That was my second visit to the writers’ work space on Fifth Avenue at Fiftieth Street that he was still using five days a week, Monday through Friday, because the owner was still away on a biographical research project in France and Italy. He was sitting at the long heavy oak conference table that he used as a writing desk, and I was sitting across from him in a chair near the window through which I could look north beyond St. Patrick’s Cathedral toward Fifty-seventh Street and Central Park South, and from that many floors up, the sound of the traffic was all a part of the midtown Manhattan hum and buzz as I already remembered it from movie sound tracks when I heard it on my other visit.
I said, Man, when Hortense Hightower told me what she told me about suggesting me as a stopgap replacement when the Bossman Himself called and just happened to mention in passing that Shag Phillips had given notice, I couldn’t believe it. But she said, Don’t worry about it because he doesn’t go around looking for superstars. He makes his own. Not because it’s a game or some kind of challenge to prove anything about his ingenuity as some kind of mentor either. She said, He hires his musicians because he has decided that he wants to find out what he can do with something he’s heard them playing. And that is when she also said, Believe me when I tell you that the very fact that he remembered you as soon as I mentioned you is what counts, because that means that you did something that caught his ear—not necessarily something musically technical either, something that goes with something he’s got filed away in that steel-trap mind of his. You’ve heard about those big-time college profs talking about those legendary linguistic experts that can listen to half a sentence and tell you where you come from? Well, that’s him when it comes to music. And then she also said, One thing is for sure, you can’t find a better way to spend a summer after four solid no-letup years on a college campus down here in central Alabama than hitting all those towns all across the country with those guys in that outfit. You just wait.
I said, Man, the thing about it is that I don’t remember ever really touching, let alone trying to fool around with, the bass fiddle before Hortense Hightower gave me that one in the spring of my junior year. Man, or any other instrument, except for the toy snare drum I once got for Christmas because I wanted Santa Claus to bring me one like the ones in the Mardi Gras parade bands that I used to imitate on a tin bucket during my preschool days—and come to think of it, there was also a time when some of us, in spite of the fact that our main interests were cowboys and baseball and boxing, used to make ukuleles out of wooden Cuban cigar boxes, but I don’t remember that as something that I still had very much interest in doing by the time I reached junior high school. By that time it was track and field events and the Boy Scouts.
I said, Man, the one who took me through my rudimentary exercises on that present from Hortense Hightower was a sophomore string major and chapel orchestra cellist from St. Augustine, Florida, named Willis Tucker and called what else but Pluck Tucker because he also played the string bass in one of the campus dance bands, whose fingers were even more nimble than those of old Tricky Lou Cartwright, the fanciest bull fiddle thumper I ever heard during all the time I was growing up on the outskirts of Mobile. I said, Now I’m pretty sure that old Tricky Lou started out on the tuba like the one I first heard him tooting in Papa Gladstone’s marching band in the Mardi Gras parades long before I found out that old Papa Gladstone also had the number one (and sometimes also the number two) dance band in town.
Then I said, Which reminds me that Tricky Lou sometimes also used to play the tuba in the dance band, because I can still remember him tooting what I used to call the circus elephant parade tuba part in old Jelly Roll Morton’s “Kansas City Stomp” when the dance band used to set up in the front rows of the grandstand at the baseball field and play a few numbers to advertise the eight-o’clock dance that would follow the game after supper that evening.
I said, But man, old Pluck Tucker was strictly a string man. I said, He was in the freshman class that checked in for the fall term of the year that you cut out. So my guess is that he’s at least about a year younger than I am, so he just might have started out on a cigar box ukulele, the four strings of which you tuned from top to bottom by playing the right tones for “My Dog Has Fleas.”
That was when Taft Edison said what he said about how popular Hawaiian and Latin American music became for a while back during the early days of radio when I was just getting up to junior high school level and he was on his way out of it. And he said that was probably also when Spanish guitars, which had been becoming more and more popular ever since the Spanish-American War back in 1898 (and the Panama Canal project), became more widely used in dance bands than banjos. And when I asked him if he had ever played around with any of the south of the border high-note fiesta trumpet
