Play Pretty Blues by Snowden Wright

Author:Snowden Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938126116
Publisher: Engine Books
Published: 2013-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

The first time he saw The Loblolly, a two-floor hotel located on a gas-lit street in downtown Little Rock, painted a dusty red, crowned in rusty tin, and constructed mainly of its titular pine timber featuring a set of Jalousie windows, Ernie Oertle thought it seemed the kind of place that could keep a secret. Ernie had plenty of secrets. He often traveled to faraway states from his hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, sent on recruiting trips by the ARC label group, a secret he kept from the recruiters for rival labels he often recognized at lunch counters on the road. One of the most reliable talent scouts and salesmen of race records in the mid-South territory, a secret he kept, among others of a more intimate nature, from his mother, Ernie could track down a bluesman and get him under contract before the bluesman even knew Ernie’s full name. He kept secrets from his neighbors. He kept secrets from his friends. He kept secrets from his lovers. At the moment, standing in the lobby of an establishment that proclaimed above its door, “White Folk Only,” and considering how Arkansas’s motto, “The People Rule,” just applied to those of a certain color, the most urgent of all Ernie Oertle’s secrets was the black musician sitting in the front seat of his automobile.

The black musician was our mutual husband. Earlier in the year, April of 1936, Robert Johnson, twenty-four, had gotten up the will-do to knock on the door of a record shop owned by H.C. Speir, the talent scout who first recorded Son House, Charley Patton, and Skip James. Robert had stood in a line of identical bluesmen with identical aspirations, waited his turn, sat in a room with mattresses nailed to the walls, played his song, and hung around the shop as sides were cut on the premises. Each disc for demo purposes was made of red acetate instead of black vinyl. Afterwards, given the talent scout’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for his performance, Robert Johnson left the record shop and continued his travels throughout the South. He was in Little Rock when Ernie Oertle found him. Ernie had been told by his colleague, friend, and mentor H.C. Speir, who’d grown disillusioned with the recording business, that our husband had the goods if only somebody had the gumption.

“And a good evening to you, sir!” Ernie heard someone say on entering the hotel. “Welcome to The Loblolly lobby!”

Across the room, past the deserted sitting area with furniture upholstered in genuine zebra stripe, beneath the mounted head of a lion imprisoned in a silent roar by the taxidermist’s art, past the walls lined with photographic evidence of safaris in darker lands, next to a gun rack weighted by six-foot-long rifles with five-inch-wide barrels constructed of heavy red brass, stood one of the most fascinating things Ernie had seen in the whole of his thirty-two years. The desk clerk’s name was John William Smith. His dimpled chin was rung with a circle beard, and his dimpled cheeks had known of a straight razor.

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