Johansen played some gigs in London earlier this year, just a bluesman sitting on a stool and cradling a guitar with a harmonica brace hung around his neck. It was a far cry from the way he looked in the early days. He had grown a beard, and he was wearing a plain, dark suit. He warned New York Dolls fans to stay away; nevertheless, old Dolls covers like Don’t Start Me Talking got the most applause. But in London as well as New York, audiences seem perfectly comfortable with Johansen as a sort of method actor of the blues, and Mojo magazine said they had just seen a man who would go down in the books as being as artistically honest and creatively daring as the deceased bluesmen he now honors.
Like the tricksters and masked marvels and shapeshifters that populate the Anthology, both Harry Smith and David Johansen have an affinity for morphing roles and presenting an ever-changing façade to the world and, like the songs themselves, an aversion to being categorized or pinned down. They also share the music, for that is the glue that binds them together.
Time done been won’t be no more, Furry Lewis warns in his version of See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, not only singing it but prefacing it with an imperative: Listen, he sings, as if he wants you to remember it, listen. Time done been won’t be no more.
But in a sense, if a moment of time is the world we inhabit in that moment, it is the world that matters and not the clock that measures it.
In the end Johansen’s music seems to be saying that the world doesn’t change, only the guises it goes under, only the masks it wears. Appearance is nothing. The essentials remain. Love is still love, and loss is still loss. Death was ever death and will remain so. The dark is as black as it ever was, and the light is what you struggle toward, and that seems to matter as much to David Johansen as it did to Rabbit Brown or Harry Smith.
I BELIEVE I’LL BUY ME A GRAVEYARD OF MY OWN
WHEN FURRY LEWIS WAS REDISCOVERED in Memphis in 1959 by Sam Charters, nothing much happened. The folk revival, when scholars and musicologists and collectors of worn 78 records on strange labels like Black Patti and Okeh would prowl Mississippi back roads looking for the old men who long ago recorded the music that was strange as the labels, did not come along until the early 60’s. When it did, bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt and Son House and Furry Lewis found themselves on the road again, playing to new audiences at the Newport Folk Festival and the East Coast coffeehouse circuit. Those old country-blues songs that had been dismissed, almost forgotten, were popular again.
Furry was born Walter Lewis in that fabled, near-mythic birthplace, and graveyard, of the blues, Greenwood, Mississippi. Just when is a matter of conjecture; Lewis was prone to altering his past history to suit the needs of the moment (he asserted that he invented the bottleneck style of guitar-playing that Robert Johnson used and that he was a protégé of W.C. Handy). The consensus is that he was born in 1893.
He didn’t tarry long in Greenwood. His family moved to Memphis when he was seven years old. Before he was out of school, he was playing with folks who would one day be hailed as Beale Street legends Will Shade, the Memphis Jug Band, and Handy, the man credited with igniting the first blues craze.
Furry was soon touring Arkansas and Mississippi with the medicine shows that were prevalent in the rural South of that time. By his teens, he was playing the jukes with Memphis Minnie and Blind Lemon Jefferson. He claimed to have learned the rudiments of guitar as a child from a street musician known to him only as Blind Joe. The rest he learned on his own, writing original songs in a tablet, and recasting ragtime pieces and popular songs with lines from the stockpile of interchangeable blues poetry that has been dipped into by everyone from Jimmie Rodgers to Bob Dylan.
In the late 1920’s, Furry recorded twenty-three songs. Thus, Furry was squarely part of the 1927-29 historical musical outpouring that was probably the richest period in American recording. Men like Ralph Peer were scouring the South for talent, but no one had yet figured out what would sell and what wouldn’t. The playing field was momentarily level and everyone had a shot, black bluesmen from the Delta and white string bands from the Carolinas, Georgia, and West Virginia. At least until the Great Depression hit and the record business nearly stopped, and then many musicians went back to doing what they were doing before.
What Furry had been doing before, aside from making music, was working for the city of Memphis. Despite losing a leg in a railroad accident in 1917 (doctors had replaced it with a wooden stump), Lewis got employment in 1922 as a street sweeper, a job he would hold off and on for the next forty-four years.
Those twenty-three recorded songs formed the strongest part of Furry’s musical legacy. Mostly based on the twelve-bar blues pattern and played in open tunings, his songs featured familiar blues motifs that bobbed in and out like debris in turbulent waters, railroads and highways, cops and authority, empty beds, women who cling too tightly or won’t hold on at all and all shot through with sardonic humor and violence that lies around the next bend in the road.
“I believe I’ll buy me a graveyard of my own”, he sings in Furry’s Blues, his tone confiding, as if he’s passing on hard-won knowledge, “I’m gonna kill everybody that have done me wrong.”
Impending violence fuels his songs. Frustration and anger seethe just under the surface and there is a feeling that things could go south at a moment’s notice. “If you want to go to Nashville men and they ain’t got no fare”, he sings, “Cut your good girl’s throat and the judge will send you there”.
When things get too heavy, there’s dark humor: “I went down to the I.C. train, laid my head on the I.C. tracks,” he sings in Cannon Ball Blues. “Seen the I.C. comin’, Lord, and I snatched it back.”
Furry’s masterpiece is Kassie Jones, a long, imaginative reworking of the traditional song about the death of engineer Casey Jones in a 1900 train wreck in Canton, Mississippi. But Furry makes it his own, literally. The song begins typically enough with an account of Casey as a folk hero, but takes a trip to the surreal when Furry himself emerges as a character: Chased to his woman’s gate by the police, welcomed to her folding bed, then on the road again, his name on the back of his shirt, “he’s a natural-born Eastman don’t have to work.”
Driven by Furry’s hypnotic percussive bass strings, the song sounds like something Sam Phillips would have recorded at Sun Studio thirty years later.
In the 1970’s, age had enfeebled his musicianship to the point that he was forced to get by on the tricks and showmanship of his medicine-show days, but, paradoxically, a brief fame touched him. In 1975, he opened in Memphis for the Rolling Stones, and in 1976 Joni Mitchell wrote Furry Sings the Blues about him. He even appeared in a movie that stars Burt Reynolds, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings.
Furry had attended John Hurt’s funeral in Greenwood, and most of the other country bluesmen were in the ground, too. By the time of his death in 1981, he had outlived most of his contemporaries. The strife and hard times Furry had written about were still around but they were being addressed by a different kind of music. The blues had gone Big City, and the acoustic country blues were practiced mostly by purists and academicians.
Maybe Furry himself said it best, in his reworking of St. Louis Blues, Time done been/Won’t be no more.