? I don't want nobody to make my funeral look pretty; make it look like the life I lived. That's all!"
Like the life it describes, A Blues Life isn't pretty -- but it tells the life he lived -- that's all.
