
Photo by Jeff Titon. CC BY-SA 4.0
Walter "Furry" Lewis
Walter "Furry" Lewis singing and playing guitar at the Wisconsin Delta Blues Festival, Beloit, Wisconsin, March 28, 1970.
It is hard to know Walter “Furry” Lewis. I wouldn’t need to say this if you had met him, of course, but with every new year there are fewer people alive who have. When it comes to the blues, mystery is not uncommon, nor is it surprising. Trying to draw up an objective history of the genre is practically impossible. Blues “history,” in fact, bears more the hallmarks of myth and shadow than it does any objective light. But the mystique that surrounds Furry Lewis has nothing to do with mythology. There are few bluesmen whose lives have been better documented. We know the place Lewis was born (Greenwood, Mississippi); we know where he lived after he stopped recording (Memphis, Tennessee); and we know the exact year he died (1981). Lewis’s mystery is not historical, but instead frustratingly cliché: why was he not given the credit he deserved in the time that he lived? Even more mysterious: why didn’t he seem to care?
During the heydays of his career, in the 1910s and ‘20s, Lewis had developed a name for himself as a performer at parties, dances, fish fries, and gatherings on Beale Street, before taking to the road with various “medicine shows” and at juke joints across the south—which exposed him to new guitar and vocal styles. Following the music industry’s new attraction to the “country blues” style coming out of the Delta, Lewis recorded more than twenty songs for Vocalion and Victor. Around this time, though, the financial struggles of the Depression made it increasingly difficult for traveling musicians, much less one with a prosthetic leg (the result of a grisly train accident in 1917).
Lewis took a job as a street sweeper, and worked for the next forty years doing odd jobs for the City of Memphis. Though he still performed some local gigs on occasion, for most of the days of the week, he was not a musician. At two every morning, he sat in his kitchen, alone, listening to the soft percolating of the coffee machine and reading the newspaper while his wife, Versie, slept nearby. Then, it was walking the street corners around Beale and Maine, then Hernando, and so on, picking up the trash and other little bits of waste left behind the previous night. Sometimes friends in the street that knew him would wave, some days they wouldn’t. When work was over, Lewis would stop by Rothschild’s grocery store to try to get some beer on credit.
Lewis’s mystery is not historical, but instead frustratingly cliché: why was he not given the credit he deserved in the time that he lived? Even more mysterious: why didn’t he seem to care?
In those years, he rarely left Memphis, where he had lived most of his life—save for the few times a year he could visit Greenwood, the place of his birth. Inevitably this made him a far reach for blues audiences on the East and West coasts. Even if you were in Memphis, you still had to find him first. There were, of course, a few tricks. Haunt the local bars downtown; he'd play there from time to time. If you were lucky, you’d find one of his friends. They knew the hours he would be home, and they’d take you to the duplex apartment he owned on Mosby Street. I’ve heard that sometimes he would play for guests in his pajamas, if you can imagine that. But despite the way his own elusiveness stunted his rise to fame, it appeared Lewis was happily settled down, in every sense of the phrase.
Dr. David Evans, who recorded Lewis in 1968, put it this way: “He didn't tour coffee houses, clubs, folk festivals, etc. With his civil service job and eventually Social Security, he was content to be a local musical hustler with a steady stream of visitors who would bring drinks and some money, plus occasional local club and festival gigs. It was a very different adaptation from most of the other Blues giants of his generation.”
In addition, Lewis’s songs didn’t seem to fit in with the public’s definition of “blues” music. Before its explosion in the sixties, blues music was primarily defined by New York City, whose audience tied it to a single quality: misery. The blues was the long day with the sun on your back. It was pain and longing. While there is truth to this, what the audience in New York did not know was that, historically, this was dancing music. It was customary for the audience to sing along, to laugh and to drink.
As the story goes, this changed when Leadbelly and so many other itinerant musicians took up permanent residence in New York in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Suddenly, their rural music was being played in large concert halls and at prestigious universities. This was far removed from its usual stages in barrelhouses and on street corners. The blues, which up until this point had been an orally-transmitted tradition, was transcribed and analyzed, and conclusions drawn. The “southern blues” forms were interrogated, then cataloged, and this included its performers. Even the music’s thick local accents were removed so the lyrics could be more readable and ultimately, sell-able, in books and magazines. In performance, audiences often politely chuckled at the music’s perceived crudeness. Leadbelly himself chose to perform in the costume of a country bumpkin,complete with overalls and bare feet, to covertly play into this perception and make a profitable living.
