harpists to try out for a spot with Brother Ben. I owned but didn’t listen much to his and Bucketmouth’s first album, The True Delta Blues, but like I believed Bessie Smith died because she wasn’t allowed into a white hospital and believed Tommy and Robert Johnson sold their souls at the crossroads and believed Blind Blake shot a dog and alone could ride the New York City Subway system with ease, I believed the story in the liner notes about how twelve-year-old Ben was arrested for stealing a Stella from a pawn shop, then sent up before some stern, but sentimental cracker who asked why Ben had committed such an awful transgression. “To play the damn thing,” young Ben is purported to say, a response that so tickled the judge, he said, “Then let me hear what you can do.” Naturally, Ben shook those strings so well—without even a lesson—that the charge was dropped. I believed all those stories and more, as if by learning them I might make up for my assimilationist experience and play the blues as if I’d lived them. I’m sure the twenty white cats I auditioned with in an Auburn Hills Hilton believed this tale, too, only I was chosen to play with the man. My confirmation. And my introduction to a world as much defined by manipulation as music-making. Still, backstage at our first show together, I asked Ben if the story about him and the judge was true. He didn’t even say a word right away, just tilted his head and squinted as if I were indeed the rawest negro on the block.
Now, five years later, I hold the notes of “Good Evening Everybody” as long I can before letting them go. This morning, flying from New Orleans to LAX, when I first read the polls, I believed things had turned my way. We’d finally get more than just a nomination at the Beale Street Blues Awards. I’d flash these polls before Ben and he’d agree: “You’re right, Pete. Let’s just play.”
Thank God I couldn’t hold on to such notions for long. Thank God the Last True Delta Bluesman showed me once more that this is his show and will be until he says he’s through. That he knows much more than I, as a businessman, a musician, a bluesman, a man born black in these United States. Without that, I might have believed I had the answers. I might have believed it was my time to go it alone.
2.
Take Your Hand Out of My Pocket
BECAUSE NEITHER BEN NOR I KNOW LAS VEGAS, we don’t follow our usual pre-show routine of checking into the hotel and waiting for fans to find us. We’re touring Las Vegas Blvd, looking among casinos, hotels and family-friendly extravaganzas for the newest Jump and Jive Juke Joint, a chain with franchises in Columbus, Denver, Orlando and right next to the Mall of America. “Jump and Jive” reminds me of swing music, not the True Delta Blues, but the promotional literature promises you can eat “authentic Dixie-fried victuals” or “soak up the southern hospitality of our full bars” and, most of all, “stomp your foot to the best roots music.” And the owner, a former ad agency president from—get this—Hamilton, Ontario, simply cannot open the Las Vegas Jump and Jive Juke Joint without Brother Ben and me there to christen it. To the man he believed was only our manager, he said, “Brother Ben’s the only performer who can provide the genuine roots music experience we try to provide our customers.” In his guise as Wilton Mabry, Ben agreed, then told this fellow, Kent Bollinger, he’d see what he could do. The delay doubled our typical appearance fee and assured we’d be there to kick off the tour. Call Brother Ben a con man or a capitalist, Ole Br’er Rabbit and Ralph Ellison’s Rinehart have nothing on him.
Ben parks the Brougham in walking distance of the miniature skyline of New York, New York and the mammoth MGM Grand, across from the Jump and Jive Juke Joint, which squats solidly on Las Vegas Boulevard South. When Ben and I get out, a man in gray slacks and a blue blazer walks forward, arms spread wide. “Brother Ben, Silent Sam,” he says. “Kent Bollinger.” Bald head shining, he shakes our hands. Mine hard, Ben’s gingerly. Then he steers Ben toward the wooden steps that lead to a porch so country I expect yawning hounds stretched out by their masters’ work-booted feet. “Buffalo, 1972,” Bollinger says. “That’s when I saw you with Bucketmouth. I liked Cream and Hendrix and the Stones then. But once I heard the real thing, I was hooked.”
