The last chapter of Josh White: Society Blues is titled “Going Down Slow,” and though it doesn’t appear he ever recorded that particular blues chestnut (he may have performed it live), it is an apt description of his life in the latter part of the Sixties. He wasn’t really all that old, having turned 50 in 1964, but had done a lot of living in his time and seemed to just plain wear out.
Man, you know I done enjoyed things that kings and queens Will never have In fact, things kings and queens can’t never get And they don’t even know about And good times? I have had my fun If I never get well no more I have had my fun If I never get well no more Whoa, my health is fadin’ Oh yes, I’m goin’ down slow
As the decade wore on he spent less time on the road and more time at home, which may have helped his health but was not good for the family finances. He had never been one to put money in the bank.
Now look here, I did not say, I was a millionaire But I said, I have spent more money than a millionaire ’Cause if I had kept all of the money I had already spent I would’ve been a millionaire a long time ago And women, well, googly moogly
Eventually his wife Carol was forced to take a job.
One thing I missed in the last roundup was that in 1963 Josh White had his last significant recording sessions, for which he was “accompanied by a small combo including the Chicago harmonica master Sonny Boy Williamson” (says Mr. Wald). They were apparently quite a departure in approach and sound and resulted in two well-reviewed albums, The Beginning and The Beginning: Volume 2. Oddly, though neither one is especially rare — there are many copies on eBay, some of which may soon be mine — neither is to be found on yer YouTube or Spotify, so you’ll have to use your imagination I guess.
In 1966 he was approached by a man named Charles Kaman, who was the owner of an aerospace company but also a guitar aficionado. Kaman had set his engineers to work creating space-age guitars using new designs and materials, and they were now looking for artists to test their products. First they went to a guitarist named Charlie Byrd, who liked the fiberglass model he was given, but explained that since he played nylon rather than steel strings he was not the ideal subject. Byrd suggested Josh White, whose reaction (as remembered by Kaman’s son Bill) was “This guitar has got the biggest motherfucking balls I ever heard.”
White signed on as Ovation’s first spokesman and Kaman’s people consulted with him to create a model made to his specifications, which became “the first signature guitar made for an African American.” (Wikipedia) When the engineers learned that White’s psoriasis of the fingernails was making it painful for him to play, they set out to solve that problem too, developing a process to make artificial nails. According to Society Blues,
Bill Kaman remembers Josh coming out to the (Ovation) factory every month or so. “We had to make a real slow mix of the material, and it would take about an hour to cure. Normally, you mix up the resin and the fiberglass and it cures in about five minutes, but it gives off an awful lot of heat. Since it was on his fingers, we had to slow it way. way down. In the early days, they’d make the nails and he’d sit around and play for them and drink. Toward the end he’d be eating a tub of yogurt and would say, “That’s all I can do now.” An Ovation guitar history adds that the special mixture they used to attach the nails would later be marketed as Super Glue.
And that’s probably a good segue into the next post, which will be the last one of this thread.
The rest of Josh White’s 1960s went something like this:
1961: Is invited to the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, who has been a fan since college. Also appears on a TV show called “Dinner with the President.” In June, has a heart attack and is hospitalized. (As when he broke his leg in high school, he makes the best of a bad situation. Says his wife Carol, “There were times I walked into the hospital in Chicago and got very angry, because the doctor wanted him to rest and I’d walk up there and he’d have maybe six nurses sitting on his bed.”)
1962:
1963: Plays at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on the Capitol Mall organized by Bayard Rustin, opening for Martin Luther King. “I admire Dr. King and the passive resistance movement,” he says. “But I don’t like to be hurt and if somebody jumps me, that business about turn the cheek isn’t for me.”
The Story of John Henry — which came in the form of two 10-inch , 33 1/3 RPM vinyl records — was a big success and led to Josh White making more albums for Elektra. A lot of them featured re-recordings of his old songs, which had previously been released on shellac 78s that were now obsolete. As with the CD boom of the 1990s, a new medium is good for business.
The medieval English ballads were left behind on favor of a steady diet of folky blues and bluesy folk. This made the records easier to market, and reflected White’s general mid-career shift into something of a nostalgia act. The folk and blues revival that would come to full flower in the late 1950s and early 1960s was already underway, and provided a reliable stream of educated customers with spending money.
Some of the material seems intended to position him as a sort of blues/folk Frank Sinatra, not entirely without success:
Even so, it took a while for him to climb back to solvency. Apparently he had a network of women he could fall back on when things got rough; according to one lady friend,
A great many of the women that he was with had money, and that was his purpose. I’m being blunt about this, but he would by the first to tell you. He’d say to me, “I have to spend some time with so-and-so,” and suddenly he would have money again to take care of everything. It sounds brutal, but it’s true. He did what he had to do to survive.
We open Act 3 with Josh White in Europe, where he has gone to find refuge after the trauma of the blacklist and his unpopular decision to testify. No one in London, Paris, or Rome cares about un-American activities; there, all activities are un-American, and they like it that way.
He was particularly popular in the UK, says Elijah Wald. “The British public loved his blues and spirituals and were equally enthusiastic about his versions of old English numbers like ‘The Riddle Song’ and ‘Molly Malone.‘”
His career in the U.S. was not dead, just fraught with complications. He played at several revived versions of Café Society (none of which lasted very long), and was still a reliable concert draw who — because of the troubles — could be had by promoters at a surprisingly reasonable price. He spent the first half of the Fifties bouncing back and forth between the States and Europe, and took to spending a lot of his downtime in the hospital. He did have real health problems: ulcers, migraines, laryngitis, bursitis of the shoulder, and psoriasis of the fingernails that made it painful for him to play guitar. But according to his wife Carol,
A lot of times, when Josh would come home, the doctor would put him in the hospital just to make him be quiet… and also to eliminate some company. When he was on the road he would neglect himself, and by the time he got home he was just so out, so tired, so run down. He never knew how to say, “No, I can’t go tonight, I have to go back to my hotel and go to sleep.” So the doctor would put him in just to cleanse him. He had to be disciplined.”
Though he’d done some recording in England and Italy, by 1954 it had been seven years since White had released an album in his home country. That was when he met Jac Holzman, who had recently launched an upstart label called Elektra Records. The fledgling enterprise and out-of-fashion veteran performer took a chance on each other, and the result was a collection called The Story of John Henry, the centerpiece of which was an extended piece combining spoken narrative with pieces of various blues songs.
Since this runs to 23 minutes plus, it should get you a good way into the cocktail hour. We’ll pick up the story tomorrow.