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In general, the blues was treated like classical music. White city bankers and professors in high-waisted trousers went to Carnegie Hall with their secretaries and listened rapturously from their seats to lyrics about farm living, cotton picking, corporate corruption, housefires, racism, and lynchings. In the end, they were there for the misery; they craved these gothic stories that illustrated the South as a largely evil and backward place, soaked in blood and darkness. The new record companies at the time were obliged to craft mysterious, often exaggerated, backstories for their singers to complete this shadowy picture. Thus, the beginnings of blues mythology. But these stories were not just on-the-ground reportings of the devastation and oppression from slavery and the Jim Crow era. They were also the darkest comedies ever written about America.
An example of this is the song, “Black Betty,” which by now has been covered hundreds of times. It was common to hear prisoners on Texas chain-gangs singing its popular refrain, “Whoa, Black Betty, bam-ba-lam," while they worked. From his travels throughout the Deep South, folklorist Alan Lomax discovered the chilling meaning of these words: “Black Betty was the ironic name the prisoners gave to the punishment whip, then still in frequent use. . . When this strap fell upon the spread-eagled prisoner, it would raise him inches off the ground. We were told the song mimicked the sound of the whip [bam-ba-lam]. I marveled at the fierce courage of men who could make ironic and bawdy fun of so frightening an antagonist.” Around the time “Black Betty” was first heard in New York, droves of white audiences looked upon these words with gasping solemnity; its Black authors threw a party and danced.
In those days, a musician that played old folk music could make a killing in New York so long as they played the “lonesome” blues. A musician like Furry Lewis, who used blues largely as an expression of humor, had little space in that music scene. His music was mostly concerned with entertainment and its emotions, like its singer’s, were usually playful, full of sudden moments of great pride and ecstasy.
And his story, as well as his personality, weren’t well suited for mythology either. There was no mysterious past; he would have told you all about it, if you’d asked. Lewis didn’t have a disappearance to answer for, as other blues singers did—he’d been right there in Memphis the entire time. He hadn’t been plucked out of some ghost town like John Hurt or found dying in a hospital bed like Skip James. Memphis was this bustling city that everyone had heard of and could attach no exotic antiquity to, as they could to Avalon or Tunica. Had Lewis stopped touring because he’d witnessed a murder like Son House and thought the Devil was hunting him? Perhaps he’d crawled right into a bottle and out of sight?
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No, it was simply life, cliché, that halted Lewis’s life as a traveling musician. The Depression came, and facing complete destitution, Lewis was forced to take work wherever he could find it. It was the dreary tale of many a musician during that time. What set Lewis apart was his attitude towards the events of his life, and the musical success that always eluded him. In his own words, in 1976, “I'm 83 years old, half-blind, and gots a wooden leg. But I sure gots a lot of friends.” Even in old age, he refused to make more of himself than the simple facts.
So, even after he was rediscovered by Sam Charters in 1959, the audience didn’t hold their breath when Furry Lewis’s name was announced, as they did with the others, thinking to themselves, "Just who or what is coming to the stage?" They’d most likely already met him somewhere. You can see it in the footage—the Memphis Blues Festival in 1969, for example: Lewis strolls blissfully in from the wings as if he had just been asked to come perform for some friends. Odds are, that’s exactly who they were. The festival announcer even says with an elated sigh, “Now, a man that needs no introduction around here…” and Lewis smiles wide knowing that he is at home.
One thing is still true, and more important than legacy. Few can paint like Furry Lewis can with music. Listen to the “Why Don’t You Come Home Blues,” and you’ll believe me. The story takes place over just a few midnight hours, yet its implications ripple across the singer’s entire life. After finding his bed empty and his woman gone, the narrator is attacked by childhood advice from his mother and has visions of his own coffin rolling down the street. He wants to hurl himself from the treetops. Then, to boot, he has prophesying dreams of the world collapsing. Meanwhile, through all of this, the guitar is chugging along like a coal engine. Narratively, this is the past, the future, the present, the inner and the outer world, all in just three minutes. Even when the woman returns at the end, the man still cannot help but admit he would’ve liked to have died when he was younger—the final “punchline” being that if this is what life is, I hope they kill me now. This is cosmic humor worthy of Shakespeare.
So, listen to Furry Lewis speak, listen to his music, listen to how he laughs at everything, how he winks and smiles when he lies. Listen to how his machinery fails when he speaks; how his tongue cannot help but trip over itself trying to put that great spirit into words. When you believe you are done, imagine then a man that is crushed by a freight train, laughing.