What’s in a Song IV

When It’s Sleepy Time Down South

My love for Ray Charles expanded into a love for jazz in general.  I heard musicians on his albums and wanted to hear more of them.  Or heard Ray’s solos on the piano and turned to other pianists.  I loved the sound of David Newman and his tenor sax, and tenor saxes were a rich area to explore.  I had once played the trumpet, briefly, so I certainly noticed trumpet solos.  But as I listened to more and more jazz, one trumpet stood out. It conveyed joy even bwhen playing a sad melody (it was a joyful sadness).  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but that horn was distinctive.  Louis Armstrong.

He was one black musician who was ubiquitous in my youth.  He appeared in the movie High Society, which I loved; he was often a guest on variety shows, and had been in other movies.  With that lip that seemed flattened by years of blowing, his affect of constant hilarity, a gravelly singing voice that was like nothing else I’d ever heard but was oddly affecting, he was instantly recognizable.  I never mistook him for someone else, even when all I could hear was the horn.

The weird thing was that, when I went to the Record Mart, none of his LP’s was current.  Everything was retrospective.  I’d heard him sing “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” on some show or other and was haunted by the melody.  But I couldn’t find it anywhere, except in an old album where it truncated into two other tunes.

Armstrong may have entered a period of irrelevancy.  The Sixties were a time of rising black consciousness, and his whole affect, honed through years of performing, was almost minstrel-like, with his wide grin, happy face.  Young black men could see that as Uncle Tom behavior, and see his music as old-fashioned after the bebop era.[1]  Actually, though he was a world ambassador for jazz, Armstrong was anything but an Uncle Tom, as you can discover through his copious writing, or some of the tapes he left behind[2].  He was as outraged by racism as anyone.  And he’d had to deal with it more than most.

He was one of the great innovators in jazz history.  He is said to have invented scat singing (though he claimed he wasn’t the first), and—though I’m not a jazz historian—I have the feeling that he, with his virtuoso horn, more or less created the jazz solo (I’d be glad to be corrected on that).  If you listen to those early King Oliver recordings, where he’s in the background, then move along chronologically, the way he stepped forward, so to speak, and played by himself, seemed unprecedented.

Anyway, in the fall of my senior year in high school, Armstrong came to Pittsburgh to play with his Jazz All Stars, and I decided to go.

Seeing Ray Charles was such a vital, essentially religious experience for me that I didn’t want to take a date—it would have been distracting—but I didn’t feel that way about Louis.  I’d been palling around with a girl who had broken up with a friend of mine, so I was supposedly comforting her in this situation (actually, I was hoping to be the new boyfriend, but that didn’t work out).  She loved music and vocalists in particular, liked to sing along to whatever was on the radio,so I invited her.  At first she wasn’t quite sure who I was talking about, then remembered that she’d seen him on TV, and liked him.  So we dressed up and went.

The concert was held in a small hall in the Carnegie complex in Oakland, and we had good seats in the center, not too far back.  We were the youngest people in the by probably fifty years, maybe sixty.  I don’t remember any black people at all.  It stood in marked contrast to the Ray Charles concert.  On the stage was nothing but a set of drums.  And in contrast to the opening of Ray’s concert, with the band setting the mood and Joe Adams proclaiming “America’s most exciting musical personality,” we were sitting there when the lights dimmed, a door opened at the back of the stage, and who walked through but Louis himself, carrying his horn, followed by the Jazz All Stars.

Once Danny Barcelona got seated at the drums, Louis raised the horn to his lips and started playing the song I’d come to hear, which opened all his concerts.  The All Stars followed his lead.  After he played for awhile he began to sing.  The acoustics were perfect.

That was the tightest band I’ve ever seen.  Nobody counted down or anything; they just started playing.  I have since bought many concert albums with Louis, and they’re all basically the same.  He starts with Sleepy Time and moves on to various other standards.  I guess this was jazz circa the thirties, forties, and fifties (just what the audience was looking for); it wasn’t innovative (though Louis once had been), but it was beautifully, perfectly done.  Jazz All Stars indeed.  There were songs he had to sing, “Mack the Knife” and “Hello Dolly,” and he generously did encores on a number of them, and as always he closed again with his signature number.  The whole evening was marvelous.

