Tyrone ‘Pinetop’ Purvis
Tyrone understands life musically. No matter how complex it may seem, there are patterns, and those patterns repeat. It doesn’t matter so much what the song is, but how you play it. Born shortly before the turn of the century, he moved with his family through the cotton belts of Louisiana and Alabama, his father trying to scratch out a living sharecropping on former plantations. Tyrone’s father didn’t start out with forty acres or a mule, just a strong back, a knowledge of the land and an ever-growing number of mouths to feed. Sharecroppers in those days started deep in debt, the landowner supplying them with shack, tools, mule, seed and whatever else the cropper dared to charge at the plantation store, and once the crop was made and harvested he had to accept the price per pound the owner granted him. Nobody got ahead, few managed to stay even. Disputes between owners and croppers and the hope that another situation might be better kept people moving- if the local white lawmen would allow it. Tyrone remembers following half-asleep behind a mule at six o’clock on a chilly morning, only to be wakened abruptly when the plow hit a submerged rock and the cross brace slammed into his hips. The sharecropper kids, white and black, always missed the first month of school because of harvest. He didn’t wear shoes on a weekday till he was twelve years old. He’s chopped and picked cotton, harvested tobacco, peanuts, sugar cane and rice, knows how to harness a team of mules and when and how to plant anything you can grow in a truck garden. Two of his sisters and one of his brothers died before they were nine years old. The only black people he saw who escaped the cycle of indentured servitude his father was caught in were preachers, criminals and musicians.
The music around Tyrone when he was a little boy was church hymns, field hollers and ragtime. Church hymns were Sunday music, mostly just people singing and clapping, sometimes a fiddler, and even more rarely a piano accompanying them. Field hollers were just people thinking and feeling out loud, sometimes to themselves, sometimes to whoever happened to be plowing or picking on the next acre. Ragtime he only heard on special occasions, trips to town (radio doesn’t appear till Ty is grown and has been off to Europe in the war, and nobody he knows at the turn of the century has a wind-up Victrola). Ragtime is on the player pianos in the bars and drugstores of the bigger towns, places he gets to peer into through the windows but rarely enter, and once or twice he actually sees a person playing it, somehow drawing the magic noise out of the beautiful black and white ivory keys. Even if it couldn’t make noise, the piano is the most incredible piece of furniture he has ever seen. In the towns there are also brass marching bands on the Fourth of July and other holidays and the streetcorner minstrels- fiddlers, jugband buskers, spoon and stick slappers, banjo players and occasionally somebody strumming a guitar. They seem carefree and sophisticated, able to travel at the drop of the hat, dancing lightly out of reach of the brutal never-ending grind of field work. Listening to the music, little Ty feels like he’s floating away from the plows and the furrows and the steady plodding of too much to do and not enough to eat to a magical land of fun and adventure, and as he grows he begins to feel like his father is a jailer and a tyrant, and though he understands how tough his life is, the old man’s moods and silent spells, his explosions of drinking and temper are harder and harder to tolerate. When the old man starts renting Ty out as a laborer to local landowners he makes the move he hopes will transform his existence. Tyrone is twelve years old when he hits the road.
Nobody especially needs another homeless, uneducated black kid in the deep South in 1906, but Ty scuffles by, finding little labor jobs here and there, not eating regularly, hopping rides on the back of wagons going to market or trains headed downriver. He follows the music to Mobile and then to Shreveport and when he reaches New Orleans big things are starting to happen to it.
