Guitar Blues by David W. Landrum | Cave Scribbles

After the stock market crash, Noah Copeland’s family ended up better off than most. His father kept his job and Noah, eighteen at the time, had been working as a clerk and stocker at a local dairy for eight months. When he first got the job, his mother objected.

“Lots of blackies live in that part of town, don’t they?” she asked, her question actually a comment on his choice of a workplace. He said nothing by way of reply. Jobs were hard to come by for anyone his age, and he was glad to have any sort of work at all. The dairy was on the edge of the black district, and his first few days on the job told him many of the patrons were indeed colored. Still, the manager paid well. Noah worked diligently. He quickly noted that his boss valued his colored customers, treated them with courtesy, and seemed like a familiar friend to many who came in. He took the cue and copied his behavior. In a few months he had advanced from stock boy to cashier. When the crash came and the streets filled with the unemployed, he wondered if Mr. Hughes would replace him with one of the adult men who daily came in wondering if he planned to hire anyone. Hughes retained him. He worked even more carefully, diligently, and courteously, to keep his status secure.

It was in his workplace, the Sunlight Dairy, that he first heard about the blues.

Up to that time he had not had a lot of contact with coloreds. In fact, he had not seen a colored person up close until he began his job. They had always seemed remote to him—remote and slightly dangerous. As a child he remembered his father telling him to take a circuitous route back from the places he visited downtown.

“Don’t go near Franklin Street. Those niggers will kill you if they catch you there at night.”

At first he had been wary at his job. Yet his customers were friendly and did not behave any differently than anyone else. And Hughes’ amicable relations with so many of them gave him pause.

One snowy morning in early December he brought his guitar to work. The streetcar lines had changed their timetables, cutting back on routes because more people were walking to save money. The new schedules meant he could not catch the streetcar home and then transfer to go to his music lesson. He carried the guitar case in and set it behind the counter.

One of the colored customers, George Hooks, noticed.

“You play?” he asked. Noah smiled. He liked Hooks.

“I’ve been taking lessons for a few years.”

“Who do you like—who are you favorite players?”

He studied mostly classical guitar and used the Carcassi method book. He did listen to a little jazz, though.

“I like Eddie Lang.”

Hooks’ reaction surprised Noah. He laughed.

“Of course you know, Eddie Lang is Blind Willie Dunn.”

Noah gave Hooks a puzzled look.

“Eddie Lang did some recording with a colored bluesman named Lonnie Johnson,” he explained. “But the record people didn’t think white and colored should be doing music together, so when they put the record out, Lonnie Johnson was Lonnie Johnson, but Eddie Lang was Blind Willie Dunn.” He laughed again. “You ever heard Lonnie Johnson?”

“No, sir,” he answered. Hooks did not say much more, bought some things and left. Noah went to his guitar lesson and got home late at night. Two days later Hooks came in with a young colored woman wearing a pink dress and a cloche hat. She had a heavy black coat. Flecks of snow clung to it. She smiled at him. Hooks introduced her as his cousin, Bess, who had come to live with them in hard economic times. They purchased some items. Then Hooks took something out of his coat.

“And I brought these for you,” he said, handing him a stack of square cardboard holders. There were four of them and they held .78 recordings. “You got a record player, I assume.”

“I do,” Noah said, looking down at the recordings in wonder. He looked up. “Thanks, Mr. Hooks.” Then he glanced at the girl. “Nice meeting you, Bess.”

She smiled. She struck him as being an extremely pretty woman. She had cream-colored skin, large eyes, and stood tall and slender. She only smiled at him. They left the store.

He waited until his father went out and his mother had settled down in the parlor to play bridge with a group of friends and then stole upstairs to play the recordings Hooks had given him. His father had conservative tastes in music and only half approved of his listening to Eddie Lang and Django Reinhardt. Noah closed the door to the room where they kept the phonograph—a new one that had replaced the wind-up cylinder model he had known as a child. Listening for his mother’s voice or footsteps, and not hearing them, he turned the machine on, put the disc on the turntable, carefully set down the needle, and listened.

What he heard amazed him. In a way, it was simplistic, with a repeating 1-4-5 structure. The structure, though, disappeared in the intricate weave of notes that formed the piece. Over the continuo of chords the artist—it was Lonnie Johnson—spun out a euphonic of melody line that tinkled and cascaded in abrupt, rough but graceful constructions. Noah knew enough about jazz to recognize the elements of that style lodged in this music, but it was not jazz. It lacked the free play he had heard in artists like Eddie Lang and Nick Lucas. Tied to the firm ground of repeating rhythms, it gained force and slow-building velocity so that its impact—the emotion of it—surpassed anything he had heard in jazz music.

