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Full Circle
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Sunday, 18 December 2005 09:51 |
Some Of These Days
for Jimbo Mathus
Roebuck Staples
of the Staples Singers
grew up in the Delta
playing the guitar. He says:
I was raised
on the Will Dockery place
from the time I was 8
till I got to be 20 years old.
Charley Patton
stayed on what we called
the lower Dockery place,
& we stayed on the upper Dockery.
He was one of my great persons
that inspired me
to try to play guitar.
He was really a great man.
At first, I was too small
to go hear him
on Saturday night,
but on Saturday afternoons
everybody would go into town
& those fellows like Charley Patton,
Robert Johnson & Howlin' Wolf
would be playin on the streets,
standin by the railroad tracks,
people pitchin em
nickels & dimes,
white & black people both. The train
came through town
maybe once that afternoon,
& when it was time,
everybody would gather around
just to see that train pull up.
They d play around there,
before & after the train came,
& announce where they d
be that night. And that's where
the crowd would go.
They d have a plank
nailed across the door
to the kitchen
& be sellin fish & chitlin s,
with dancin in the front room,
gamblin in the side room, & maybe
two or three gas or coal-oil lamps
on the mantlepiece
in front of the mirror
powerful light. It was
different people's houses,
no clubs or nothin . And I
finally
grew up to play.
Detroit
March 22, 1982/
New Orleans
May 27, 1997
3.1.670 |
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