“Would you ask Picasso to sell his guitars?”
- Dewey Finn/School of Rock
Several years ago, our youngest nephew, Luke, was spending a few days with us in Memphis. He was about eleven at the time. He and I were out driving in the city one day and we came to an intersection with a homeless guy holding a sign standing in the median. Given his young age and the small town that he lived in, he had little interaction with such things. He asked me, in essence, what a person should do when they have contact with the homeless. I told him that everyone had to make their own minds up about the issue, and that I didn't have a hard and fast rule about it, save for one - homeless or otherwise, if you're a street musician, you're getting money from me. My feeling is, they're putting something positive out into the universe and for that, they have my appreciation.
I've had the good fortune to visit Ireland a couple of times. If you're on Grafton Street in Dublin, you'll hear some incredible musicians, buskers, playing there. How some of them aren't famous is a wonder. You could spend all day there being entertained.
The first time I ever went to New Orleans, I remember walking one night in the French Quarter. I had come out of some establishment, and it was late enough that the Quarter was pretty well deserted. That means it was really late! A couple of streets over, in the quiet of the night, I heard this lonesome saxophone playing the most wistful tune. The guy was so good it could have been Charlie Parker himself. It felt like a movie scene. I made my way to the source, a black guy standing alone under one of those distinctive French Quarter streetlights blowing his horn. I made my contribution to his little bucket and I still love the memory almost forty years later.
My favorite story along these lines comes from, who else, Todd Snider. Todd's hero and the man who made him want to become a songwriting troubadour was Jerry Jeff Walker. Most people, if they know of him at all, would know Jerry Jeff as the man who wrote Mr. Bojangles. Todd had seen Jerry Jeff at a small show in 1986 and was so enamored by the man's gifts, he declared then and there that that's what he was going to do with his life, write and sing songs. And sure enough, that's what he did. It was a long, ragged road but along the way he got to know and become friends with Walker. One night after Todd had established a career, they played a gig together in Santa Fe, NM. After the show he and Jerry stayed in the club drinking until last call at 2:00 a.m. They were the last two people to straggle out. I'll let Todd tell you the rest from his book, I Never Met a Story I Didn't Like.
We walked out onto the sidewalk, there on the downtown plaza. Our hotel was a couple of hundred feet away. As we turned a corner, we heard what sounded like a banjo and a harmonica, playing “Mr. Bonjangles.” Turns out it sounded that way because it was a banjo and a harmonica, playing “Mr. Bojangles.” We walked toward the sound.
The guy with the banjo and harmonica was not a performer kid. If he had been, he wouldn't have been working at 2:00 a.m., when there were no cars and no foot traffic. This was a bedraggled guy, not a kid. A homeless guy, kind of crazy looking, with a harmonica around his neck, his hat on the ground in front of him, and nothing in the hat. It looked like a winter hat to me.
That guy looked up at us, without recognition. He didn't know Jerry Jeff was standing there. He may never have heard of Jerry Jeff Walker. “I met him in a cell in New Orleans,” he sang. “I was down and out. / He looked to me to be the eyes of age, as he spoke right out. / He talked of life, he talked of life.” They were the words from Jerry Jeff's song. Jerry Jeff and I stood there and watched this guy sing them, in front of a closed-down old blues bar, and I could feel both of us getting chocked up. And I was asking myself, “Should I tell this guy that he's playing Jerry Jeff's song, and that Jerry Jeff is standing right here?” But, no, I figured that if Jerry Jeff wanted to let this guy know who he was, he'd tell him.
He chose not to. When the song was over, he said, “That sounded great,” and then he put a load of cash - every bit of cash he had on him - into that guy's hat. And then we walked off to the hotel, and I just couldn't leave the moment alone.
“Maybe the highlight of my life,” I said.
“Boring life so far, kid.”