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CounterPunch
September
14 / 15, 2002
a
Memoir
Rebel Angel
by David Vest
Chapter Three:
Neither-Handed
J. O. Curnutt, my maternal grandfather,
bought me a typewriter and a stack of newsprint when I was 12
and told me to "get to writing." A veteran of the First
World War, he had met Tallulah Bankhead and claimed to have rocked
baby Judy Garland in his lap.
He had also "known" the two
women who accused the Scottsboro Boys of raping them on a train
from Chattanooga to Huntsville. Wilburn Vest, my father, had
attended the trial in Decatur and considered Judge Horton, who
had overturned the guilty verdict (at the cost of his own political
career) to be a hero.
Besides my mother, the two men had little
else in common and openly disliked each other. J. O. considered
baby food a waste of money and simply fed me portions of his
own plate which he had prechewed. He dipped snuff, smoked Camels
and expected me to play baseball wearing an old mitt made in
about 1920, the padding long since worn away. He tried to get
me to cut a quarter-sized hole in the pocket so I could "feel
the ball' when I caught it. I could already feel it. It still
makes my hand sting to think about his fastballs.
Some people are righties, some are lefties,
some are ambidextrous. I was neither-handed, equally clumsy with
either paw. I learned to catch the ball only to protect my nose
from the sharp line drives he would hit in my direction.
It was J.O. who sent me down to the city
jail to see my first Yankee. He  told
me they had caught one and he was probably peering through the
windows bars right now. "What do they look like?" I
asked him.
"Make him say 'mayonnaise,'"
he instructed. "They can't pronounce it."
If Yankees were a novelty, Huntsville's
small town isolation was to be short-lived. Europeans were pouring
into the area to work in the space program at Redstone Arsenal.
The small town once known as Twickenham went from a population
of perhaps 8,500 to over 100,000 in just a few short years.
My father, poorly equipped for the space
age, went down to Birmingham to look for work as a body and fender
man. He took my little brother Mike with him and rented a duplex
apartment less than a mile from Tuxedo Junction. One night he
was roused from a deep sleep by the Mike's cries from his crib
across the room. The house was on fire. Both of them escaped
alive, thanks to Mike, but the disaster seemed emblematic of
Wilburn Vest's luck in life at that stage. He worked a series
of hellish low-paying jobs, including a brief stint at a rubber
plant, a literal inferno.
We didn't know any of the Europeans.
Somehow our small world remained intact while being swallowed
by a much larger one. The universe for me still consisted of
the town, with its buses and newsstands, and the country, with
its bobcats and serpents and horrific scenes of women wringing
the necks of chickens, the spurting headless fowls running in
circles around me. I preferred the town.
In these years my grandmother, a great
singer, would sometimes take me to church with her. I would sit
beside her in the choir and black out all the whole notes in
the hymnal with her pen while the Rev. J. Vernon Rich preached.
One Sunday morning he took as his text the proposition that "America
is a godless nation." His proof was a Bible verse -- and
the fact that we were not bombing Moscow that very day.
I imagined Russian children sitting in
school with their heads in their desks to protect them against
thermonuclear war, as we had been taught to do at West Clinton
Elementary.
Horrifying as Brother Rich's views were,
I remember mainly the wonderful cadence of his delivery. He was
an absolute spellbinder, with none of the unctious snivelling
and fake sobbing of a Pat Robertson or a Jimmy Swaggart. He never
wept over sinners, he thundered over them. I was delighted to
discover that he was still alive many years later when he showed
up to preach my mother's funeral in 1976. He told the assembled
mourners that my mother and he had seen a ghost together when
he last visited her in the hospital.
My mother had often claimed to have seen
the ghost of my grandmother, who had died of heart disease in
1956 at the young age of 54, but not before buying me a piano,
an ancient H. P. Nelson upright grand.
The piano arrived just as I discovered
other kinds of music far different from anything I had heard
in church or at home. On New Year's Day in 1953 my next-door
neighbor told me that Hank Williams was dead. I had never heard
of him. Following my pal over to his house, I listened to "Why
Don't You Love Me Like You Used to Do" on his radio.
I thought it sounded like the way the
feedstore smelled. (Years later I would reconsider this view
and determine that it sounded more like the way beer tasted.)
Then came "Tutti-Frutti," and
everything changed forever. I still think hearing Little Richard
for the first time was far more important than, say, the first
fumblings at sex. What could possibly have compared with the
wildness of that performance? "A-wop-bop-a-lu-bop-a-lop-bop-bop"
came out of the literal silence and seemed to ignite the very
air around the radio. And then that scream before the sax solo
... suddenly all I ever wanted to do was to be able to scream
like that.
