What’s in a Song III | Dave's Place

Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair

I don’t know when I first heard him referred to in this way, but whenever I think of the author of this song, I think of him as The Immortal Stephen Collins Foster. Though he wrote many songs about the deep South, he was actually born, and lived most of his life, in Pittsburgh, and the city claimed him as its own. Beside the Carnegie Library was a statue of the man sitting beside and slightly above a shirtless black man who is pickin’ on the old banjo. That was a statue I saw many times, because I often went to the library, also because it was just a couple of blocks from Forbes Field. In front of the Carnegie Institute are busts of famous thinkers—Shakespeare, Galileo, Michelangelo, Bach—but beside them, just to one side, was Pittsburgh’s own, the Immortal One.[1]

In 1958, when I was ten years old, my music teacher at Shady Side Academy Junior School decided we should put on a program composed entirely of songs by this man. It was a great idea, and my friend Gordon Hughes and I were asked to sing a duet of Sewanee River, he as the alto and I—God help me—as the soprano. I had dreadful stage fright and was afraid I wouldn’t be able to sing at all.[2] I managed to choke something out. Gordon actually had a strong alto, and could harmonize. He had the harder part.

But the most controversial part of the program was that the music teacher wanted someone or other to sing “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” to a boy standing there in a wig pretending to be Jeannie. As soon as the music teacher announced that idea, the class broke into an uproar. “It isn’t going to be me,” was the general consensus. Was there somebody in the class who seemed so feminine that he could actually play a girl? Actually, there were a few candidates, but what were you going to say, “Jack, you’re kind of like a girl, why don’t you do it”? My memory was that the music teacher left it to us to decide. It was so controversial that our homeroom teacher, Marian Shakeshaft[3], got involved.[4]

She told us, where she got this information I don’t know, that if you wanted to pick somebody to play a girl, you should actually pick the most boyish-looking person. That boy would make the best girl. We liked Mrs. Shakeshaft so much that we believed her. She said the most boyish person in our class was Robbie Miller. As soon as she said that, we knew she was right.

Robbie consented and stood there acting like a girl, and somebody or other sang Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair to him/her. (I don’t know what Robbie’s pronouns were that day.)

Robbie was one of the first people to befriend me, and invite me to his house, when I arrived at the school in the fourth grade. He lived in Shadyside somewhere, one of those back streets with big posh houses. He hadn’t told me, but his mother was in a wheelchair, I believe as a victim of polio; the house had elevators, and she could get around anywhere. Robbie had pet rabbits, and we played with them that first afternoon, setting up a kind of labyrinth with large wooden blocks and letting them run around. For an afternoon snack, we had celery stalks, and Robbie put butter on his, something I hadn’t seen before or since. Toward the end of the afternoon his father showed up, and Robbie ran and jumped into his arms. I thought that rather an enthusiastic greeting, but I later surmised the parents were divorced, and the man was just visiting, so Robbie didn’t get to see him all that much. Just the fact of divorce would have been startling to me at that point, at the age of nine.

As it turned out, I went to Robbie’s house quite a bit through the years, because as teenagers we could party in the basement and at the swimming pool, and pretty much behave any way we wanted, since his mother mostly stayed upstairs. We smoked cigarettes and cigars, drank beer. That house was the scene of a memorably embarrassing moment in my youth, which I altered in my novel Football Dreams, as having happened to me. It actually happened to Gordon’s twin brother Gerry. They eventually became two of my best friends.

Roughly ten years later, this song came back into my life. I had a summer job at James H. Matthews in Pittsburgh, a factory on Penn Avenue that made marking products, about a mile from my house. My job was entitled stockroom/truckie, and my base of operations was the stock room, presided over by a 33-year-old man (who had worked at the company for fifteen years) named Don Luffy. Two women also worked in the stockroom, Jeannie and Bertha. Every morning when Jeannie arrived—she did indeed have light brown hair—Don burst into this song. He also referred to her casually as Jeannie with the Light Brown.

