”It’s Just Air Music” in the words of Robert Pete Williams ”It’s just air music . It just comes to me, is all. When I ride in a car or I’m in a field working I might begin to hear sort of an echo, as an echo of singing, like. And then maybe I start to sing with the echo, or maybe I just keep it on my brain until I get home & then pick up my guitar & start to play those blues. 2 ”Yessir, itıs just air music, but I re- member it. “Oh, I write them, too. I sit here & look at you from the head on down, & I could make a song of you. Or say you misuse & scold me, I could make a record of that. ”Well, sure. Like me & my wife. If she’s mad at me & get to fussin’, then I just get my guitar & sit down like I am right now, & I just pick it off. Just pick those blues away. It’ll be all right then.” Rest Stop near Champaign, IL July 17, 1987

”Some Of These Days” for Jimbo Mathus Roebuck Staples of the Staples Singers grew up in the Delta playing the guitar. He says: ”I was raised on the Will Dockery place from the time I was 8 till I got to be 20 years old. Charley Patton stayed on what we called the lower Dockery place, & we stayed on the upper Dockery. He was one of my great persons that inspired me to try to play guitar. He was really a great man. At first, I was too small to go hear him on Saturday night, but on Saturday afternoons everybody would go into town & those fellows like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson & Howlin' Wolf would be playin’ on the streets, standin’ by the railroad tracks, people pitchin’ ’em nickels & dimes, white & black people both. The train came through town maybe once that afternoo n, & when it was time, everybody would gather around just to see that train pull up. They’d play around there, before & after the train came, & announce where they’d be that night. And that’s where the crowd would go. They’d have a plank nailed across the door to the kitchen & be sellin’ fish & chitlin’s, with dancin’ in the front room, gamblin’ in the side room, & maybe two or three gas or coal-oil lamps on the mantlepiece in front of the mirror— powerful light. It was different people’s houses, no clubs or nothin’. And I finally grew up to play.” —Detroit March 22, 1982/ New Orleans May 27, 1997

“Screamin’ & Hollerin’ the Blues” for Barry Kaiser & Warren Spottswood “It was he who got me interested,” Howlin’ Wolf says of Charley Patton: ”He had be en up north somewhere & cut some records for some company at that time & then had come back down there in the fall of the year, in the harvest time— when people’re picking the cotton— to play for the folks. He’d go from place to place around there. He was playing by himself when I heard him—I was just a kid, & my mama didn’t allow me out at night. I couldn’t go— I’d have to slip off. That was the first I heard of him, & I liked it, so from then on I went to thinking about music. It was he who started me off to playing. He showed me things on the guitar, because after we got through picking cotton at night we’d go & hang around him, listen to him play. He took a liking to me, & I asked him would he learn me, & at night, after I’d get off work, I’d go & hang around. He used to play out on the plantations, at different one’s homes out there. 2 ”They’d give a supper, call it a Saturday night hop or something like that. There weren’t no clubs like nowadays. Mostly on weekends they’d have them. He’d play different spots—he’d be playing here tonight, & somewhere else the next night, & so on. He mostly worked by h imself because his way of playing was kind of different from other people’s. It took a good musician to play behind him because it was kind of off-beat & off-time, but it had a good sound the way he played. I never did work with him because he was a traveling man. In the spring of the year he'd be gone—he never came in until the fall. He followed the money. When spring came, why, he’d generally go up north someplace, maybe New York or Chicago. He mentioned he traveled a lot. He couldn’t make too much money in Mississippi in the spring of the year because people didn’t have any money until harvest time. He’d always come back in the fall. 3 ”He was a real showman,” the Wolf remembers. “When he played his guitar, he would turn it ove r backwards & forwards, & throw it around over his shoulders, between his legs, throw it up in the sky! He was more a clown than he was a musician, it seems. But I never did hear nobody else playing like him—playing that bass, patting on the guitar—nobody mocking & using his patterns much. Charley’s music was what you would nowad ays call old-fashioned folk singing, stuff like that. But there weren't any people around could play that old stuff like Charley. I felt like I got the most from Charley Patton.” 4 “Charley was the big man in the area,” Son House told Lawrence Cohn. “Everyone knew Charley Patton. He made a whole lot of records, you know, & he was the one who got me the contract with Paramount. He was just a little guy. Maybe 5’6” & 140 pounds, but he was the strongest singer aound. He was a fine guitar player, too. We used to play the juke joints a lot. Boy, were they rough! Every Saturday night someone got cut up or killed. I’d leave when the rough stuff started— even though they never bothered the musicians, I wasn’t taking any chances. The white people liked our music fine. Anything fast & jumpy went over. They didn’t like to hear any church music, though. I played in a church once, on Arkansas. Also in Dr. McFadden’s medicine show one time. He sold medicine all over Mississippi, especially ’round Drew. I used to get on a small stage & play just as loud as I could to attract the attention of the people. Boy, we sure sold lots of medicine.” —Bath, Michigan March 8, 1985/ New Orleans March 6, 1998/August 31, 1999

