Q: Tell me about your travelling around.
A: I met a good many musicians.
Q: Did you notice that in different areas there were different guitar styles?
A: That’s quite natural because I had a different style myself. I sat down and figured mine out. I always did sit down and study what way I could take advantage of a thing, trying to make it different than anybody else.
Q: You didn’t mind teaching people?
A: No, I didn’t mind teaching anything that they wanted to know that I knew.
Q: There were a lot of musicians who copied your style?
A: Yeah, I didn’t keep up with their names.
Q: What happened to your first wife?
A. Well, that’s a long story. The truth of it is that I found out she wasn’t my wife but everybody else’s wife. I let her go. We weren’t getting along too well and after I found out her husband was living, that settled it for me. Yeah, I got married again. I’ve been married now longer than you’ve been here!
Q: What made you leave the South and Durham, North Carolina?
A: I didn’t have no people there. All my people were gone so I traveled up to New York. The first place I lived was Mamaroneck, N. Y. That was in 1940. I came down to the city later on in the year and lived at 169th Street for 18 years.
Q: Did you also play on the streets of New York?
A: Yeah, it’s a problem. Reason it’s a problem you see, we weren’t allowed to play out on the streets. Sometimes the police chased me and I’d take a chance and try to play again. Also I had guitars stolen off me as fast as I could get them.
The Blues
Q: When was the first time you heard a blues?
A: That broke out in 1910. 1 couldn’t tell you where it came from. I first heard them from a fellow coming down the road picking a guitar and playing what you call "the blues." When I started playing the guitar there was no such thing as a piece coming out called "the blues." They played other songs. The blues, they just began to originate themselves.
Q: Did you ever hear of W.C. Handy?
A. No, I ain’t never heard of him.
Q: Who was one of the first bluesmen you heard?
A: A fellow named Porter Irving. He played that song about "Delia." He was born in South Carolina from where I come from.
Old sow woke
up one morning, found all her pigs dead.
Old sow said to the bull, run! we’re bound to move our bed.
All the friends I had are gone.
Oh Delia,
why don’t you run,
Here comes that sheriff with a 44 Gatlin’ gun.
All the friends I had are gone.
Take old
Delia to the cemetery, bring me a rubber tired hack.
Put her in the ground, poor girl, she could never get back.
All the friends I had are gone.
Q: Why do you think people started to play the blues?
A: Now, people had different feelings, you understand. He worried about a woman, or worried about a man, something like that. Get all stirred up in a cauldron. Thing like that is the blues.
Q: They never felt that way before?
A: No, they didn’t have that before. They didn’t have that name before. People have always been worried.
Q: Did blues playing start on the guitar first?
A: They started playing it on the piano too.
Q: In church why can’t you sing a blues?
A: Folk music and blues is a whole lot of differences. That’s like your singing some type of love-trot. If you do like the people wants you to do, you won’t do nothing! You know that. Folk music is kind of like a love-trot. It’s telling a story. Talk about the blues that leads you to the point of where a person is worried about somebody.
Q: What would you tell a guitar student about playing blues?
A: Well a lot of things I could tell a person if I just had the time to study what they were fishing for. To play blues on a guitar I’d teach them to play the guitar like a piano.
Q: What do you think of bottleneck playing?
A: I don’t think nothing of that! You’re cheating your own self. It ain’t so respectable. People thinks it’s a pretty thing but it’s not.
Q: Did you ever play with a bottleneck?
A: Not too much for I didn’t care for it. (2)
Q: Did you ever try playing blues on the piano?
A: No. Fact is I didn’t know too much about piano until I got started travelling. I didn’t even know how a piano was shaped. I didn’t have no time for piano or organ. I stuck to the guitar, because I could carry that with me. I couldn’t carry no piano!
Notes
2. One of the most exciting and interesting bottleneck tunes I have ever heard was Rev. Davis’ "Whistlin’ Blues." Even though Rev. Davis looked down on this style he had nevertheless perfected it and created a unique sound as well as tuning (D A D F# A B). This was rather typical of Rev. Davis’ approach to his music.