When the music gave way to the needle scratching on blank space, he removed the armature and picked up the recording. It was titled “Guitar Blues.” He carefully replaced it in the sleeve and put on another number, “Catfish Blues,” by Lonnie Johnson, following that with “Fine Booze and Heavy Dues,” and then one by a woman, Memphis Minnie, called “Bumblebee.” 

After listening, he felt a mild but deep agitation, as if something in his soul had been torn from its moorings and now floated free inside him. Noah could not be certain what these stirrings meant or why he felt excited and eager to hear and to play this new music.

His conscience, stimulated because he had played the records surreptitiously, took him back to a conversation he remembered from a year ago.

It had been Douglas Gostin, a missionary from the Presbyterian church his family attended. He was a missionary to the Belgian Congo and had lodged with the Copeland family during his weeklong stay in the city of Grand Rapids.

At dinner that night, when his father told him Noah played guitar, he seemed pleased.

“What type of music are you learning?” Gostin asked.

“Classical,” he said.

“He also likes jazz,” his mother put in disapprovingly.

“Jazz?” the missionary echoed, looking slightly troubled. “That is not particularly good.”

“Why not?” Noah asked.

“Jazz has its origins in the rhythms the slaves brought to this country, which still exist in the folk traditions of colored community here and elsewhere,” he said, his words measured as if he were reading a lecture. “Embedded in these rhythms are the pulse of African drums and chants.”

“Is something wrong with that?” Noah asked.

Gostin gave him a look that seemed to pity his naivety.

“Quite a lot. The chants and drumming of ancient Africa are connected to their demonic religions and were used to summon spirits—and in their fertility dances, of which I will say no more because the very subject is unseemly. These rhythms are still found in jazz and other types of colored music. People listen to this new music, go to minstrel shows, and hear colored bands in dance halls playing this new sound and do not realize they are subjecting themselves to demonic influences.”

“All the jazz players I listen to are white,” Noah said.

“Still, they play the same rhythms. They echo the heathen chants and frenzied cacophony the African tribes call music, which is in fact conjuration.”

Noah thought the conversation might lead to a ban on jazz in the Copeland household, but Gostin softened his condemnation a bit.

“I suppose,” he said, sipping a glass of apple cider (he did not drink alcohol), “it is relatively harmless. No one is going to be morally affected by jazz or minstrel songs. But we should at least be aware of its questionable origins.”

Standing by the record player, feeling his odd response to the music he had just heard, he wondered if Gostin’s words were true. Could what he felt be a pernicious, demonic influence?

He put the recordings away. Probably his reaction rose from their uniqueness. He remembered feeling the same way when he first heard Debussy on the piano. The odd intervals, the jumps and note-bridges had caused him to react in a manner similar to what he felt now, having listened to blues for the first time. Yet he also thought about Bess. He thought of girls at his school he liked.

He got his guitar down and began to attempt what he had just heard by Lonnie Johnson and Memphis Minnie.

It was the beginning of March, when the first whispers of thaw rode on the wind, that Hooks asked him if he would like to come to a concert.

“This is a benefit show to help out the jobless colored folk in town. Like everybody, we’ve been hit hard by the Crash.”

“Who’s playing?” he asked.

“I’d like that to be a surprise. But I think you’ll like it because you like the blues so much.”

Since his introduction to blues, Noah had become a fan. Hooks had loaned him more recordings. He had listened to songs by Mammie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Patton, and Louis Armstrong (a jazz player influenced by the blues). He had begun to play the music as well.

In a sense it was not difficult to play—at least as far as its basic construction went. Blues was much less complicated in its musical set-up—less than the simple pieces by Carulli, Giuliani, and Sor he had first leaned in his classical lessons. The structure, however, only grounded the music. When he tried to play the leads, the melodies, when he tried to bridge the chord progressions with a line of notes, he felt stupid, clumsy, and heavy-fingered. Four years of disciplined lesson had helped him develop speed and dexterity as a guitarist. His teacher often praised his ability to execute fast, intricate cadenzas like the ones at the end “Capriccio Arabe” by Tárrega and the lines of notes in Paganini’s “Caprice.” Still, he felt he could not get the blues. Even though he could play the notes, they did not sound right.

He told Hooks, who laughed.

“You’ve got to learn to feel it,” he said.

And one day he did.

How it happened he was never sure. Later, musicians would talk about how it “worked” for them. No one he met could articulate the passage that enabled one to play the blues with fluency and expression. But everyone knew when they had crossed the line and come to understand. You had to understand, he thought. You had to feel it, just as Mr. Hooks had told him.

