Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

  The story, as Hank O’Neal tells it, dates to that record, when he first listened attentively to Jody Bolden’s highly original style; and it leaps then to 1969 when John Hammond played a tape for O’Neal at Hammond’s CBS office and asked if he recognized the musician.

  “That’s Bobby Henderson,” O’Neal retorted, and claims he only needed four notes to make the identification. The tape had been made by Hammond at Mike Flanagan’s Petit Paris Restaurant in Albany, where Jody played regularly before his illness sidelined him. The name “Bobby Henderson” is unfamiliar to many Albanians who know Jody only as Jody; but it is his straight name, and the one he uses on all his records.

  O’Neal, who was visiting in Albany last week, said he told Hammond: “You’re a big CBS executive, why don’t you record this?” O’Neal, in his notes for the record jacket, continues the story:

  “John said it was a pity that no one would record Bobby. The major companies just don’t care very much about jazz and their interest in sixtyish, largely-unknown Negro jazz pianists is totally non-existent.

  “And so,” O’Neal adds, “it became a personal project to find someone to sponsor a record of Bobby.” The sponsor turned out to be Sherman M. Fairchild, head of Fairchild Aviation, and Fairchild Camera and Instrument Co., a man O’Neal describes as “a longtime friend of jazz behind the scenes (and striding piano players in particular).” Striding piano, or stride piano, is the jazz genre into which Jody Bolden’s work fits, along with the work of James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and Art Tatum.

  Says O’Neal of Jody: “He’s a more tasteful player than either Tatum or Fats. Tatum would put forty-eight notes in a measure when you could’ve gotten away with twelve. And he [Jody] doesn’t get so boisterously out of hand as the music sometimes did with Fats—on songs like ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ or ‘Fat and Greasy.’”

  Most of Jody’s late years were lived in Albany, away from the mainstream where most musicians practice their art. And so, as O’Neal pointed out in the liner notes to Home in the Clouds, Jody/Bobby has “not been a major part of the new trends in jazz that have developed since he left New York City in 1937. He really never needed to be. He simply plays jazz that is eternally fresh, always tasteful, and ever appealing. It may have been a few years, but Bobby does not have any catching up to do.”

  Jody, born in 1910, began taking piano lessons when he was eight, when Mamie Smith, the blues singer, used to come to his house in Harlem to visit. By the time he was fifteen he was serious about the piano—“practicing, practicing,” he said. “At that age I never felt I could play. You’d listen to guys like Ellington and Fats and they’d really grown up in music. But after a while they were very inspiring.”

  He made a record when he was seventeen, backing up a young singer named Martha Raye. Jody credited John Hammond with getting him that record date.

  “Martha was sixteen,” Jody recalled. “She had long pigtails and she was well developed for a young girl, and her mother used to travel with her. All those musicians, man, had big eyes for Martha.”

  The record was cut but never released. Jody got work with a band, then met Fats, who took him on as a protégé. He credited Fats with giving him the self-confidence to play solo piano, and then introducing him to crowds with the words, “Now you’ve got to hear my boy play.”

  An underground kind of fame developed for Jody, and then came a record date in 1933 and fate stepped in. The subway Jody was on had a breakdown and when he got to the studio his recording time was gone. And he waited twenty-three years for another chance—the night in 1956 that John Hammond walked into a nightclub on Albany’s Eagle Street called the Kerry Blue, run by Jean Garrison, and with Jody as the star attraction.

  It would be Hammond’s rediscovery of Bobby Henderson, and in the next two years Jody would make four records, most notably A Handful of Keys, on which he gives a good but disappointing rendition of one of his greatest numbers, “Twelfth Street Rag,” but which also has his best recording, “Blues for Fats”—fourteen choruses of it. One jazz critic, Johnny Simmen, thought this to be “one of the outstanding piano performances in music. Any kind of music, I mean … Bobby’s inspiration never falters.”

