He took a small metal cylinder from his pajama pocket and picked up the guitar. "I may be weak, but I'm willing," he said. "Could you play something now, or don't you feel like it?" Charley asked. What's the ticket on it?" "Sixteen dollars." "I'll get it tomorrow." "All right," Furry said, "and I'll come play for you." He reached out and shook hands solemnly with Charley. "Will you, sure 'nough?" Furry asked, looking at Charley with serious, businesslike gray eyes. Charley said not to worry, he'd get the guitar.
PLAY BOY LOOKTHROUGH FULL
It held aspirin, Sal Hepatica, cigarette papers and a Mason jar full of tobacco. "This here one belongs to this boy, Jerry." He put the glasses back on the table. He would like to, he said, but his guitar was at Nathan's. Furry picked up a pair of glasses from the bedside table, put them on, then took them off again. "You hadn't been here in so long, I thought you had just about throwed me down."Ĭharley said that he could never do that and asked Furry is he would come out to the coffeehouse for a couple of nights in the coming week. "It's good to see you, Furry," Charley said. Beside the bed, there was a table made from a small wooden crate. The room held a sizable amount of old, worn furniture: the bed, a studio couch, three stuffed chairs, a chifforobe and a dresser. Furry's been giving me a little guitar lesson." We shook his hand, then Charley introduced me to Furry and we all sat down. The boy wearing gold-rimmed spectacles who had got up from a chair to let us in said, "I'm Jerry Finberg. One leg of his green pajamas hung limp, empty below the knee. When he does play, it is usually at the Bitter Lemon, a coffeehouse that caters mainly to the affluent East Memphis teenaged set, but whose manager, Charley Brown, is a blues enthusiast and occasionally hires Furry between rock-'n'-roll groups.Ĭharley, a tall, blond young man, bent to shake hands with Furry. Nor, since the Depression, has he performed regularly, even in his home town. But Beale Street's great era ended at the close of the 1920s since then, Furry has had only one album of his own - a 1959 Folkways LP. In Chicago, at the old Vocalion studios on Wabash Avenue, he made the first of many recordings he was to make, both for Vocalion and for RCA Victor's Bluebird label. He was also one of the most popular, not only in the saloons and gambling dives of Memphis but in the medicine shows and on the riverboats all along the Mississippi. Handy, was one of the most highly respected musicians. During the heyday of Beale Street, when the great Negro blues artists played and sang in the crowded, evil blocks between Fourth and Main, Furry, a protégé of W.C. There, sitting next to a double bed, holding a guitar, was Furry Lewis. "Got a new way of spellin',' "a quiet, musing voice sang, " 'Memphis, Tennessee.' " A run of guitar chords followed, skeptical, brief " ' Double M, double E, great God, A Y Z.' "Then two closing chords, like a low shout of laughter, and Charley knocked. Charley started to knock, and then we heard the music and waited. We climbed the back stairs of the building on our left and went down a bare, dusty hall to a door with a metal number three over the cloth-patched screen. He pretty when he clean." "Nice dog," he said.
The women talking would stop as we came near and then, as we went past, would start again.Ĭlose by, a fat woman was holding a small brown-and-white dog to her bosom. The children's gaze followed us as we walked on. "How are you?" Charley Brown spoke to one of them.
There were women sitting on the doorsteps, some of them together, taling, but most of them alone, sitting still, ignoring the heat and the buzzing flies. Filthy rags and broken bottles lay on the concrete pavement. There were two-story brick buildings on both sides, with wooden stairways that shut out all but a thin blue strip of sky. When we came into the alley, the children stopped playing. It's been four decades and more since his last hit record, but Furry Lewis - now a stoical Memphis street cleaner - can still make his guitar sing.
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