And that was when he went on to tell me what he told me about what Hortense Hightower had told him about why she had given me the bass fiddle. She told me that it was the one basic instrument that even as a beginner you could play almost the same way you just naturally did whatever you just naturally did when you were just listening and responding to whatever you were hearing when you were listening and responding with nobody else around. Just think how different it would be if you were playing the same notes on a tuba.
That, he said, was a pet notion of hers, and I said it made a lot of sense to me, because it did. But when I called to tell her that I was thinking about sending for you as the stopgap replacement for Shag Phillips, she was all for it, but she still immediately reminded me of what she had told me about not mistaking your all too obvious love for music and close identification with musicians with any personal desire on your part to become a professional musician as such. Not as your life’s work. Even though you hadn’t yet settled on what you wanted to try to make of yourself.
Which I could also understand, he said, and I promised her, and I kept my word as you well know I did. And by the way in case you haven’t already figured out why I picked an inexperienced youngster like yourself to fill in for Shag Phillips, what impressed me was how natural your sense of time seemed to be. Because what it all added up to was pulse, which is not just metronomic precision but a matter of personal feeling, gut feeling. Technique is fine, but it doesn’t always add up to music, not the kind of music I’m always trying to play. Not that you or anybody else were born with it, for Christ sake but you were conditioned to it early on.
We were well into our snack by that time and he looked at his watch and said, I don’t pick my musicians like anybody else anyway. With me it’s not their expertise but their potential. So what happened with you was the way you locked in with old Joe and Otis and me was not just surprising, it was downright incredible. And so far as I was concerned it had to do with a lot more than execution. It had to do with feeling. Look, we could always improve your execution with practice. That’s what the hell rehearsal is always about, but feeling is something else, and the texture of my music is always all tangled up with the blues.
Which I could have said was essentially a matter of idiomatic sensibility. But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to sound that much like a graduate school academic. So what I actually said was that I knew exactly what he meant. And even as I said it I was remembering those old long-ago summer twilight times on the steps of the swing porch, with the antimosquito smoke wafting and curling across the chinaberry yard, when old Luzana Cholly used to come sporty limping up along Dodge Mill Road from the L & N Railroad bottom, strumming his twelve- string guitar on his way to whichever honky-tonk or jook joint he was going to play in that night.
Not that it wasn’t as if church music was also always there. But church music was about church service, which was about heaven and hell. Whereas the blues was about everyday good times as well as holiday good times. I don’t really know which I heard first, but I do remember that Luzana Cholly with his guitar and sporty limp walk was there quite a while before old patent-leather-tipping, flashy-fingered-piano-playing Stagolee Dupas fils first came to town.
So I said what I said because suddenly all of that had come to mind. But what he was saying then was that as far as he was concerned, musicians should never become so preoccupied with what they were doing technically or theoretically—and certainly not with how their technique is impressing other musicians— that they forget that the truth of the matter is that the people in the real audience respond to what you make them feel.
So, he said, when we returned to that part of the conversation as we finished our dessert and stood up to leave, so what good is impressing other musicians with your virtuosity if nobody out there in the ballroom, the auditorium, and the record store is responding? Which sometimes people do in spite of themselves. In other words, describing and explaining how the sounds are made is elementary for musicians themselves, but all of that is only a matter of craft. But when my band plays something, I want the craft to add up to what good music is supposed to do for people who come to hear it and dance to it. Not because they understand it but because they feel it.
Then as we came on back along Sixth Avenue toward the studio, he said what he said about Hortense Hightower and that was when I said what I said about Luzana Cholly and Stagolee Dupas fils. That was when he went on to say what he said about what great but undefined expectations Hortense Hightower had told him she had for me. And I said what I said then because that was when he had gone on to say, As you already know I’m with her. And so is everybody in the band. And that was when he smiled his very pleased Bossman Himself smile and then raised one eyebrow and said, But I still can’t help being curious about what you yourself think about how you happened to come by such an intimate identification and involvement with