He said he would look forward to the concert. He knew he would have to lie to his parents in order to attend.

He did not want to go alone. He hated going places by himself. The solution to his problem came unexpectedly when he got to know Chloe Fettman.

Chloe stood out at their school. She dressed in the latest styles. Twice she had been sent home because the Dean of Women thought her skirt was too short. Her father’s clothing store had survived the wave of foreclosures that had put so many merchants out of business the past couple of years. Since so many other clothiers had closed up shop, Fettman’s did well and their family was wealthy. Chloe’s up-to-date fashions came from the store, which catered to a board spectrum of the Grand Rapids community with everything from discount items to the latest from New York City.

Once he passed her in the school library and saw her removing the price tags from a newly purchased stack of .78s. He immediately recognized the Okeh label. He stopped. She looked up at him.

“Noah?” she asked.

“Nice music,” he commented, pointing at the recordings.

“You’re joking.”

“No.” He looked around. “Nice to see someone else in this school likes blues.” He bent down so he could see the name on the black label.

“Charlie Patton. I like him.”

“You listen to Charlie Patton?”

“I have ‘Pony Blues.’ I listen to Lonnie Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Kokomo Arnold, Robert Johnson”—

She smiled, delighted.

“Sit down.” He slid into the chair across from her. She smiled a smile he thought pretty but also wicked and provocative. “Noah Copeland—Dad is a lawyer who adroitly conducts foreclosures and makes certain creditors get every penny the bankrupt merchants owe, even if it means taking their house, car, the clothes of their backs and the food off their tables.”

“I try not to know a lot about what my Dad does for a living.”

“Might be a good idea. I thought you were straight as an arrow. Now I find out you like the blues. What do Mom and Dad think about that?”

“I keep my records hidden away. I only listen to the blues or try to play them when they’re not around.”
He knew Chloe was progressive, even radical, in her ideas. When he told her he was going to a blues concert at the Franklin Street Theatre, she laughed. 

“I’m going too.”

“I was going to ask you along. I hate attending concerts alone, but I end up doing that quite a bit because of none of the girls I date are into guitar music. They think the guitar is a low-life instrument to play even if you’re playing classical music on it.”

“In Europe, Andres Segovia is playing Bach on the guitar.”

“I know. My teacher says he’s going too far.” He paused, and then asked, “You want to go with me to the concert?”

“I’ll meet you there.”

He began to sit with Chloe in class. People saw the two of them talking in the halls and before and after school. Word soon got back to his parents.

“One of the women in my bridge club told me you’re friends with Chloe Fettman,” his mother chided.

“I’m getting to be friends with her.”

“I’m told she is not a very nice girl.”

“I think she’s nice.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” his mother said curtly.

Now and then his parents would refer to adult matters. When they did, it startled him so badly he did not know how to respond. Like most children, he did not think of his parents, especially his mother, as having a sexual aspect to their lives. He was especially embarrassed and uncomfortable when his mother made mention of such matters.

“A nice girl would never dress like she dresses,” she continued. “And she is a Jew.”

His mother broke off the conversation and began to arrange flowers to set on the dinner table tonight. She never specified a course of action after her admonitions, though he always understood. In the case, as with her disapproval of his working at Sunlight, he would be able to ignore her. If his father, who gave explicit directives and expected them to be obeyed, expressed the same sentiment, it would be harder to resist.

The concert coincided with a lecture at the church on threats to our society. He knew his parents had a dinner date that night. When he mentioned that he planned to hear the lecture, his father seemed suspicious. Noah had not gone to any of lecture series in the church. His association with Chloe had not escaped his father’s attention though, since Fettman was prosperous and influential, especially since his business had survived the Crash, he did not tell Noah to back away, thinking a silent censure would be the best approach. 

On the afternoon of the concert Chloe called him.

“Meet me at the lobby of Olds Manor Hotel. They have a soda fountain. We’ll get something to drink before we go.”

He took money to buy her a soda or a phosphate, but when he got there she told him she had rented a room and took him upstairs by the service stairway.

Once inside he told her, embarrassed but thinking he had to be frank about it, “I’ve never”—

“Neither have I,” she interrupted. “We’ll learn together. I want to be a woman. I’m tired of being a little girl. I think you want to be a full-fledged man.”

He had never thought of it this way. Lines from the music they both listen to returned to his mind—lines about being a man, references to what a man the singer was. It had never occurred to him how those lines were about what he and Chloe meant to do, but now he saw it. Their entry into experience had broken upon the language of the blues.

