Finding A Space For Songs
Lorenzo Thomas

        Du musst dein Leben andern!

                                  —Rainer Maria Rilke

Coming back home to New York from serving in Vietnam, I found everything around me tentative and vaguely unsatisfying. When the chance came to go to Houston for a brief assignment, my response was “why not.” After all, great music came from there. Houston was Arnett Cobb´s hometown. Home to the Jazz Crusaders and the great Hubert Laws and Archie Bell & the Drells, where the people danced as good as they walked. It was the city where Milt Larkin, starting in 1936, recruited the baddest “Territory” band in the history of jazz. It was where Leadbelly sang, “Let the Midnight Special shine its ever loving light on me.”

Well, that last was a bit ominous, but Houston definitely had a reputation for wonderful music, even if the local musicians rightfully complained about how hard it was to make a living there. Ten years before Motown, Houston´s Duke/Peacock Records was the fountainhead of AmericaÍs black popular music. I would later hear teenage musicians, such as saxophonist Shelley Carroll, blow rings around cats that were working the jazz clubs in New York. Houston was also a city where blues virtuoso Sam “Lightnin´” Hopkins—revered by the rest of the civilized world as a living legend—was pleased to perform on his Third Ward front porch for the entertainment of his neighbors.

But the bluesman who most successfully captured the character and ebullient power of Houston was Weldon “Juke Boy” Bonner. He lived on Elysian Fields in Fifth Ward and was a poet who, in addition to composing his own songs, published verses in the Houston Forward Times. In later years, Bonner would create the music for a play at Barbara Marshall´s Urban Theatre. Marshall—who was the mentor of movie star Loretta Devine—understood that the “consciousness raising” drama of the Black Arts Movement could only be enhanced by drawing upon the heritage represented by the black church and the blues.

It was Juke Boy Bonner who served as Vergil to every newcomer. It was he who proclaimed that Houston was “the action town,” but also a place where in some neighborhoods it could be dangerous to “break a Twenty after dark.” Bonner and his songs represented the many people in Houston who had migrated from the small towns of East Texas and Louisiana, from the farms in the Rio Grande Valley or along the Brazos River stretching into Central Texas. His songs captured the archetypal newcomer´s initial wide-eyed wonder, as well as the inevitable disappointment and the onset of a sophisticated cynicism:

Here I am in the big city
And I´m just about to starve to death.

Still, Bonner´s sophistication never deteriorated into pessimism or despair—neither in his songs nor in his quietly gregarious personality.

Bonner´s realistic vision of the city was shared by newspaperman Sigman Byrd. Seen through Sig Byrd´s eyes in the early 1950s, downtown Houston was harsh and gritty—grimmer than any bluesman´s vision. Much dimmer then were the streets that now ring with chatter from credit card-carrying citizens strolling blocks seemingly composed of nothing but trendy restaurants. A true flaneur in the tradition of Baudelaire, a strolling philosopher like Walter Benjamin, Byrd reveled in his dyspeptic appreciation of urban life. He was naturally, indeed magnetically, attracted to the “gray asphalt and grimy concrete,” enamored of that “old, crowded, tired avenue once so proud, so bright with gaslight and hearty laughter. Sam Houston walked this avenue. So did Mirabeau Lamar, Gail Borden, Audubon, Dick Dowling, and other great ones.” It was not Main Street that Byrd celebrated, but Congress Avenue, which like other downtown streets near Old Market Square in those days was skid row—populated by hustlers and a few absent-minded shopkeepers, dope addicts, and other losers.

Byrd also loved the streets of Houston´s black neighborhoods, particularly the Fifth Ward area around Lyons Avenue and Jensen Drive known as “Pearl Harbor, the Times Square of the Bloody Fifth.” Today there´s nothing there but vacant lots and a few boarded-up buildings, but for decades the area bustled with restaurants, bars, and small stores, a fabled locus of lowdown glamour and hair-trigger confrontation. It was also, Byrd once wrote, the proving ground for rhythm and blues singer James Wayne “and all the other Fifth Ward boys who had functioned right and gone high in the world of boogie, jive, and bop: Illinois Jacquet, Gatemouth Brown, Arnett Cobb, Goree Carter, and Ivory Joe Hunter.”

Beginning in 1970, the corner of Pearl Harbor became the home of the Black Arts Center, a project of Rev. Earl Allen´s HOPE Development organization. Partly supported as an arts agency by John and Dominique de Menil and partly funded as a meliorative intervention by a patchwork quilt of social service and community antipoverty grants, the Black Arts Center was located at Lyons and Jensen precisely because of the area´s notoriety. Lodged in two renovated movie theaters and a warehouse building, the Black Arts Center was both an artists´ collective and a school. There was a fine resident drama group, a successful “dropout prevention” program, and an art gallery where a 1974 “Juneteenth” program that I organized with Turner Worthen helped revive the African-American community´s century-old celebration of the end of slavery in Texas. Given the always precarious state of arts funding, it´s not hard to figure out what eventually happened to the Black Arts Center. As Juke Boy Bonner would say, “the money got funny.” Jimmy Carter´s CETA program helped for a while, but when a former Hollywood actor moved into the White House, the reality of hard times moved in on black America.

