Doin' The Peg Leg Stompppppp p p pp
Doin' The Peg Leg Stompppppp p p pp
“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”― Gabriel García Márquez
I am writing today’s newsletter from my spacious, time capsule attic room at the Tabard Inn in Washington DC. It is the room where author Edward Everett Hale supposedly stayed and wrote the short story “The Man Without a Country” written during the Civil War about a traitor to the states, Philip Nolan--a friend of Arron Burr--who is permanently exiled from the country. The story was a response to Ohio’s House of Representative member Clement Vallandigham’s recent exile for opposing the war, namely the Union’s effort against the Confederacy (Vallandigham is named in the first paragraph of the story), with Nolan’s character ark leading him to finally, on his deathbed, understanding the errors in his thoughts and actions, finding a new love and appreciation for the Union (you can read the story on the Project Gutenberg website).
The Tabard Inn has been a restaurant and lodging for over one hundred years now, maintaining the look of bygone Washington days with its dark wooden walls, Victorian plush chairs and couches offering opportunities for libations and fireside chats, and supposedly still a place where progressive ideas—secrets and plans-- are passed from diner to drinker over candlelit meals of Chicken Fricassee, mushroom tarts and salted caramels, old fashions and martinis. Maybe there is even talk of attempts to exile current traitors who have tried to overthrow the country. I have eaten here for years, but for the first time am staying here in my room with two beds and a parlor that is a three-story creaky stairway climb above the streets of the city. There is no television, but instead a library of books right next to a fireplace (which include titles like The Theory and Practice of Social Case Work by Gordon Hamilton, The Best Plays of 1924-1925, and The Politics of National Party Conventions). It feels like vintage DC, and it is great to be here, although I’m glad I brought my own book to read (The Door by Magda Szabo).
Great music has always come out of this federal state, from Duke Ellington to Trouble Funk to Minor Threat. But today we look at the story of an artist from Georgia, whose tie to DC is that he recorded for Columbia Records, a label that was founded here in 1899 (named after, of course, The District of Columbia). The artist in question was Peg Leg Howell, born 136 years ago today, just eleven years before the founding of the record company, who in 1926 at 38 years of age became the first blues musician the label released.
Joshua Barnes Howell was raised on a farm in Eatonton, Georgia. It was when working on the farm that Howell started teaching himself how to play the guitar while also picking up work & field songs from the workers around him. When he was 27 years old, he lost his leg after his brother-n-law shot him in the knee during an argument (replaced by a peg). No longer able to be a farm laborer, he tried his hand at other jobs until becoming a full time musician, busking in the streets of New Orleans…traveling around the south.
After a stint in prison for bootlegging white lightnin’, Howell was discovered on the streets of Atlanta by A&R men from Columbia Records, who in late 1926 recorded and released the New Prison Blues/Fo' Day Blues 78 single which ended up selling almost 10,000 copies. A regional hit. Not only was Howell the first blues artist on the label, his style represented a link from the field recordings he had heard as a young farmhand and the style thought of as the early blues of the 1920s, with the lyrics and melodies of the former constructed into more formal song structures of the latter, all effortlessly performed with a complicated yet smooth finger picking style. Peg Leg was one of the best performers of a fantastic moment of blues performers, knowing how to put on a show, which came from his years of busking, while displaying his guitar virtuosity.