  Jody had settled in Albany in 1946 and ten years later was telling people, “I just want to be known as an Albany man who played music.” Such musicians as Rex Stewart and Roy Eldridge and Trummy Young and Omer Simeon and Hot Lips Page would drop by the Kerry Blue to play alongside Jody, or just listen to him make that two-handed sound that filled the room.

  What kind of music was it?

  “I just play with ten fingers,” Jody said.

  “Some piano players only play with one hand,” someone said.

  “You got to have at least eight fingers,” Jody said. “You can’t make it with less than that.”

  Jody seemed to have two dozen fingers and, at his peak, incredible accuracy and unbelievable speed. A tune like “Twelfth Street Rag” would send listeners into ecstasies of excitement, bring them to their feet to cheer the maestro.

  It had been like that from the early days, when he was playing in such Harlem nightclubs as the Famous Door and Pod’s and Jerry’s, and then at the club where he met Billie Holiday.

  “She sang great, man, from the first time I ever heard her. She was working in a joint in Prohibition, maybe it was the Clam House, in New York, and a lot of musicians I knew wanted me to hear her. So we go by the Clam House and Billie was accompanied by this girl named Vi and Vi played a lot of piano, and Billie sang. She was a natural from the start and it only took the right people to hear her. So then I got up to play a tune and Billie was amazed because I was so perfect accompanying her. And then I played ‘Sweet Sue’ for an encore and I knocked her out.”

  In her book, Lady Sings the Blues, Billie wrote in passing that “By then Bobby Henderson was playing for me. I still think he was the greatest.”

  He played for Billie at a place called Jerry’s Log Cabin in Harlem, on 133rd Street—his first nightclub job. Willie (the Lion) Smith was on the bill, and Jody replaced him. Jody remembered Willie fondly: “Among piano players Willie was one of the senior citizens, man.”

  Willie was on his last night at the club when Jody arrived, and he recalled: “I froze when I got in the place, cause I never had seen so many famous musicians—Goodman, Bunny Berigan, the Dorsey brothers, the whole crowd. The boss of the place got me up to play and I played Gershwin’s ‘I Got Rhythm.’ I was nervous, but the boss says ‘You play piano,’ and I says ‘Little bit.’ Surprisingly I got a terrific hand. Somebody was liking it.”

  1969

  Postscript: We were all was still liking it when Home in the Clouds was released in 1969. It was Jody, all right, but past his peak. The lung cancer that was destroying him slowly had affected the use of his arms. He died December 9, 1969, about the time the record came out.

  When he and I talked in his last days of how he looked at his career he said, “I don’t want people to forget me.” Now when I listen to his records, I feel great joy at being in his company again, but also an enduring sadness; for though the music on all his records (even one with him playing a tinny, honky-tonk piano) was always of a high order, it was never high enough to capture the complete Jody, the great Jody. And so people who come to him only through his records can never know how truly good he was. Only those who heard him play live have that now. I have that and it’s a great thing to have.

  The Charcoal Man:

  Warming Up to the Press

  George Dobert didn’t know why anybody would be interested in hearing about the making of charcoal nowadays.

  Because it’s kind of odd, he was told; kind of unusual; the kind of thing you never think about anybody doing. Charcoal is just there at the supermarket when you want it, ready-made, like a jar of artichokes. Maybe you could show me the equipment, how it’s done.

  “It’s just burned out in the yard in a pile.”

  “The wood?”

  “Yep, the wood.?
??

  “Any particular kind of wood?”

  “Nope. Any wood will burn.”

  “Well, could you show me the equipment you use?”

  “You want to come out I’ll show you the shovel and the rake.”

  So the jaunt was made up the winding road to Taborton and eventually to George H. Dobert’s farm on The Kipple, a road that was just a meandering wagon path when George Dobert was born seventy years ago, and wasn’t much more than that when he bought his farm forty-eight years ago. A big farm. A hundred acres. Maybe two hundred, George said, worrying not at all about being specific with a stranger. But when he got there forty-eight years ago he could look across his land and up to the higher part of the mountain and see the house that was there even then, that is now a bigger house. But that isn’t all that’s changed. A whole forest has grown up in between George’s house and that other one. And it is out of that forest that the logs came that he—and his father before him—turned into fire wood, or charcoal.