The brass bands, sometimes literally playing instruments left behind by the occupying Union Army after the Civil War, are starting to color outside the lines of the old tunes. They compete with each other, trade players and innovations, and something that starts getting called “jazz” evolves. In the hundreds of houses of prostitution that fill the growing Storyville district the floor show in the parlor is provided by a “professor” at the piano and a handful of sidemen, playing old standards straight or slightly jazzed up, the latest sheet music from up north, their own versions of what the brass bands are putting out on the street, and sometimes just long, open-ended numbers patched together from whatever phrases the piano man thinks of at the moment. Ty gets a job cleaning up and providing security (he is already six feet tall and plow-hardened) in one of the cathouses, raptly watching everything the piano men do, picking up a few pointers when he brings them their drinks, and sitting in front of the keyboard and playing (softly as possible, so as not to wake the girls) in the daytime. It is an accelerated education and he has a feel for the music, as if his fingers and the keys knew each other in another lifetime. Now and then, if somebody is late or passes out before all the customers go home, Ty is allowed to play the few simple songs he’s learned and it is thrilling. Not only is he not chopping cotton or staring at a mule’s hind end, but he’s making music and some of the customers look up now and then to listen and once in a while one of the girls will come sit beside him, seeing him when before he was invisible to them.
He is “adopted” by Joe Dudlow, an impeccably-dressed, hard-drinking piano man who dresses Ty in identical sharp suits and pays his food and board to be his “valet” on the road, traveling back the way he came through Shreveport to Mobile, playing joints run by genial criminals who prefer to pay Joe in trade rather than cash. Joe has had a stroke and part of his act now is to have Ty play his left hand, keeping steady rhythm on the lower keys while Joe skips around the melody on the high ones, and it is still pretty thrilling with the added advantage that they have something big and solid to duck behind when things get rough.
Joe Dudlow dies on the bench one night and Ty takes over, barely missing a beat. The next ten years he lives the musician’s sleep-till-noon, play till daybreak life, playing in bars and whorehouses and on the black minstrel and vaudeville circuits, drinking constantly but not especially heavily, falling in and out of lively relationships with women, mostly older than he is, and always keeping his ears open, learning and adding his own two cents to whatever new sound is in the air, becoming a solid if not well-known jazz man.
He is twenty-four years old and just living along from woman to woman, piano to piano, when two things happen that change him profoundly. He gets into a barfight with a young man he knows, the guitar player he has worked with dozens of times, and ends up killing him. It starts over a women whose name he can’t remember two hours later, but it is in the weave of the life he has been living and singing about, every man he meets in the joints packing some kind of weapon and determined not to countenance one more insult, real or imagined, men with very little to lose who fear losing their self-image and pride most of all, men like the ones celebrated in many of the ballads Ty sings. It is something he has seen many times now but it has never before been him holding the knife with somebody’s hot blood staining his clothes. And before the local law bothers to respond or the slain man’s friends can retaliate, Ty is drafted into the Army and sent to Europe.
In France the African-American doughboys are infected with the same lice as the white ones, eat the same lousy chow, slog through the same mud and cold, and eventually leap out of trenches to slaughter and be slaughtered. People Ty comes to know and care about are blasted into scraps of meat in front of his eyes, there is more hot blood and killing on a nightmarish scale, and when it is finally over “normal” life doesn’t seem real for the longest time. The only piano he touches while he’s in France is sitting in the rubble of what used to be a church. He plays a few notes and walks away. Music can’t save him here.
Ty comes back into the heyday of New Orleans jazz- King Oliver, a very young Louis Armstrong, and the beginnings of the dream of finding a wider audience (and making much bigger money) on records or radio. Ty goes back to his musician life and he plays it all- jazz, hokum, minstrel and the hot new sound called the blues that seems to have always been hanging around and is only now exploding to the rest of the country. The Queens of the blues- Mamie and Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Bertha Mae Spivey- are now the biggest sensations, carrying a full orchestra and several variety acts on their tours, bedecked with feathers and jewels, impossibly glamorous. Ty still sees the guitar tramps at the railroad depots and street corners and will occasionally have one sit in with him for a job, trading licks, but the instrument and the men who play it bring out something dark in him, a darkness that often creeps into his playing since he’s come back from the slaughter, and he prefers to stay out front with the piano like his New Orleans hero Jelly Roll Morton. He is known as a competent and reliable player but never asked to record as a front man, his reputation (”That’s Pinetop Purvis- he killed a man in Arkansas”), intimidating size, and the dark strain in his music scaring off the talent scouts wandering around the south looking for new talent to put on wax. Ty never grins at the piano unless he really is happy, and loses more than one touring orchestra job for forgetting to flash the expected smile. He has a few longer, deeper relationships with women, almost gets married, but the road life is not conducive to that kind of hookup. His playing is effortless now, like breathing, only always with a bit of passion- he’s never learned to totally disengage and become a technician at the keyboard. He travels north and west to big cities, spreading the music like gospel, one of the countless troubadours of the Jazz Age.
