that mammoth mouth of his—veered into the seventies, after playing all the sixties coffee houses and festivals in dusty brogans and faded Big Smith overalls, a lot of people wore these synthetic monstrosities. Only for bluesmen did they stay in vogue long past their expiration date. Everyone from John Lee Hooker to Junior Wells to the other B.B. looked like an extra from Superfly until about five, ten years ago. Nowadays, you’ve got blues men dressed like rappers, others like cowboys or rock and rollers. The ladies, like Koko and Etta, prefer gowns, the more sequins the better. And the other B.B. seems only to appear in a tux, which no fan expecting a demonstration of an authentic Delta past will allow. Ben thinks we may as well not monkey with a good thing. Just accept these uncomfortable threads as the necessary password that allows us to enter the venues where we get paid to play. After each gig, we’re both out of them faster than any crawling king snake can shed its skin. For now, we hand over forty dollars and earn from the cashier a lopsided grin, then head to the latest pimp wagon to haul our slick asses back to the hotel.
•••
“You want some advice?” Ben says, a question he’s asked me so many times he rarely waits for my answer anymore. “You best lay off that red meat.” We’ve just ordered room service—Heart Healthy special for him; cheeseburger platter for me—and lounge in his room. Ordinarily, we share quarters, but Ben’s sprung for two tonight.
“I’ll be all right,” I say. Out of our stage clothes, we’re comfy in slippers and bathrobes. Seated at a small table, Ben fills the compartments of his weekly pillbox. Nothing going in is prescribed. There’s no medical conditions I have to know, no emergency numbers to contact in case he starts clutching his chest like Fred Sanford. He counts on homeophathic remedies and supplements to keep him in a physical condition that steadily reminds me of the ten or fifteen pounds I need to shed. “We got enough strikes against us, Pete,” he says now. “Hypertension, diabetes. You best get some greens and grain in your diet. Cruciferous vegetables, too.”
“Charley Patton keep an eye on his fat grams?” I say.
“And how old was he when he died?”
A bad choice. I search the pantheon for a long-lived bluesman. “Lightnin’ Hopkins drank gin and fried eggs for breakfast.”
Ben shuts the seven compartments of his plastic tray. “Well then let’s get you chopping cane like Lightnin’.”
“Chopping cane?” I say. “When’s the last time you were out in the fields?”
He grins, drums his hands against his taut stomach. I pull mine in. “Don’t let’s get started on that,” he says. “What grows in Michigan?”
“Cherries,” I say, recalling seventh-grade Michigan History. “And boy when massuh found out you was eatin his crop. . .”
A knock at the door stops me cold. Most likely, it’s room service, but you never know. Ben’s always willing to let fans visit wherever he’s staying—in fact, he encourages them—and the two of us sharing a room displays the country-negro frugality that balances our garish clothes and fancy cars and creates the overall image Ben believes we must cultivate. I doubt we’ll get such a visitor now, but I creep to the door, tighten my robe and say, “Who dat?”
A moment passes, long enough to make me suspicious. I say again, “Who dat?”
This time, I hear “Room Service,” in a pleasant young woman’s voice, so I open the door to retrieve my food along with the steamed vegetables and brown rice for a man who on stage purports to smoke dynamite and drink TNT.
•••
At nine, Ben racks out—the Last True Delta Bluesman needs his eight hours—and I tip to my room to listen to Sonny Boy and examine the dates and locations of the tour. A few radio and TV interviews along the way, with most of the gigs at places we’ve played before. A lot of colleges, though it’s rare we see students. Their professors are always present, as are the record- and health-food store owners and all others who graduated but never found reason to leave Missoula, Ithaca or Athens, GA. This time around we’re the featured performers at a conference at Indiana Northern University, my first gig of that kind. We play Eau Claire in addition to Madison but will get to Detroit about half way through. Not to play, though. I need to see my mother and her husband, Grover, who are soon headed to Ghana, the motherland. She’s been planning such a trip since Alex Haley published Roots, only I bought the tickets because two years ago I couldn’t make it to their wedding. And once again, we’ll bypass Ben’s hometown of Clarksdale and the Beale Street Blues Awards, though we’re nominated for Best Traditional Act, as we are every year.
In all, of these next four months, much of my time will be spent in rooms like this one. I’ll play harp, practice to speak like a Mississippian with a high school education so I sound true to people who probably count me and Ben as the only black people they’ve conversed with. The brothers and sisters I’ll see, other than my mother and her husband, will be waiting tables or sweeping up. They won’t be in line holding tickets for the Brother Ben Show. I always assume a few are in the crowd, just outside my peripheral vision—half the time, on stage, my eyes are closed, anyway.
From my case, I take out the Military Band Hohner in G I bought for the tour and haven’t broken in yet. Its weight in my hands is a comfort as I play some Sonny Boy, “Good Evenin’ Everybody,” which was a modification of his King Biscuit Time intros. The point then for Sonny Boy was as much to sell flour as to make sounds like no one else had ever heard before. For me now, nothing feels more right than the smooth metal running cool across my lips, my tongue slapping holes to chord, my hands cupped or flapping like wings, yet I stop when my eyes open and I see my black shirt hanging on the doorknob. That’s part of the other show, the one we’ll be putting on, before and after the music. After four years, I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up. But I get to play harp. I get to play harp.
•••
First time I heard a harp was on a radio show called “Who Covered Whom.” The station was Detroit’s Cool Q 102, and I listened every Sunday so I could appear in school on Monday, dressed like everyone else in a rugby shirt and jeans and Weejuns, and talk about what records were played on “Who Covered Whom,” as if knowing Little Eva did “The Loco-Motion” before Grand Funk might obscure that I was the only twelve-year-old in Troy who was black and fatherless. One Sunday, the DJ played Slowhand Clapton’s “Eyesight to the Blind”—from the soundtrack of Tommy, a popular midnight movie among the stoner set—then Sonny Boy’s original. The sheer sound, so rough and raw and real, reached inside and shook me. I didn’t know how anyone could have made the sounds Sonny Boy did. I almost believed those trills and slides emanated from within, like song from a bird. Plus, I knew instantly, unlike with Jimi Hendrix on the same station, that Sonny Boy was black. And I wanted to learn how to kick up such a racket myself.
Once I bought my own harp and instructional books to go with it, I was soon stumbling through “The Star Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America,” meantime listening to Sonny Boy and Little Walter and wondering if I’d ever sound like them. Later, at Troy High and at Michigan State, I joined several bands—the Mr. T’s, Sheik and the Trojans, Motown Mojo, Jack and the Dull Boyz—but we sounded like George Thorogood or J. Geils. Having grown up on Apple Blossom Court instead of Dockrey’s Plantation, I feared I was never close enough to the real blues to play them. I needed confirmation of my talent but was too frightened to sit in with players who came through East Lansing and Detroit. Didn’t help that my bandmates were named Trevor and Steve and came to the blues after several viewings of The Blues Brothers. No brothers and sisters were stopping to see me either. So, two months shy of graduation, when I’d been offered a job by Loomis and Pratt, a marketing firm in Cleveland, I was confident I’d take it and keep