  “How long I been burnin’ coal? If you want to know the truth, since I started to walk.”

  George also has raised some beef cattle and dairy cattle and planted his own potatoes and lettuce and lived off the land, and the charcoal was something else that brought money in. Did he live off the charcoal?

  “It takes everything,” he said. “If I just wanted to farm I’d starve to death.”

  He never did farm a whole lot, and then lightning hit his barn and it burned down and he lost some of the animals, but anyway it was inevitable that he’d go out of the dairy business, what little there was.

  “Today if I had to sell a quart of milk I’d have to have everything inspected. Fellow down here below the church used to sell milk in the summertime, and the doctor had to come up and inspect it. If I was to sell a quart of milk today I’d give it away before I sell it. Give it away. When I came up here you didn’t have that stuff. Make butter and take it in town and sell it. Now there ain’t no cows from here to Sand Lake.”

  What about the charcoal, what do you do with it?

  “You sell it.”

  “For starting coal furnaces, for instance?”

  “Where do you know they got houses like that nowadays? Nobody got them kind of furnaces anymore.”

  “The most they buy it for is to have a cookout, and barbecuin’,” said Mrs. Dobert, who, having said that, got up and left the front porch.

  “How much do you sell in a year?”

  “I have no idea. Some years I didn’t burn anything. Now pretty near everything is oil furnaces. See oil trucks goin’ up and down the road every day. And everybody works in the city today. That’s where I oughta went. Them that went didn’t care for anything else but making the big money, gettin’ five dollars an hour. Didn’t get that burnin’ coal. Sometimes you don’t sell ten dollars’ worth a week. Just now it’s a little better. All winter didn’t sell hardly any.”

  “What about the profit, say from about fifty bushels?”

  “I ain’t sold fifty bushels can’t say when, must be four, five years ago. Maybe longer. Used to have a roofer and he’d take forty bushels at a time. I didn’t measure. He furnished the bags. I don’t know what happened to him. Guess the bigshot died and they got someone else in there. Everything’s changing and changing fast. Coal ain’t like it used to be. Sometimes you’d go to the city and sell forty, fifty bags. That ain’t much. That ain’t a day’s pay. I ain’t peddled now to the city in seven years maybe. I ain’t got no trucks or anything. Just a team of horses. If I went to the city with them they’d have me arrested. I’d be holding up traffic all over.”

  Now one of his sons (he had eleven children) delivers charcoal to some stores, but not very much by George’s reckoning.

  “Gettin’ old anyway. All through as far as I’m concerned. All through crawlin’ around all night.”

  “Crawling around?”

  “You got to watch it, maybe every two hours.”

  “How big is the pile?”

  “Sometimes you burn a little, sometimes big ones.”

  “We’ll say a pile half as big as this porch. How deep would it be?”

  “Ten feet and that there burned, and it settles down and sometimes the inside ain’t burnt.”

  “Now this may seem like a dumb question, but how do you keep it from just turning into ashes?”

  “Cover it with dirt. Put a heap of wood, and cover it.”

  “The dirt doesn’t smother it?”

  “Nope.” George Dobert snorted at the ignorance of the stranger. “You just start a little fire and get it going. I don’t know how you explain it. Just start a fire. And then you got to watch it every time or it’d burn right up.”

  “So it just smolders then. For how long?”

  “Couple of weeks, and maybe it wouldn’t be all charcoal then. Maybe some of it wouldn’t be burnt.”

  “What about when it rains?”

  “That’s good. Sometimes it gets so red hot it won’t smoke even.”

  George took the visitor out of the barn and showed him a bin of finished charcoal, about a quarter full. Cords of hemlock and maple and birch were stacked along the driveway to the barn, and an old plow was gone to rust. In another barn were the horses. What kind of horses? Just horses. And then a truck and a large sleigh that the horses draw in the winter, which is a bad time for burning coal because it’s too cold to keep watching it all through the night. The truck belongs to George’s son who works with the logs and the charcoal now that his father is pretty much out of the business.