Howell was successful enough for Columbia to keep recording and releasing his music, a total of 28 sides worth over a four+ year period of time, during which time Howell put a string band together, collectively called Peg Leg Howell and His Gang, who recorded songs like Beaver Slide Rag and Hobo Blues, and a duo with Jim Hill who recorded greats like Monkey Man Blues and Ball and Chain Blues (Howell’s entire recorded output from that period is very much worth a listen). But by the mid-1930s, the depression had come, and his record sales went down. One of Howell’s band mates had died, the other went to prison and Howell went back to bootlegging, only playing sporadically. Like many of the bluesman of the time, Howell faded into obscurity
In 1963 a young blues enthusiast and folklorist named George Mitchell, along with his friend Roger Brown, tracked Howell down in New Orleans; Howell was one of the first blues players to be rediscovered during the 1960s blues revival. Mitchell found Howell in a wheelchair, having lost his other leg to diabetes in the 1950s. When Mitchell started inquiring if Howell was THEE Peg Leg Howell of legend, Howell grabbed a guitar and started playing. Mitchell recorded Howell on the spot. The following is from George Mitchell’s 2015 post on social media1 (it has been edited)…
I was scheduled to move to Chicago in a couple of months to work for Bob Koester of Delmar Records. This was extremely early during the blues revival and few of the legends had been “re-discovered.” Bob listened to the recordings we made that night and said to work with Peg to help him get more in practice, seeing that he had not played or performed since 1934, and was also getting on up there in age.
Peg accepted Bob’s offer and also the challenge to try to regain some of his old musicianship and to get together a total of 12 songs ready to record. I went to Peg’s house almost every day for a month while he practiced. It was a pretty rough neighborhood of shacks and dirt roads (located where the Braves Stadium now is) and I usually left before it got dark.
Finally the day to go to the studio to records arrived, and I remembered that it would be necessary to rent a rollaway bed for Peg to sit on to perform. I called Koester, and he gave his okay for this expense. I didn’t know until we got to the studio that it was on the second story of the building, and the sound engineer and I had to struggle mightily to get the bed up the narrow and steep staircase.
The session was held and when I went to Chicago, I gave the tapes to Bob Koester. They were not what he took the gamble hoping they might be. But when Pete Welding started Testament Records, he bought the tapes from Bob, and released the album entitled “The Legendary Peg Leg Howell.” The record has recently been re-issued by Sutro Park.
The Legendary Peg Leg Howell showcased a player who was no longer the same legendary blues player he was at his high time in the 1920s, when his complicated yet effortless style was his calling card. Instead the recordings showcased a more life-weary, slow, warn blues player. The songs are more dirges—meditations—than the up-beat blues Howell had helped define, and the release was met with a tepid response from blues fans that wanted to hear him at his prime. Over the years, the album has gained notoriety amongst blues enthusiasts and record collectors (its light initial sales made it a rare one) and in 2013, I was lucky to secure the rights to reissue it, releasing it on my label, Sutro Park Records (as Mitchel refers to above..and thank you Josh Rosenthal for loaning me your copy so Barb could remake the cover). I love the raw, true-grit feel of the recordings on the record which to me grabs that little bit of magic left in the carved out body of a great bluesman…that celebrates the beauty deep within the human, even when the process of aging has taken so much else away.
Happy Birthday Peg Leg Howell!
Broken moon lander beams back a final poignant photo — of Earth
“A spacecraft on the moon is lying on its side. It snapped a leg while landing. And now it's lost power. But before the freezing, two-week lunar night swept over Intuitive Machines' Odysseus moon lander, the robotic craft beamed back one final transmission from space. It shows the cratered grey surface spreading to the lunar horizon. And if you look closely, near top-left you can spot a crescent of shadowed Earth in the distance.”
STEVE MCQUEEN WINS VOLTA LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Steve McQueen has done so much great work…but (and?) his short Lover’s Rock is one of my favorite pieces of film in decades. May he live for ten more lifetime awards worth of work.
The Swing Jazz of Eddie Durham — Credit Well Deserved
A very interesting documentary of Eddie Durham…who pioneered the electric guitar in Jazz, who co-wrote I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire (among so many other great compositions) and helped The Ink Spots arrange their vocals in lock-step with their instrumentation, helping them mold their sound. He is a lesser known figure who worked with all the greats of his days and helped evolve the mediums he touched. You can watch the whole doc here.