I loved the job once I got used to it. The stockroom was my base, but the real job was to push a hand truck and move things from one department to another, sending parts from the stockroom up to the various machine shops and bringing finished products to shipping. Jeannie and Bertha found the smaller items in the stockroom and put them in the truck; later in the day they worked in shipping, wrapping packages to go out. I did that too, at the end of the day, once there were no more items to move. It took me a while to learn where the various departments were, and what the job was, but once I’d done that I could relax and got to see everybody in the factory. People were glad to see me, since I was bringing something they needed or taking something they had finished. Mine was the entry level job, and I often trained new people before they went on to something better. I especially trained new black employees, because the company was trying to integrate that summer.

Luffy was a character. He told me that the foreman of our department, Doc Sciuli, had started his job just a couple months before he had, and if he’d been a couple months earlier himself he’d have been the foreman. (I wondered about that.) He was good at his job, but magnificent at screwing around, and taught me how to do that. After lunch, in particular, he would come up with a cup of coffee, slowly clean and light up his pipe, talking all the while; he had an idea of how much work we had to do, and how long it would take, and we’d stand there talking for an hour, an hour and a half, then we’d work furiously for fifteen or twenty minutes and get everything done, and I would head off to the machine shops.

Don often talked about fucking his wife, which he referred to as “playing house.” He was married to a German woman, and “they like to play house as much as we (men) do.” If he fucked her twice he said, “I had a double last night.” If he did it in the morning, he said, “I went off with the alarm clock this morning.” He had a report almost every day. He also brought tabloid newspapers to work which were vaguely about sex, and sometimes he would read aloud from them, asking me what certain words meant. “Fellatio, Dave. What the hell is that?” I sometimes pretended not to know just so I wouldn’t embarrass him, though usually I answered. “Cunnilingus. What the hell?” (Just use the Latin you studied in school, man.)

He was building a terrace in his backyard out of cement blocks, and he drove every evening past a place where they were demolishing some structure, where he picked up the blocks for free. He often told me how many blocks he’s gotten the night before, before he told me how much ass he’d gotten. (One time, when a fellow Catholic named Herb was asking him about the age of his daughters, Herb said, knowingly, “You musta been shootin’ blanks there for a while.” What he meant was, you must have been using birth control. Catholics weren’t supposed to do that in those days.)

Herb was another memorable guy, a burly steel cutter with a wave of gray hair, extremely friendly, always glad to see me. He too was a pipe smoker. (Nearly everyone in the place smoked something or other, because their jobs were fundamentally boring. Herb had to sit there and watch his machine slowly cut huge pieces of steel.) I sometimes helped Herb moved things around, and he taught me to work slowly and carefully, not only because “Once you finish this job, they’ll just have something else for you to do,” but also because freshly cut steel was incredibly sharp on the edges, and the pieces were heavy; you could slice a finger off if you did it wrong. (A fair number of people in that factory were missing fingers, or parts of fingers, from various jobs they did.) One time I was working with Herb and a young guy who I was showing the job to, an extremely jittery guy who was always pacing around if we didn’t have something to do; he put a piece of steel down too quickly and, though we were wearing huge protective gloves, it fell on his little finger, He jumped up and down in pain. Herb got him off to the infirmary, and said, “See. That’s what I was talking about.”

My first day on the job, somebody invited me to bring my lunch into the lunch room where a bunch of guys ate together (the coffee was free, the only perk of the job. It was also terrible), and I sat there with two foremen; a couple of machine shop guys, one of whom was a major bodybuilder; one of the few black guys in the building, who would come into the room with a big smile on his face, tilt his head to one side and say, “All righteee,” probably thinking to himself, “I hate these stupid white motherfuckers.” It was always fascinating to see what people ate and how they ate it. One of the foremen always had a fresh tomato and would slowly slice it and add it to his baloney sandwich. Another, Don Moffitt—who was not overweight—always had a bag of about ten cookies and a piece of cake to eat at the end of his lunch; he ate every bit of it and never offered so much as a cookie to anyone else.