As the Black Arts Center faded, what kept me interested in Houston was what had excited me about the city in the first place—the music. I became involved in Sum Arts, an organization founded by poet Vivian Ayers and musicians Bob Morgan and the late Lanny Steele. Sum Arts was the city´s most adventurous production company, staging concerts ranging from Ornette Coleman and Karlheinz Stockhausen to Sonny Rollins, Muddy Waters to Anthony Braxton and Pauline Olivares. For several years I helped to produce Sum´s annual Juneteenth Blues Festival at Miller Outdoor Theatre. Meeting and working with blues greats such as Koko Taylor, Roosevelt Sykes, John Lee Hooker, Professor Longhair, Lou Ann Barton, Clifton Chenier, and Sippi Wallace was a thrill.

One year when I was MC, I was standing in the wings as Big Mama Thornton—backed by Arnett Cobb´s band—finished her set. Waves of applause were rolling in like the surf at Galveston when I got a “stretch” signal from the stage manager. I bounded out on stage and pumped up the audience some more: “How about letÍs hear it for Big Mama´s greatest hit … Ball and Chain!”

Arnett´s and Big Mama´s eyes shot daggers at me, but they swung into an intense, heart-stomping performance of the song that many younger listeners mistakenly thought belonged to Janis Joplin. Finally they came offstage triumphant and tired. “Listen, Lorenzo,” Arnett growled, “the next time you want a request, you better call up KCOH!”

Each year on the last night of the festival, Steele would throw a party at his home where he and other members of the Sum Arts staff—several of whom were poets or musicians—would entertain, while Big Mama Thornton sat grumpily majestic in an armchair like the monarch that she truly was.

Soon the mode of the music had changed. “Look at the map of Texas and see where Houston´s at,” chanted a new group of performers. “It´s on the border of Hard Times.” Three young men using the handles Mr. Scarface, Willie D, and Bushwick Bill, styled themselves the Geto Boys and—on the local Rap-a-Lot Records label—introduced a new style of music and spoken word poetry called “gangsta rap.”

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Geto Boys succeeded in “putting the ´hood on the map,” but it was a depiction of Houston that was, to say the least, disturbing. With hypnotically rhythmic music and profanity-laced rhymes that often approached true eloquence, the Geto Boys struggled to find some hidden meaning in a social milieu marked by unfocused aggression, justifiable paranoia, and testosterone-induced stupidity. Their subject matter was seldom pleasant, but some of the trio´s best jams featured weirdly introspective lyrics, like these by Brad (Mr. Scarface) Jordan:

     I live by the sword
     I take my boys with me everywhere I go
     Because I´m paranoid
     I´m looking over my shoulder
     And peeping ´round corners
     My mind´s playing tricks on me.

The Geto Boys found words to express the profound alienation of the city´s marginalized youth. The problem, as these artists well understood, was how to prevent “ghetto fantasies” from turning into nightmare realities.

By the end of the decade, Houston was known to much of the world through the Geto Boys—and followers such as Li´l Keke, Street Military, and DJ Screw—or through movies such as Jason´s Lyric (1994), a ghetto drama that at least made a star of the wonderful West Gray soul food restaurant This Is It. Scenes shot along Braes Bayou (with its amazing sunlight and vast sky) showed why Houston can be a really beautiful place to live, but the Romeo and Juliet love story was overwhelmed by the dark and graphic brutality that the filmmakers´ gangsta rap aesthetic demanded.

“Nothing happens,” Max Roach once told me, “until its time.” Which, I suppose, means that—in life as on the bandstand—you´ve got to listen carefully to know when it´s your turn to come in. Not everyone gets that message. As often as not, younger people get the dismissive platitude that “everything takes time.” On their CD The Resurrection (1996), the Geto Boys´ Bushwick Bill sensibly and angrily asks, “How long does time take?”

Back in 1994, David Theis noted that the city Sig Byrd wrote about no longer physically exists. But it is not the physical city of Houston that this essay is about. It´s about music and the past and urban life. Whether life is hard, people are crude, or crass materialism seems to overwhelm all other values, the purpose of music remains the same: to tell the truth and somehow imagine that people are capable of creating beauty. Houston is still a city that makes room for that effort.

You can, in fact, be an artist. You can live your life.

Copyright©2000 Lorenzo Thomas