  “I ain’t gonna stay here forever,” George said. “Some don’t live as long as I did.”

  He looked down at the tree full of wild apple blossoms and that reminded him of another change in life.

  “They wonder why people die,” he said, “eatin’ all that arsenic. They spray it on everything. I eat apples I peel ’em. They even spray the potatoes. Fella bought a whole load of potatoes and planted ’em and they never sprouted. Another fella up there bought a pig and gave it a cabbage leaf and the pig got sick. Vet said the only thing he could see was that he got poisoned. But I lived here forty-eight years and I guess I’ll live forty-eight more. Live, like the fella says, as long as I see somebody else livin’.”

  It was dusk now and the mosquitoes were out and biting. The stranger swatted them as George’s eyes smiled through his steel-rimmed spectacles. He had started out reticent, untrusting. Now he was relaxed and garrulous, talking again without prodding about the city, where he envied the big money. “Even when they get makin’ five dollars an hour it ain’t enough for them and they go on strikes. Times are changin’. Times are changin’ so fast you can’t keep up with ’em.”

  The visitor made a note and George wondered: “You gonna put that in the paper too?”

  “Probably.”

  And George shook his head in amazement at what people find important to write about in the newspapers these days. George couldn’t get over it.

  “Say,” he said, “you’re gonna have to send me one of them papers.”

  “Positively,” said the visitor, who then drove back down the mountain into the middle of 1970.

  1970

  Postscript: Some months after this story appeared in print a lawyer from Troy came up to me at a party and said, “George Dobert got a kick out of that story you wrote about him.” I said I enjoyed it too because it had gotten at an odd and antique truth about rural life. Then the fellow said, “No, he got a kick out of it because he thought you were an Internal Revenue man when you called him. He thought you were checking him out.” And so whatever George had told me about making charcoal had to be read in an entirely new light. It also may help explain why, in the story, Mrs. Dobert leaves the porch so suddenly after bringing up the subject of barbecuing. I taught this story regularly in my journalism class for years after, explaining that reporters should understand clearly that there is a decided difference between the truth and the whole truth.

  Barney Fowl
er:

  The Quest for Curmudgeonous Joy

  Barney Fowler.

  In some quarters, the name slides through the teeth like sandpaper. Elsewhere, teams of police and patriots stand and recite the pledge of allegiance to Fowler and all his works. His mail, he says, totals twelve thousand letters a year, and people call him in the middle of the night to shout obscenities. For a time he received a flood of pornographic mail, catalogues and photos in plain brown wrappers, the consequence of a practical joke played on him by Albany students who had been targets of his verbal abuse. He took two pies in the face on campus here to raise money for the Telethon. People remember him Red-baiting professors who were giving anti-draft counseling to students in the 1960s, and he is the coiner of an alternative name for State University at Albany that some people find alliteratively appalling: “Dirty Doodleland.”

  I remember Barney Fowler when he didn’t wear any socks. He was then the Saturday city editor of the Albany Times-Union, a relative newcomer from Schenectady, where he had been a columnist for fifteen years on the Union-Star. Sockless he came from Schenectady, bearing harpoon, bow and arrow, and writing nature stories about wild Adirondack animals and fish, which he would skewer with arrow, spear with harpoon. Sockless he would go into the woods (also matchless and without benefit of gunpowder), and survive alone for a week or two, then come back to the city room and turn out one sockless story after another about skewered and sockless Adirondack animals. Hal Kallenburg, the late Times-Union columnist, took note of the phenomenon and made the pronouncement that enlightened us all: “Barney had a great disappointment in life. He expected to be born a bear.”

  Barney Fowler is now sixty-seven and has been in the news business for fifty-three years, most of that time as a columnist. He recalled some of his high points recently, during an interview at his desk in the Times-Union city room. Chain-smoking and deep-inhaling Camels as he turned out one of the six columns he writes every week, he summed up the essence of his role as a curmudgeon: “I’m totally opinionated and will remain that way.”