The ghost of Bessie Smith
by David Benjamin
“… Oh, how that boy can open clam/ No one else is can touch my ham/ I can't do without my kitchen man…”
— Bessie Smith, “Kitchen Man”
MADISON,
Wis. — Picture Bessie Smith, belting out one of her bluesy anthems from
the ill-lit corner of a boisterous, drafty roadhouse somewhere in the
bayou country of west Mississippi. She’s surrounded by musicians — a
drummer and a guitar man, a stand-up piano with a dervish pounding the
keys, a couple of sweaty men with horns, a girl too young to be in a
joint like this rattling the tambourine — who all seem to be competing
with her to be heard. She’s wearing a sequined dress that sparkles and a
head scarf that screams. She’s flashing that big ivory grin and leaning
back, shaking the moon with every gut-busting note and smutty innuendo.
By now, she’s had enough whiskey to be loose, fluid and winkingly lewd
as she improvises new lyrics to her own songs.
“You’re a good old wagon, daddy, but you done broke down…”
Bessie’s
voice is like a train-whistle cutting into the wee-hours blackness all
around, defeating the players but losing its way now and then, here and
there, amidst the riotous party in this clapboard tumbledown. Along the
bar, drinkers are shouting their orders — barrelhouse kings with feet unstable, sagging, reeling, pounding on the table
— and the barkeeps bellowing back. In one corner, three, four, five
biglegged women in print dresses and rolled-up stockings trying to sing
along but don’t know the words and besides, they’re too high to
harmonize. Across the room, two dangerous men arguing thunderously over a
high-brown honey who’s given them both the slip as she saunters out the
door with a third man who already has his eyes down her dress and a
hand on her ass.
The scrape and shuffle of dancing feet on the
slivered floor, flesh on flesh, breaking glass and desperate laughter,
grunts of lust and stage-whisper refusals (or the giddy squeal of carnal
assent), all the while the night invades through gaps and weathered
knotholes — owl screams, cricket chirps, the whine of a million skeeters
and a choir of baritone bullfrogs — boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
The only white face in the place is pinched and avid, an itinerant
musicologist working a primitive recorder, struggling to capture live on
a celluloid cylinder the rude genius of Bessie’s blues. But even this
reverential device, its steel stylus hissing softly, sifts into the din
that swells all around, mindlessly rising up to drown Bessie’s peerless,
joyous performance.
Bessie, of course, minds none of the
pandemonium she has wrought. This is her briar patch. Near the stage, a
handful of devotees presses close, their ears attuned only to the
goddess, their lips following her lyrics, their eyes alight whenever she
makes up something mildly obscene from out of the blue. Bessie belts
on, her song the pure thread that explains it all, makes it all
possible, lends coherence to this stormy evocation of Sodom before the
lightning struck.
Somehow, this unlikely scene came to mind as I
tried to somehow organize all the media mishegoss stirred up by Vladimir
Putin’s meddling in last fall’s U.S. election fiasco. The Electoral
College Blues?
I know, Bessie, Vlad and Donald Trump seem the
strangest conceivable bedfellows — until you give the thought a chance.
More and more, political scandals in America resemble a Reginald Marsh
canvas overfull with drunks and floozies, drinking, dancing, shouting,
singing, fighting and fornicating inside a broken-down blind pig in the
heart of a bog. One side accuses, the other side denies passionately,
then turns the tables, crying “You did it! Not we!” A shred of evidence,
like a snatch of sliphorn jazz, emerges, blows up so suddenly huge that
it collapses upon itself and convinces no one, eventually shaming the
hapless sleuth who dug it up. A thousand reporters, commentators,
analysts and propagandists chime in, create a hubbub that smothers the
few provable facts, befuddles a million minds and spooks the horses
into the quicksand.
Investigations — each with a vested interest
and a foregone conclusion, each discredited before they’ve begun, each
populated by cherrypickers who trumpet half-baked findings that foster
their cause, while wailing denial and disgust at opposing panelists
promoting their own portfolio of dubious revelations — stumble along
fitfully. The ever-rising roar threatens, at last, without resolution,
to simply deafen everyone in the joint — beating an empty barrel with the handle of a broom, hard as they are able, boom, boom, BOOM.
There’s a clear thread here somewhere, like Bessie’s voice and her immortal poetry…
When it thunders and lightnin’ and the wind begins to blow
There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go…
The
thread is the actual evidence. It’s the truth. It’s the testimony of
someone who was there, who saw it all, who played a part — the
bottleneck guitar, the clarinet, the little gal with the tambourine —
who knows the music and sang the words. The thread is John Dean in the
Watergate scandal, or Joe Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings.
The
thread is proof, on paper, on film, on that waxy cylinder scratching
every note, every syllable and flourish, making it permanent and
irrefutable. It’s Nixon’s Oval Office tapes or Denny Hastert’s hush
money.
The thread, underlying all the hollering, emotion and
disputation, is the truth. It’s as clear and vital as Bessie’s voice.
It’s the only reason that all the other noise ever rose up in the first
place.
But we don’t have that imaginary record of Bessie singing
her from her soul in a fictional backwater dive. We know she did that
stuff in joints like that. But there’s no film and there was no
musicologist on the premises. It was all drowned out long ago and time
has swallowed every trace. Even the songs that we’ve preserved are mere
ghosts of the Bessie Smith who gave voice, strength, music, joy and
momentary liberation to a people whose swamp was all around and farther
from the hope of dry land than any black eye could see.
The truth
beneath this latest uproar — this glut of Trumpian uproars — is
somewhere, like Bessie’s spirit. It can’t be silenced, it will never
die.
But most of us have never heard even Bessie’s ghost. Most of us never will.
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
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