Meanwhile, At The Diner...
“The details were only as Hawk or a dozen other oral informants remembered them, innumerable facts, innumerable stories, all burgeoning, living bubbling beneath the surface, lost to history. That was the trouble with the book. That was the reason there wasn’t going to be any book.
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Meanwhile, At The Diner...
NIGHTHAWK BLUES by Peter Guralnick (Seaview)
“The details were only as Hawk or a dozen other oral informants remembered them, innumerable facts, innumerable stories, all burgeoning, living bubbling beneath the surface, lost to history. That was the trouble with the book. That was the reason there wasn’t going to be any book. Everything buried is a miasma of memory, a morass of oral tradition.” Jerry Lipschitz, the manager of the Screamin’ Nighthawk, never finished his biography of Hawk because, in a sense, the legendary bluesman looms larger in life than can possibly be conveyed through life language. Guralnick allows us to read excerpts from Lipschitz’s book but only toward the end of Nighthawk Blues—after we have already experienced what the Hawk (real name: Theodore Roosevelt Jefferson of Yola, Mississippi) is really all about.
The author of superb nonfictional profiles of blues, country and rock ’n’ roll artists (Feel Like Going Home, Lost Highway), Peter Guralnick may very well have fashioned his ultimate portrait in Screamin’ Nighthawk. To me, the Hawk seems to be a feisty composite of Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf, but to you, he may represent mofe arcane and less obvious bluesmen. The point, however, is not who the Hawk represents—that all great bluesman are embodied in him, that he symbolizes a fading era, and that he actually becomes the blues in a way no fictional blues singer could ever do. Guralnick’s accomplishment is remarkable because he has created a character against which we must now measure our own personal blues heroes. For instance, no longer can I listen to Sonny Boy Williamson without thinking of the Screamin’ Nighthawk.
But Guralnick’s-book is not merely Lipschitz’s unwritten biography. For 15 years, Guralnick has been writing about the blues, and he brings that experience to his novel, shaping a natural blues world. Hence, Hawk is the centerpiece of a dying culture that’s never simply depicted decoratively.
If there’s a little bit of Lipschitz in Guralnick, it’s probably beside the point, for Lipschitz exists primarily as a prop, the method of pursuing the Hawk down Highway 61. To sympathize with Lipschitz is to forget he’s still learning; his every deed and idea are always undercut by the Hawk’s knowledge, whether through trickery or words of wisdom. Lipschitz imagines himself a realist, preserving a blues legacy as well as Hawk’s destiny; Hawk, though, knows he’s a realist and so, he imagines other realities.
“There was always Hawk, dominating the Conversation, spinning out his monologues, sitting back, hands folded over his stomach, and lecturing his audience as if they were schoolchildren listening attentively to fairy tales.” Hawk’s tales are the substance of Nighthawk Blues. Always half banter and half truth, they give the reader a maze to follow— and a message to hold.
My favorite story is about how Blind Arthur Bell, a blues singer on Dr. Clarence Lewis’ Medicine Show, became blind. According to Hawk, Blind Arthur (“he wasn’t no blind man, of course, he may not have seed too good, but he seen plenty of what was going on...”), was blinded by a nefarious sheriff who considered Arthur's handicap a con. Hawk claims Arthur said, “Oh, yassuh, I been blind from birth, and maybe you want to see my certificate from blind school.” To prove Arthur’s blindness was faked, the sheriff took a hot metal poker, brandishing it before Arthur’s eyes. Even though the satanic torch was moved closer and closer, Arthur never blinked, staring straight, ahead. Finally the poker went into his eye and he was blinded for life. “But Blind Arthur didn’t never cry out,” assures Hawk.
Although we are given Hawk’s history and the circumstances of his rediscovery, Guralnick’s narrative occurs in present time. As peripatetic and uncompromising as ever, Hawkls nevertheless at the end of his road. Hawk becomes for us a cynosure of truth because Guralnick makes his life, despite its aimlessness, seem habitual. In a light Faulknerian touch, we enter Hawk’s mind throughout the novel at the moments when only his memories can illuminate the past.
For as cantankerous and irascible as the Screamin’ Nighthawk is, he’s also a solemn storyteller and a quiet messenger of abandoned traditions: he recognizes that his fate is to preserve those memories just as others (like Lipschitz) are preserving him.
The novel’s most poignant scene underlines this notion. Hawk is seated at a table at Yola’sSunset Cafe with his family and Lipschitz; he’s on the verge of dying, but tonight he’s come out of hiding to hear Little Mose, the Crown Prince of Funk. Little Mose’s bantam moves and studied soulmanship do not impress Hawk. Over the impassioned screaming, Hawk grunts and then pokes his son in the ribs, leaning over to express some fatherly nugget. “ Too much noise,’ Hawk pronounced. ‘ ’Course I don’t mind, but that’s where he making his mistake. See, out in the country we used to listen to the crickets, think they was making some kind of song. Once you get used to this kind of racket, you ain’t never gonna hear them crickets no more.’ ”
A deeply dedicated work of fiction, Nighthawk Blues is about all those crickets.
Robert A. Hull