I hadn't yet heard Archie Brownlee, probably
the first man ever to scream on a record, and the Five Blind
Boys of Mississippi. But I would hear them soon, and the Five
Blind Boys of Alabama as well, as I twirled the radio dial in
search of more screaming and discovered the local Black station.
It was the sound of freedom, freedom from all the Baptist repression
and segregation and the feedstore smell and everything uncool.
I understood that some of it came from
churches, but not churches like mine. Nobody but J. Vernon Rich
screamed in my church. I didn't know about night clubs and juke
joints and the gay black chitlin' circuit.
"I know you got to move," sang
the Blind Boys, and I surely did. By the eighth grade I was being
asked to leave school dances because my style of dancing involved
too much "shaking."
Meanwhile, my mother was taking me to
"all-night singings" in Birmingham, where I could hear
the Blackwood Brothers, the Stamps-Baxter Quartet and, above
all, the Statesmen, who had the "blackest" sound of
all the white gospel groups. So closely did the Statesmen copy
some of the arrangements of the great black groups of the day
that white audiences sometimes muttered openly against them.
There were no screams, but their version of "Get Away Jordan"
was, I thought, one of the greatest gospel renditions I ever
heard -- until I finally stumbled across the legendary recording
of the same song by Dorothy Love Coates and the Original Gospel
Harmonettes and understood where it all came from. Then I heard
"Stand By Me," another Statesmen favorite, performed
by the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and it was all over.
I still think the Statesmen were a fine
group and that their early recordings ought to be released on
CD, especially the ones on their own label that were sold at
concerts, infinitely superior to the watered-down Nashvillized
versions later released on RCA Victor. The Blackwood Brothers
made some great records, too, until a 1953 plane crash killed
half the quartet.
With rock and roll coming in one ear
and gospel the other, I didn't know where to put the bluegrass
music my father would sing along with in the car on night trips.
He could make that high lonesome keening sound Bill Monroe was
famous for, and it, too, captivated or repelled mainly by its
sheer wildness. My mother couldn't stand it.
Interesting that bluegrass accelerated
the beat of country music at roughly the same time bebop was
propelling jazz into faster and faster playing. (But if it's
really acceleration you really want, listen to Little Richard's
"She's Got It.")
The music industry responded to it all
by desperately churning out Pat Boones and Fabians and Bobby
Vintons. Some of it was pretty seductive to a wayward youth.
Boone's attempts at Little Richard songs were too ludicrous for
words, but his "Anastasia" and "April Love"
were masterpieces of weirdness.
Before I knew it I was playing both rock
and gospel. My first band was called The Secrets. We dressed
in black and wore masks onstage. At our first show, in a Hartselle
movie theater, a white audience squealed downstairs while a black
audience screamed and boogied in the balcony. Neither audience
had ever heard live rock and roll music.
Nor had the theater owners and managers.
In Albertville we opened for "The Girl Can't Help It"
and weren't even allowed to see the movie because we "nearly
caused a goddam riot."
At a high school dance near Paint Rock
we came out of the gym to find the world covered in snow, turned
the wrong way out of the parking lot, and wound up somewhere
in Tennessee, out of gas and freezing.
Our lead singer, a couple of years older
than the rest of us, was charged some years later with the homicide
of a young woman he was said to have killed in a blackout. He
told people he had no idea whether he had done it.
In one of the gospel groups I toured
with, the Glorylanders, was a man who had done prison time for
church robbing. He was one of the few gospel performers I knew
who ever talked about anything but sex.
On these tours I met some real characters.
There was the original Chuck Wagon Gang, featuring Sister Rose,
out of Texas. There was Wally Fowler, the Don King of Southern
gospel music. And then there was a man named Albert S. Williams.
Williams had been the piano player for
the Stamps-Baxter group and had written a couple of important
quartet songs. He had also done time in Alabama's Kilby Prison
for selling (with no plan for ever delivering) aluminum awnings.
They let him go early after he organized a prison choir and wrote
a little book called "I Found God in Prison." "You
do what you have to do," Williams explained. At his shows
he would play the piano and "testify" about his prison
experience, inviting the audience to compare him with Peter and
Paul. Later he would scan the audience for young men to his liking.
The S. stood for "Silly," he told me.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He is a poet
and piano-player for the Pacific Northwest's hottest blues band,
The Cannonballs.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
Previous Installments
of Rebel Angel: a Memoir by David Vest.
Chapter One:
I'll Never Get Out of this Band Alive
Chapter Two:
A Blind Mule and a Box of Medals
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A Conversation
with My Arab-American Self
Ron Jacobs
Shelter
from the Storm
Rick Giombetti
Paxil
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Krystal Kyer
From NAFTA
to CAFTA
Another Rotten Trade Deal
John Jonik
Overcome
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