Probably the most memorable of my lunch companions was a big overweight friendly guy named Earl Peaccock. When I would bring a part to his workspace he would say, “Just leave it set there. Leave it set there.” Someone once mentioned the subject of coon hunting, and Earl delivered the interesting non-sequitur, “Coon huntin’ I love coon huntin’. My Dad died coon huntin’. My Step Dad.” But his most memorable story was a time when he began, “I almost shit last night.” A common male expression of surprise. Except that, in this case, it was especially apt, because I believe he was sitting on the toilet (so one hopes he did shit). He apparently lived in one of those Pittsburgh houses that was very close to the place next store, you could almost reach over and touch it, and in a window right beside him, some guy was fucking his wife from behind, standing up. Not something you see every day. “He’s a nice guy, too,” Earl said, as if to say, He may fuck his wife in a weird way, but he has some good qualities as well.

The political sentiments of the group were overwhelmingly conservative, and they were big Nixon supporters, right after the man had been elected to his first term. I sat there smiling just like the black guy. He probably felt the same way I did. That foreman who sliced the tomatoes (who really liked me, and once said in front of a large group that I was the best truckie they’d ever had. That’s what a college education will do for you), once said that if he found his son smoking pot, he’d have an easy solution. “I’d kill him.” He seemed to mean it. “I’d kill him.”

I worked in that place for two summers, after my sophomore and junior years at Duke, and I wrote a couple of short stories about it, in a kind of Pittsburgh vernacular. I thought they were good, though they went unpublished, like all my work in those days. One of the stories was about a young black guy who I was training as a truckie; he had a big Afro and, somehow, no upper teeth. He told me what it was like to work there, just the vibe of the place. “You all right man. I can tell you okay with anybody. But some of these guys, most prejudice people I ever seen.” He didn’t have money for lunch, and finally got Sciuli to give him an advance on his first paycheck. But on the same day, he had taken a hand stamp up to the machine shop and misplaced it somewhere, something that anybody could have done when he was learning the job. I went up to the second floor and looked for it with him, but we couldn’t find it. “They gon’ think I took it, man. They gon’ think I took it.” I told him that made no sense. What would he do with a hand stamp for some particular business? “That’s what they gon’ think, man.” He walked out that day with a bewildered look on his face and never came back.

People would think that, once he’d gotten that advance on his salary, he just quit, but that wasn’t the case. I realized that I had no idea what his life was really like.

[1] I originally wrote these sentences in the present tense, but I have just discovered, much to my chagrin, that the statue was removed in 2018 because it was deemed racist, and now sits somewhere in Highland Park beside a dog park. I guess his immortality was short-lived, or at least tarnished—he’s no longer in the company of Bach—but I myself would settle for a statue in Highland Park, which is a beautiful spot, nicer than that busy block of Forbes.

[2] At Sterrett School two years before, I had played a trumpet solo, during a program when all the students taking music lessons were asked to perform. I did okay, two choruses of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” but I was so nervous that my legs kept buckling and shaking furiously, so that I nearly went over. I was embarrassed, but my friends understood and began to call me “Crazy Legs,” a reference to a football player named Crazy Legs Hirsch.

[3] An unusual name, I must say, but she was one of my favorite teachers of all time. She once told us that her name indicated that she was descended from William Shakespeare, because that was one of the variants of his name.

[4] If our music teacher, Mrs. Stuart, had asked me point blank, I probably would have done it. She too was one of my all-time favorite teachers, and I also had a huge crush on her, a real erotic attachment, primarily because of her connection with music. I can see why groupies fall in love with performers. She introduced me to Watlzin’ Mathilda, which I found to be incredibly poignant (“And his ghost can be heard, as you pass by that billabong.” ), Dvorjak’s New World Symphony, which was the first piece of classical music I ever appreciated. She also once sang Old Man River while accompanying herself on the piano, and I thought that one of the greatest performances of all time. She really belted it out, sitting there in front of a bunch of ten-year-olds.