By Jerry Tallmer
True history, cloaked in fiction, sings and soars
Well, I’m broke and I ain’t got a dime.
Said I’m broke
and I ain’t got a dime.
I’m broke and I ain’t got a dime
Everybody gets in hard luck some time…
I’m just sitting here wondering
will a matchbox hold my clothes?
I got so many matches,
don’t know where to go.
Got so many matches,
don’t know where to go.
— Matchbox Blues
And life can turn on a dime, said Blind Lemon Jefferson, a proud man who sang on street corners and could tell if you only threw a penny in his tin cup. He would fish the penny out and scornfully throw it away.
Some people said he wasn’t even blind. But he was.
Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, another and more famous street singer — especially in New York City — when he first came across Blind Lemon on a street corner in Deep Ellum (a music and entertainment enclave in Dallas, Texas), scoffed at the idea that the blind man could play that guitar he was carrying.
Lemon proved he could.
“Man,” said Leadbelly, “You good. Where’d you learn to pick like that?”
“I picked it up,” Blind Lemon dryly replied.
At least Leadbelly said that and Blind Lemon said that in “Blind Lemon Blues,” the new musical by Akin Babatunde and Alan Govenar. The show, which contains bits and pieces of some 60 haunting songs — “Mosquito Blues,” “Carbolic Acid Blues,” “Bedspring Blues,” “Penitentiary Blues,” “Fence Breakin’ and Yellin’ Blues,” “Black Snake Blues,” “Baker Shop Blues,” “Deep Ellum Blues,” etc., etc. — couples Leadbelly (1888-1949) and Blind Lemon (1893-1929) more closely perhaps than did real life.
The recreation takes off from Leadbelly’s historic final recording session in Manhattan in 1948.
“Blind Lemon wrote blues for every situation,” says Brooklyn-born but Dallas-centered Babatunde, who directed and choreographed this work and stars in it as Blind Lemon. The idea arose out of Babatunde’s being introduced by Margie Reese, a cultural affairs administrator, to Dallas-based writer, photographer, filmmaker, and “Texas Blues” author Alan Govenar.
Babatunde, who had never before heard of Blind Lemon Jefferson, “was interested in the extension of the blues out beyond Afro-American life to an impact on European and other cultures.”
I woke up this morning,
Black Snake was making
such a ruckus in my room.
Black Snake is ’ceitful,
crawling all in my bed.
I say Black Snake is ’ceitful,
crawling all in my bed.
I had a dream last night,
Black Snake is killed my baby dead…
In the show it is Leadbelly (actor Cavin Yarborough) who tells of the turning point in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s life:
“Lemon stood on the corner of Elm and Central, in front of R.T. Ashford’s shoeshine parlor and record shop, just playin’ his guitar for tips. And Mr. Ashford liked what he heard, and wrote off to Paramount Records [in Chicago], tellin’ them about this blind street singer named Blind Lemon Jefferson.”
Ashford got an answer back from Mayo Williams at Paramount Records, “the first colored executive in a white recording company.” But when Mayo Williams got to Dallas, he couldn’t find any recording studio open to either him or Blind Lemon.
“We’re gonna have to do this in Chicago,” said Mayo Williams. Which they did. And from 1926 to 1929, shuttling back and forth between Dallas and Chicago, Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded more than 80 songs that are part and parcel of the American heritage. Or, in the case of “Matchbox Blues” as rendered by the Beatles, the British heritage.
The Paramount recordings put more than a dime into the broke and hungry Blind Lemon’s pocket — enough to buy two automobiles that somebody else had to drive for him. But in 1929, winter, in the frigid Windy City — “around Christmas time,” Babatunde murmurs for added irony — Blind Lemon got lost in the snow while waiting after a recording session for his car to pick him up.
Lost and dead.
There remains some belief, says the Leadbelly of this musical, that “his chauffeur had it in for him, and didn’t pick him up at the designated time on purpose.”
Got something to tell you
make the hair rise on your head..
Got something to tell you
make the hair rise on your head.
He got a new way of getting down
make the bed springs tremble
in your bed.
He say his gal got a good way
of trembling down.
Make a crazy man leave his home.
Got a new way of trembling down.
Make a man leave his home.
When I grab him and turn him loose,
make the flesh tremble on his bone.
Blind Lemon was an imposing figure physically, says Babatunde — “dark tan, not fat but heavy, portly, really a presence.” So too was Leadbelly, as a few New Yorkers still remember.
Akin Babatunde — the name comes down from the Yoruba people of Nigeria — has been a member of several of this country’s leading repertory companies, heads his own Ebony/Emeralds Classic Theater, and was co-author (with brother Obba Babatunde) and solo performer of “Before the Second Set: A Visit With Satchmo.”
To quote an authority in this matter, if you have to ask who Satchmo was — and is — you’ll never know.
But to learn who Blind Lemon Jefferson was, and is, just drop around one of these nights, or matinees, to the theater in the church on Lex at 54th Street.