Each of them knew what to do despite lack of actually having done the deed. Chloe had rubbers. Their coupling was not prolonged but it was sweet. A world—formed in flesh and warmth, in pleasure and love—had opened to receive them both. This knowledge sated them as much as what they had experienced in the grunting, gasping, amazed beauty of their first embrace.

She pulled the covers back to show him the trickle of blood on her left thigh.

“Not as bad as I’d thought it might be,” she said, the covers only pulled up to her knees, uninhibited under his gaze. He had seen girlie books his friends brought to school. Now he saw the actuality of her round breasts with their dark pink nipples, the lovely construct of her ribs, stomach and lower abdomen, the curve down to the soft tangle of hair above the miracle of her mound and her beautiful opening. The sight of her made the pornographic photographs he had gaped at an obscene parody.

She smiled at him.

“I love you,” she said.

He kissed her mouth and breasts. They lay together and talked. After a while they got cleaned up and dressed.

“You know Bessie Hooks, don’t you?” Chloe asked.

“We’ve been introduced.”

“What do you think of her?”

“She seems very nice.”

“She’ll be at the concert. Don’t get any ideas.”

At first he did not understand her. When he did get what she was saying, he thought to declaim on the absurdity of a white man romancing a colored woman, but then he stopped. He asked himself why not. The thought, so anarchically different from what he had been taught about race all his life made him tingle inside. He noticed Chloe observing his reaction. He spread his hands.

“You’re the only one.”

He did not sound completely sincere, though he had wanted to. She did not reply. Did she really see Bess as a possible rival? He realized she did.

“Who’s playing?” he asked, wanting to change the subject. “Bess’s uncle wouldn’t tell me.”

“Lonnie Johnson—and Eddie Lang. They agreed to do the benefit, but the advertisers here wouldn’t publicize it, since it’s a black man and a white man performing together on the same stage. But the thing is already sold out, and the tickets were pricey. People are coming from as far away as Chicago and Indianapolis to see it—black and white people.”

He noted she said “black” instead of “colored,” the usual word people used.

“It should be great.”

“It will be.” She reached out, pulled him to her, and kissed him. He felt her breasts against him and felt the soft touch of her lips. “Just keep away from Bessie Hooks,” she whispered. “I don’t want to lose you to her. You’re my man, aren’t you, Noah?”

He said he was, but more than before he realized all the possibilities.

They put on their coats and headed out. A light snow fell from a pale grey sky. They left the hotel by separate doors and met at the streetcar stop. Chloe looked pretty in a long pink coat and knit cap, the snowflakes sticking in the weave of the hat, settling on her shoulders, and melting when they landed on her face. The trolley appeared. They threw their money in the box, took a seat near the back, and leaned against each other, both thinking back to the hotel room. 

As they approached the concert venue, they saw a crowd of men with placards. They stood in the snow in a somber line of black, waving signs that read Jazz: a Threat to Public Good, Stop the Evil Influence, No Jungle Music, Keep the Jungle Tunes in Africa. He and Chloe gaped. They wanted to laugh in scorn, but the outrageous messages written in block letters angered them.

“I hope they don’t close the concert down,” Noah said.

“They won’t. My Dad owns this building. If they did that, he’d lose money, and he wouldn’t be happy—and most everybody in town owes him.”

The protesters—he saw some women now as well—had set a podium on the public sidewalk just down from the entrance of the concert hall. Four burly police officers stood near-by. People walked inside but the police did not hinder them. Apparently, the concert would go on as planned. Then Scott froze. His father and Mr. Gostin, the missionary, stood on the podium. Gostin declaimed, his body heaving with conviction. Noah’s father stood beside him, looking down at a sheaf of papers, probably a speech he meant to deliver when Gostin had finished.

His mouth went dry. He and Chloe would have to walk right by the podium to get into the concert.

“Is that your father?” she asked.

He nodded.

“He’ll see us.”

“He will.”

“We can sneak in the back. The watchmen Daddy hires all know me and will let us in.”

The trolley slowed. Noah felt panic. But as quickly as he felt it, he gained a sense of resolution—not a neat, smooth resolution like in a piece of music by Giuliani or Tárrega—more like the gathering of notes in the variations of “Guitar Blues. Now was time to stop hiding what he felt and what he believed. It was time to start living the blues. The trolley rolled to a stop. The bell rang. The door opened. Gostin had stepped down from the platform. Noah’s father had taken center stage. His arm sawed the air as he delivered a speech undoubtedly about the dangers of jazz and blues.

Noah took Chloe’s hand. 

“Come on.” 

“Wait a minute,” she said.

She pulled off her gloves. He smiled and took off his. Holding hands, they dismounted and stepped into the chill of early evening, crossing through the snow, heading past the small platform and toward the warmth and light of the concert hall.

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