The Depression deals musicians only a glancing blow. Hard times may make the mood in the room less carefree, but people need the release of booze and music even more than ever. Ty keeps working- sometimes riding the boxcar rather than the passenger car to move from one town to the other- but playing nonetheless, trying to work in some of the good-time feel of the young upstart Fats Waller, faintly aware of the guitar bluesmen from down home still recording for the cotton field exiles who have moved to Chicago and Detroit and Memphis and Kansas City. Ty is married finally, but the woman leaves him for another musician before they get settled or have children. He writes a blues about it. Booze is illegal everywhere now so the clubs are paying even more protection to the law and the criminals running them aren’t so genial. Now and then Ty plays for white people, the money is usually better, but there’s that smiling problem. Finally he catches on with Reginald Erskine, a Cab Calloway spinoff who manages never to play Harlem before, during or after its Renaissance. Ty becomes the arranger and unofficial godfather of the band, already older than most of the other players. They never catch a hotel gig for more than a few weeks, and pretty much live on the road doing one-nighters and weekend stands all over the country. The music is relatively sedate and upbeat till the paying customers go home and the guys start jamming and Ty can show off his Meade Lux Lewis chops, burning down anybody who thinks they can keep up with him. He never gets too much ahead, the non-stop train and bus poker game eating up what money is left after clothes and meals.
He drifts with the Erskine band for five years as Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee capture the airwaves, with Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford and Count Basie beginning to set the standard for the big band sound. But Ty starts to feel like he’s just spinning his wheels, taking more note than the younger guys when they encounter yet another broke and lonely old musician looking for a gig or a loan or just another drink. It is after playing a Saturday night dance in Shreveport that he steps into a ribs-and-music hole in the wall and sees Delilah Brown singing a simple twelve-bar blues in the sweet, wounded style that is starting to make Lil Green and Billie Holiday famous. She is a little drunk and sad and lonely and he can hear it all in her singing and the piano bench is empty. He sits in for the next number and for the rest of the night and they start to talk and they leave together when the sun comes up. Delilah is trying hard not to fall apart and not nearly as tough as she has to act to survive in the club world. Ty likes taking care of her a little and likes who he is when he’s with her, and when he gets to meet her little daughter China Doll he likes going out with them like they’re a family. Pretty soon he is sending for her whenever the band is in Texas or Louisiana (Reginald Erskine won’t take her on as a girl singer- he still thinks he’s the big draw) and looking for a way off the road. Ty starts skipping poker games, wearing the same pair of shoes till they wear out, till he hears about a roadhouse for rent in a county south of Montgomery, and he makes his break. It is 1941.