“Do tell,” Brother Ben says, interrupting himself with the broken, rusty cough he’s been experimenting with lately, the one that scared a thousand dollars away from Mr. Habib. Sounds like a lung just shut down, it’s so racked and wet, and Bollinger looks on as if what Ben’s got might be catching. Still, he’s doing a lot better meeting the legend than I did. I’d already met him at the audition as Wilton Mabry, but when I saw him in his plaid suit next to a Grand Prix the color of a bar of Irish Spring, I gasped, “You’re Brother Ben!” Today, it’s easy to see Ben in Mabry and Mabry in Ben, but that’s only because I, unlike nearly everybody else, know to look.
Now Bollinger grips Ben by the arm, helping him up the steps. “Best concert I ever saw,” Bollinger says. “I mean, even though it was freezing outside, I could close my eyes and believe I was somewhere like this place.”
Vegas? I want to say, but Sam’s no smartass. I wipe my hand over my mouth and mustache, which I’m still getting used to, as I only grow it for tours. Bollinger’s gold buttons clatter on his blazer as he turns, arms and open palms directing us to take in the surroundings. “You know, when Luther Johnson played the Minneapolis opening, he said it was too real. Gave him the chills.” Bollinger smiles, smoothes some stray hairs over his wide, bald head, a man pleased with his enterprise. And he’s met plenty of other bluesmen: Guess that’s why he’s relatively cool around Ben. Now he’s encouraging us to reply in kind with Houserocker Johnson. Or is it Guitar Junior he’s talking about? Lots of Luthers out there. Whoever it was, I suspect he might have been messing with this Canuck. Then again, I think everyone’s messing with someone in this world I live in. Sonny Boy never told a writer the same birthday twice. “They don’t know me,” he reputedly said.
Ben steps away, winks swiftly at me with the eye farthest from Bollinger. He bends over slowly, as if inspecting the floor, then wearily straightens, only to stamp his heel against the yellow wooden planks. The thump resounds while Bollinger looks on astonished, unable to process just what the bluesman who changed his life is doing to his faux jook’s porch.
“Too firm,” Ben says, then fashions another tubercular cough. He stoops, hands on knees for a moment, then rises to his customary slouch. “Ever’ porch from Friar’s Point to Marianna so flimsy folks had to tiptoe.” The pantomime he then executes makes him cackle and smack his thigh with his porkpie hat, which establishes it’s time for me to smile, and I do, Jemima-big.
“I think it was that night in Buffalo where I had the idea,” Bollinger says, reaching for Ben’s arm. “To build these clubs that gave people a chance to experience a real life juke joint.” He pauses, drags Ben along the porch and resumes. “With nothing to get in the way of their enjoyment.”
I wonder if Bollinger’s made it to the Delta, been inside a real jook. Many a blues lover flies to Memphis, rents a car and drives down 61, though I hear now Tunica and its casinos sits there like a juggernaut, keeping most from even making it to Clarksdale, let alone Rolling Fork or Alligator, or across the river to Sonny Boy’s town, Helena. Truth is, though, Bollinger must have hired some good people to construct the building. Much study of old photographs and newsreels went into the work, maybe even a visit or two to Junior Kimbrough’s place near Holly Springs. I allow my eyes to follow Bollinger’s hand pointing to the Nehi, Jax and Falstaff signs, artificially rust-spotted and rakishly hung on the exterior walls, which are made of a material that looks as faded and ready to fall apart as the warped and rotted shingles of a genuine jook but is surely as sound as a dollar and will probably be around for hundreds of years. Bales of cottons are piled around the entry, with scythes and sickles and scales hung here and there. New laminated posters are tacked to the wall, advertising shows with Little Milton, Bobby Rush and Latimore, while reproductions feature Mud, Wolf and Little Walter. There’s even an empty sack of Sonny Boy corn meal next to the checkerboard atop an old wooden barrel. I try to jump a white piece with a black piece but they’re all lacquered in place.
Bollinger’s