A member of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections recently e-mailed the listserve with his biography of Sissieretta Jones, an early-last-century opera singer who fought against racism with her voice that, in her day, was compared to the greatest singers of any known operatic era…
I was on the Other Minds board for a few years in the early part of this century during the time the organization would yearly invite a group of the greatest moedern classical/avant garde composers to hang out together for a month as they composed music that they would them perform in San Francisco. Brilliant. Founding ED Charles Amirkhanian, a composer in his own right, was also a DJ who for years interviewed these crazed legends. The Other Minds Archive is a colossal attempt to make available all of recordings Other Minds has in the vaults. Warning: this is a wonderland of a rabbit hole awaiting….
Dust to Dust: W. H. Auden writes poetry for a world marked by death
“We respond to art by feeling not as we ought to feel but rather as we do feel. And in this way, we produce the conditions for God to appear to us.”—W.H. Auden
Ancient Frescoes of Mythological Refugee Siblings Discovered at Pompeii
“It is a beautiful fresco in an excellent state of conservation. The myth of Phrixus and Helle is widespread at Pompeii but it is topical too. They are two refugees at sea, a brother and sister, forced to flee because their stepmother wants rid of them and she does so with deception and corruption. She [Helle] fell into the water and drowned.”
Grandpa’s Gavel
By: Cameron Barnett
I am mad at the red shelf for how tenderly it holds
the finished wood of my grandpa’s gavel because,
really, I am ashamed to hold it, afraid my hands don’t
carry tenderness quite the same, so when I do gather
the sense to stand and face it, my palm unfurled
over the handle like a rain cloud, it’s not lost on me
how I darken its sheen. I take it into my hand, and
it’s now 1959 and I’m in the room: NAACP gathered,
Grandpa pounding the sounding block to call
order—here, big decisions get made; here, activism
happens, ingrained into mallet and memory, and I am
mad again, this time at how little I can see from my clouding
of the room. Getting in my own way is my best trick;
getting in Grandpa’s way is a new trick I try
when I pry the gavel from him, and now it’s 1975
and I’m in his church watching righteousness rain down
from his every word, so I bow low in the back pew and pray
to be less shadow here and more snow—yes, pray that I may
accumulate, not obfuscate; yes, I pray his prayers don’t find me
here, unable to face him, his beautiful words, his heart so set
on justice. So I pick up his gavel once more, and now
we are caught in a SoCal sunset, and time has wrinkled him,
and time has also brought me to be, and this time he doesn’t
lift a gavel, but a grandson, his second one. Does he second-
guess his life’s work, entrusted to this careful boy? Does he notice
the clouds gathering where the sun makes its exit? Do I notice,
as my hand moves for the gavel again, how tenderly he held me,
as if this were inheritance, as if something in me spoke
carefully of a place to rest his soul? Is this why I can’t lift it,
even now, even then? Is this why the curl of my hand around
the stained maple reminds me of a fist, and recoil rips
through my veins? Pop, I want to be brave like you, but
even a taillight can kill these days; these days, the bullets
and bombs you dodged in church have followed us
to schools and streets and theaters and stores and squares,
and it’s like a cloud hangs over the world all the time,
and I am just scared of holding this weight. The world eats me
alive and never knows it. Could I ever have an ounce
of your courage? Could I face myself and all
the prayers you placed in me, raining over
a world awash in chaos? I take this gavel,
and all I am is right here. I’m brave enough
to do that. I’m brave enough to be, for you,
a bridge, perhaps. You were called to be strong
so that I might be your tenderness, but
is this enough? Is this enough? A question I weigh
each time I grasp this gavel, each time I place it back
on the red shelf, each time I pass by with a clouded
heart hoping for release, hoping to get a grip, hoping
to lift you up one day just the way you deserve.
George Mitchell’s facebook page is incredible, by the way, with Mitchell using the platform to regularly publish incredible photos, stories and music of the legendary musicians he recorded during his long career.