Delilah comes to Harmony, Alabama with her little girl and marries Tyrone Purvis. He pulls together a few local musicians who will play for tips and drinks and concentrates on the small-combo blues the cotton town folks and harvest hands are familiar with. A big surprise is that his one-time idol Bertha Mae Spivey, now nearly forgotten, has retired in the town and when the war with Germany and Japan comes and an Army base full of bored colored soldiers springs up nearly overnight, he is able to lure her back into performing. Too old to be drafted, Ty is happy to sit this conflict out making money and watching China Doll grow, to be in one place and become a man of property, to have something in the world worth fighting for. Of course the rumor about him killing somebody eventually catches up, but it doesn’t seem to hurt business and serves as a deterrent to the wilder young men. Even the arrival of a competitor across the road doesn’t darken the good times, with customers wandering back and forth between the Ace of Spades to the Honeydripper checking out the music and the action and buying drinks and food all the while. Ty lets the girls who have flocked to town work the soldiers hang in his club as long as they keep their personal vendettas out on the street, and he oversees a very lucrative crap game out back. Delilah sings some and cooks and stops drinking altogether, happy as she’s ever been, and Ty enlists a local gambler and former bootlegger, Maceo Green, to help him run the place. When the war ends in Japan and the base is closed within weeks it is a shock. All but the most famous of the big bands have had to break up, and the radio and the jukeboxes are full of little jump combos, five or six hot players doing lively, often funny shuffles in the style of Slim Galliard and Louis Jordan. It is a modern, big city sound and Ty is in Harmony, Alabama with some aging blues performers and a mounting stack of bills.
Ty has never thought too deeply about race relations- they seem fixed and nasty, like the periodic hurricanes that flatten Mobile and Galveston every few years. You watch for the signs and get out of town before it gets too bad, but hey, what can you really do about the weather? He has seen periods of hope and bitter disappointment before- the little raised expectations around the Spanish-American War and Philippine Insurrection that brought nothing better for its black veterans, the wave of lynchings around the south that greeted his own return from the Great War- and doesn’t think it any great privilege that black men will be allowed to carry rifles and die in this new Korean conflict. He has a unique position in the community, able to be his own boss without the patronage of white politicians or lawmen, earning their grudging respect. Though he makes them no serious amount of money he also causes them no trouble. He is careful to stay out of the way of white people, and the few, like Sheriff Pugh, who seek him out, do not yet have him in their debt. If he were a braggart or show-off they’d have to take him down, but Ty is a stay at home married man when he’s not working at the club- owns his own house, sent his daughter to school through the tenth grade (where it ends for local black kids) and is careful not to drive too nice a car. He is more troublesome to the small black middle class and serious church people. Some of them have daughters suddenly pregnant during the war years and they suspect that the Honeydripper may have played a supporting role.
Lately Delilah has been not so much drifting away from him but back into herself, into her own demons, and it seems the church and total renunciation of the roadhouse life is the only answer she can see. The stable life Ty has built for them seems now to be a precarious house of cards and here come a series of disasters that threaten him with losing the club. What then? Staying where they are offers only a return to the cotton fields or entry-level jobs with way too much “Yes suh” for him to stomach. Can he hope to catch on, in his fifties, with a high-paying music gig that doesn’t keep him on the road all the time? He is no celebrity, just another guy who can play the hell out of a piano like dozens of others who find themselves adrift as the music scene changes. Without his business, his place in the community, and worse, without his music and a place to play it, who is he anymore?
So it comes to this- hiring a guitar player to bail him out. Desperation. Yes, the guitar players remind him of the killing so many years ago and he has never had one in the Honeydripper, but it’s more than that. Ty still has his ears open, and drifting over from Toussaint’s jukebox he has been hearing the opening shots of a war between the guitar and the piano for primacy as the lead instrument, the voice of the music. It is a war that will break into full hostility in a few years when Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry hit the scene (Chuck wins- the piano and sax almost disappear from rock music after its first formative years) and this amplification is a scary new weapon. It’s as if those damn whooping streetcorner slide-guitar players have been waiting all along, waiting to come inside and push the piano man out of his parlor job. And they’re doing it playing the triplets they copped off the boogie piano masters. Ty is having to realize once and for all that music is a river, that you can lay back in an eddy for a while if you want, but there’s no way you can stop it from moving.
As for his chops at the piano when Sonny starts playing fast and loud, hitting the two and the four so hard and steady- hell, Ty was there when they invented that shit.
