Towards the end of the year I began finding a few other small pockets of
black row houses in
mid-town, and I'd canvass them one by one, usually with fairly poor results.
I'd spotted a small
street right near where Elvis' teacher Kang Rhee's had his Karate Dojo. It
was off Poplar Ave.
and just across from Overton Park. I'd pass the Street on the way to work at
the Art Academy in
the park, and made plans to stop and canvass when I could. It was about a
week later, late
afternoon, and I thought I'd give it a try. As usual, there wasn't much, one
house had a candy
dish made by melting an old lp until the edges could be curled, but I wasn't
buying. I figured it
was a waste of time since it looked like the type of street people didn't
live on for very long, and
indeed there didn't seem to be many long time residents. I got to the end of
the row of gray
shotgun shacks and was about to knock on the final door when I heard an old
blues record
coming from inside the house.
I could not believe what I was hearing at first. I noticed my hand was
frozen, still raised in a fist
to knock on the door. I'd once heard of a collector who had come across a
house where an old
lady was sitting and listening to her old blues records on her wind-up
graphonola as the collector
knocked on the door, and I flashed that this might be the same sort of thing.
So I knocked on the door.
"Come on," the voice from inside beckoned. I opened the door and put a foot
in the room,
immediately looking for the graphonola, and noticing that there wasn't one.
What there was
instead was the old man whose guitar had been offered to me for sale two or
three months
earlier, only this time he was playing Crow Jane on it. He had come out of
retirement.
"How ya' doin?" Well, what could I say?
"Sit down."
I sat. We got acquainted.
"Hey man, don't stop." He played some more. I was of course in heaven, or
the blues version of
it, but what emerged later was even more surprising.