”Country Blues” for Rockin' Jake & T.J. Wheeler ”You want to remember,” Mississippi Fred McDowell says, ”that back in the’ 20s & ’30s, they didn't have nothin’ to do but farm & nowhere to go on a Saturday night but to what you’d call a fish fry. There was no picture show or TV or nothin’, just nowhere else to go.” 2 David “Honey Boy” Edwards was raised on a farm between Cleveland & Leland, Mississippi. “On Saturday,” Honey Boy told Robert Palmer, ”somebody like me or Robert Johnson would go into one of those little towns, play for nickels & dimes. Some little towns, you'd have to go & see the mayor or the judge & ask him if you could play on the streets. Some of ’em would say, ’No, crowds on the streets, somebody might get hurt.’ And sometimes, you know, you could be playin’ & have such a big crowd it would block the whole street. Then the police would come around, & I would go on to another town where I could play at. But, most of the time, they would let you play. 3 ”Then sometimes,” Honey Boy relates, ”the man who owned a country store would give us something like a couple dollars to play on a Saturday afternoon. We’d sit in the back of the store on some oat sacks or corn sacks & play while they sold groceries & whiskey & beer upfront, & the people would come in & listen to us & pitch in. In the afternoon or maybe in the evenin’, we’d go to the movie theatre & play before or after the movies. Then people would start leavin’ town. 4 ”About 8 or 9 o’clock at night they’d go out in the country where they could make all the noise they wanted, drink that corn, dance all night long. The people that was givin’ a dance, they would put coal oil in a bottle, put a wick in it, & hang it up in a tree. We’d follow that light go ing to the dance. Maybe the man giving the dance would see you in town that afternoon & hire you to come out & play there that night. Wasn’t too much money, but we’d play, eat, drink, have a good time. They would cook fish, sell fish sandwiches & white whiskey. Some outside gambling on an old table, bad lights, way out in the country, you know. We’d play inside, sit down on a chair & relax. 5 ”Sometimes they’d give a big picnic out in the country, dig a deep hole in the ground, put charcoal down in that hole, put an iron grate across it, & lay down a whole hog on that grate. They’d let that hog steam, mop it with that hot barbeque sauce, & keep it turnin’ all night long. In the morning it would be so tender you could take a fork & just cut the meat right off the bone. They’d have whole barrels of lemonade sitting out there, some guys got four or five gallons of corn whiskey. Sometimes they’d get a wagon, two mules, three or four men, & rent a piano in town, haul it out there, have a platform built with a brush arbor over it, have piano & guitar playin’ under there. 6 ”There wasn’t that many blues players, you know,” Honey Boy says. ”We would walk through the country with our guitars on our shoulders, stop at people’s houses, play a little music, walk on. We might decide to go on, say, to Memphis. We could hitchhike, transfer from truck to truck, or if we couldn’t catch one of them, we’d go to the train yard, ’cause the railroad was all thru that part of the country then. We’d wait till the train was pu llin’ out & jump in the second blind or else get a reefer— that’s the car they put the ice in, for fruit & stuff, so it’s something like a deep freezer. We’d get down in an empty reefer, pull the door down over us, & the handle was inside the car, see, so couldn’t nobody get to us. Then when we were ready to come out, we’d just knock the handle up & come out. I’d walk around the blind side of the train & come out on the passenger side, just like I got off the passenger car, go out & catch a cab to where I'm goin’. 7 ”In Memphis, you could play in front of the big hotels, sometimes in the lobbies. And in the evening you could always go down to Handy Park, there off Beale Street. Peoples would be getting’ off work & they’d stop off at the park, get them a drink, & listen to the blues, because some of the fellows would always be there playin’. From there, we might hop a freight, go to St. Louis or Chicago. Or we might hear about where a job was payin’ offÐ a highway crew, a railroad job, a levee camp there along the river, or some place in the country where a lot of people were workin’ on a farm. You could go there & play, & everybody would hand you some money. I didn’t have a special place then. Anywhere was home. Where I do good, I stay. When it gets bad & dull, I’m gone. I knowed a lot of places & had enough to go to to make it. Man, we played for a lot of people.” —Detroit March 22, 1982/ New Orleans February 27/November 25, 1995