In the course of creating videos for the enhanced e-book versions of Feel Like Going Home and Lost
Highway, and Peter’s other books—we left some unexplored threads. This story
about Charlie Rich was too good to leave out, so Robert Gordon and Laura Jean Hocking and
I put together this short video that tells the story of the
song that came out of the book.
—JG
It’s pretty hard to say one thing or another is
the biggest thrill of your life — but for Charlie Rich to surprise me with a
song that had been inspired by the feeling he got from reading my book — well,
that was a pretty big thrill!
The whole story’s pretty much here— I’m not sure
if I say it outright, but I loved Charlie and Margaret Ann from the moment I
first met them, at the Vapors, out by the Memphis airport, in the spring of
1970. It was a relationship, I soon came to learn, that was based on total
honesty, and it was one that continued up till Charlie’s death in 1995, and
then for the fifteen years until Margaret Ann died. I wish they could have been
here to be part of the conversation — but at least their good friend, Roland
Janes was (Roland was everybody’s good friend) — not only to
put me in my place but then to show me the kindness that was such an
ineradicable part of his nature. That kindness played a huge role in helping us
make Charlie’s last album, Pictures and Paintings, in 1992. Check out
Roland at the beginning of the video — and then just sit back and dig the
music.
An audio excerpt from my 1970 interview with Johnny Shines is included in the new enhanced e-book of Feel Like Going Home. Here’s a brief clip, with Johnny playing guitar as we talk, at the Hotel Diplomat in Boston’s South End.
Once you got past the brilliance of his music, the first thing that struck you about Johnny Shines was his resolve, his resolve and and a kind of invincible optimism that he could, that he would accomplish anything that he set out to do.
Sometimes he was inclined to dismiss this quality as just plain stubbornness – he would say with a grin that he was like an old mule, but you knew that wasn’t it. A mule never had Johnny’s sense of adventure, a mule never possessed Johnny’s wonderful sense of humor, and stubbornness certainly couldn’t explain John’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge, his determination even in his mid-70s, to explore new worlds. Don’t forget: This was a man who ended up in Chicago strictly by accident; he was on his way to Africa, in 1941, because he wanted to find out what it was really like over there. “They teach you in school that Africa’s full of cannibals and savages,” he said, “but so many important things have come from there that I wanted to find out the truth for myself.”
That was the second thing that struck you about Johnny: his passion for the truth and his almost contagious enthusiasm for any subject he was interested in. I don’t know anyone who could have been less of a salesman: Johnny never had any kind of a line – he was always straight with you to the point where he could make a stranger uncomfortable with his honesty, but even so he sold you on anything that captured his imagination just on the strength of his own enthusiasm for it. With some musicians this curiosity and enthusiasm is confined to their music, sometimes not even to that. But John’s took in the whole world.
I was 25 when I first met John, probably a very young 25, and I was in awe of him strictly because of his music. He was out on tour with Willie Dixon and the Chicago Blues All Stars, and I had written a story about the group, but it was Johnny I wanted to interview because I was so knocked out by his singing and playing. I had listened to “Brutal Hearted Woman” and “Evening Sun” and “Joliet Blues” and “Dynaflow” over and over, and I was a true believer, but Johnny wasn’t interested in that. He was 53 years old, and he was like a kid let loose in the world: he wasn’t looking for disciples, he was just interested in everything. Talking about the past, I asked him about hard times, and he responded by speaking about what it was like to live in what he called an “exploratory world.”
“It’s very exciting,” he said, recalling his travels with Robert Johnson in the ‘30s and looking forward to his own new-found career in the late ‘60s. “Say, for an instance you leave here, you go maybe four or five hundred miles, and you don’t know nobody, everything is new to you. It’s really, I mean, if a person lives in an exploratory world, then this is the best thing that ever happened to him.”
That was the world that Johnny lived in right up to the moment he died. He was interested in people. He was interested in how things worked. He loved to read. He loved to fish and hunt. He prized the past, and he looked forward to the future – always. When I first met John over 40 years ago now, I never dreamt that we could actually become friends, this was Johnny Shines after all, Johnny Shines, one of my idols – but because he was Johnny Shines we became friends right away. With John it was friendship or nothing. He could readily accept differences of background and personality, politics, philosophy – he actually appreciated the differences – but if you wanted to be a friend of John’s, you had to bring something to the party.
Most of all when I think of Johnny, I hear his voice: singing, talking, just chuckling quietly to himself, booming out in that way that could always get you to sit up and take notice. “You think I can sing now?” Johnny said to me one time. “You should have heard me back in the '30s. Back then I could scream like a panther.” But, of course, he could just as easily whisper, too. Sometimes I think he would drop his voice just to make sure his audience – whether it was a single individual or a concert-hall full of people – was really listening. It didn’t matter whether he whispered or he screamed, John was always going to be heard, and his message was always going to get through.
“I’m a Christian man,” he said one time, “but I play the blues. I don’t feel that the blues is dirty. Society decided for us that the blues was dirty. That’s why I almost feel like I got to carry it on. I want to remind people, black people especially, because if you forget your beginnings you can’t do much with the future.” John Shines never forgot his beginnings, and he never lost sight of the future. That was his mark as a musician and as a man.
