I own two guitars -- one is a Martin D-18 (vintage 1974) that has never known a pickup, and the other is a Fender Precision Bass. The Martin is worn and beaten -- the pick guard curled up and fell off a couple of years ago. I haven't replaced it, so I use my bare fingers to play that guitar. Whenever I lift it from its case, the first tunes that come to me are ones I learned listening to Mississippi John Hirt, a soft-voiced man who made music in the threshold between the old days and the new.
He had a Delta accent, so he pronounced his name "Hoit" and sang about Frankie and Albert, the Candy Man, and that bad man, cruel Staggerlee. Staggerlee killed Billy the Lion over a five dollar stetson hat. When Staggerlee stood on the gallows, the Judge said "We'd better kill him now before he gets one of us."
These are all folk songs -- they emanated from a dark, mysterious time before there were records, and when there was only candle light after the sun went down. I love to play those old songs. They inspired most of the songs I wrote myself.
My Fender bass is sleek and black with a white pickguard and knobs of chrome like a Cadillac. When I play it I feel like Bo Diddly, another folksinger. Except we didn't used to think of Bo Diddly as a folksinger. He came along after recording was invented, erasing the mystical arch between the present and the past. I remember him on the Ed Sullivan show, shaking maracas and singing a song he named after himself. "Bo Diddly, Bo Diddly, have you heard .. I'm gonna buy you a mocking bird." Then he made tremolo sounds to a very primitive beat on an electric guitar. "Heeeey Bo Diddly..."
Folksingers came in many shapes and colors, and they played all types of instruments. Some sang songs their parents taught them, and some were poets who made up their own words. Woody Guthrie listened to the Carter Family on the radio and started writing about the American spirit -- it was the Great Depression, and Woody was there to chronicle it. A boy grew up on the Mesabi Iron Range and made his way to New York to visit Guthrie. That boy came to call himself "Dylan", and it was his voice I heard on a transistor radio while lying on a beach in the summer of 1965. "How does it feel," I was asked, "to be on your own, like a rolling stone?"
Like a rolling stone! Yes, that's how I feel when I wield that big black bass guitar, when I stand on the stage beside Susan Weber, who spits like Patti Smith in some songs, and soaks others with the emotional authenticity of Mick Jagger. Susan journeyed to the crossroads sometime in the middle of 2003, and came away writing songs the like of which I had not heard since "Highway 61 Revisited." Does she fit into the folk continuum? Ed Ollick, a Folknet board member of great experience in the history of the genre, gave a wonderful welcoming introduction to Susan and her band at this year's Rootstock, and the Saturday opening night crowd greeted every well-rehearsed number with heartfelt applause.
How did it feel? It felt great. I went home that night and saw my old Martin leaning in a corner. It must have been the hour that made the face of John Hirt smile back at me from under the brim of his hat. I set my bass down next to him, and we all slept satisfied.
Continuum 9.07