I loved that song for its melody, but also the vision it presented, of an idyllic South.  That vision isn’t accurate, yet there was something in it that captured even the imagination of a man like Armstrong, who had seen the worst of it.  And the melody was beautiful.

My father was a problem child when he was young, so his physician father sent him to military school at Randolph Macon Academy, in Virginia, as a kind of punishment, I suppose, or to “make him into a man.”  It didn’t work as a punishment; my father loved Randolph Macon and loved Virginia.  He often told us (though he had leukemia and knew he would never retire) that he would like to retire there, or in Berkeley, West Virginia, which also had that Southern feel.

Every spring from the time I was ten (that period corresponds to his leukemia diagnosis), we drove to Florida for spring break, and though I loved getting there, I also enjoyed the whole trip, on the deserted two-lane roads we travelled (often creating the route as we went along, my mother sitting beside my father with a collection of maps).  He loved to drive, and liked to continue far into the evening.  My memory is that we typically stopped in Greensboro on the first night, and made it to St. Augustine on the second.  We were still far from our eventual destination, the St Petersburg beaches (the first year we didn’t know how far we would go; my father said we would drive until it got hot, but in subsequent years we kept returning to the same place, a goofy motel called The Fargo on Treasure Island, not an especially nice place, bur right on the beach).  The trip involved three days of hard driving (I think that first year we took five, and included a stop at Randolph Macon, where some of the same men were still teaching).

We had any number of adventures.  One year we had not one, but two blowouts.  For one, I had to walk off and find somebody at a gas station who would help us.  Another year we visited an old colleague of my father’s, Bill Phillips, who lived in Wilmington.  I think my father had been a mentor for him.  He drove us around his homestead in a VW bug at a furious rate of speed—“You always did drive too fast,” my father said, not exactly a slowpoke himself—and that night we slept on (as I remember) plastic-covered cots where I hardly slept at all, and in the morning were served eggs and grits, a food I had never seen before and didn’t like (though the Phillips kids lapped them up).  I was always on the lookout for Dr. Pepper, which was strictly a Southern beverage in those days, so I would drink it as soon as I could (now I don’t drink it at all).  And we were always stopping at Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodges, also Howard Johnson’s restaurants, because they seemed the only dependable places.  We had a few experiences which showed us that, in those days, it wasn’t always good to eat local.

What I remember most from those trips was the way every Southern state looked different, South Carolina different from North, Georgia different from either one of them, and the long flat miles we rode through mossy trees on each side of the road, also drainage ditches full of water, and the shacks we passed in some towns where people actually lived.  I don’t know if I loved the South or just loved the fact that we were going on vacation, but in my mind the South was a hotter, sleepier, more relaxing place, and I never lost that association.

So when my brother went to Duke University because he wanted a school that had a good track program and solid academics, I followed (also probably because our father had just died and I wanted to be near him).  When I graduated from Duke and got a job at a secondary school in Winston-Salam, I was happy to be there.  And when I decided after six years to work part time and give myself more time for writing, I moved back to Durham, which by that time seemed like home.  I’ve stayed ever since.  I’ve now lived in the South—if I count my time at Duke—for sixty years.

My sister eventually told me that our father’s real wish was to have been a writer and live in the South.  In the grand Jungian tradition of the son living out the unlived life of the father, that’s what I’ve done.  It hasn’t proven to be sleepy by any means, and actually isn’t much like the landscape I drove through when I was young, but I have loved living here, and living as a writer.  It’s getting to be sleepy time these days, but that’s because of my age.

[1] I later discovered he had been critical of Dizzy Gillespee and the boppers, even recording a song that made fun of them.  “Every wrong note those cats play, they think it’s a gem.”  It was one of those generational differences among artists.  The trail-blazing young artist becomes the grouchy old one.

[2] Armstrong loved to record things on his tape recorder, including performances, records, conversations he had with friends.  On a documentary I recently watched, they played a tape of him talking to some friends, expressing anger and bitterness about some act of racism, he was throwing around motherfuckers as much as anybody.  His affect on stage, though it reflected a joy he found in the music, was not him, strictly speaking.  He was much more complicated.