If you're of the mind to explore the world of rock, blues, jazz, and folk/ballad from the 1970s, you know the band Derek and the Dominos. Four men (plus a short guest feature by Duane Allman. Drummer Jim Gordon, bassist Carl Radle, Eric Clapton on guitar and vocals, and Bobby Whitlock on keyboards and vocals. Layla and other Love Songs.
Awright, time for another story (or more), but not mine. In memory of Bobby Whitlock.
(I still cannot believe I sat there and heard this. I know there may be different versions of these tales, but I was here first to sit down with him. So maybe I helped churn up these gems. Besides, I won't get yelled at--like I did when I printed something he said and the (other) guilty party in THAT deal called me out on it. How wuz I supposed to know?) And that "Beverly Hills" imagery/reference had me in stitches. {"The guy is telling me THIS?!?"}
Bobby Whitlock - THE DOMINO EFFECT
(From my book Rock 'n' Blues Stew II)
(There I am, sitting on the porch of Bobby’s house in May 2000—at that time, in Oxford, Mississippi—and I’ve flown down from NJ to interview him—on my dime. He’s sitting there fooling around with a dobro, and all I can do is gawk: “Omigod, this is a real rock star musician! This is the guy on the Layla album!” Some things never change. Years later, I saw Bobby at his home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, after he had come over to the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio on his new Indian motorcycle and sporting his new tattoos.
I guess it’s a natural thing to say that when you’ve had a life like mine—especially my early childhood—that “I was born to play the blues.” It’s the way that I was raised—hard physical work was expected to be done by a child to help make money to help support our family. If that meant bending over in the fields, doing back-breaking work like the other adults, then it was understood that this was my way of contributing. I’m talking about real little, like a little bitty boy. Not even eight years old; much smaller.
I chopped and picked cotton until my fingers were stiff and sore—cotton’s nasty stuff; it can make your skin dry up and bleed if you handle too much of it. I rode the back of bean planters in the countryside out there in Arkansas. The sun would be beating down, the air would be hot and dusty and our throats were parched, but we had to work—there wasn’t much else to do and we had to pitch in and help. I hauled all kinds of produce.
Did you ever hear the phrase “a shotgun house”? Well, we lived in one, down there in Marmaduke, Arkansas. That meant you could fire a shotgun from one side and there wasn’t anything like a wall or any other rooms to stop the pellets or buckshot from going anywhere but straight out the door—it was kinda like a three-room, one-house deal. It was also known as a high-water house, because it was sort of built on stilts to keep it dry when the high water rose. You could literally read last year’s news through the cracks in the walls because that was the insulation in this house.
Sometimes, it was necessary to scare off—or worse—anything or anyone on two or four legs that might be trying to break into the place. Yes, we knew we were poor—I could tell that by having to sleep head-to-toe in a bed with my grandfather, “Peapaw” Whitlock. For heat, all we had was a pot-bellied stove, and food…well, I remember one time when a rat ate through a loaf of bread that we had saved… it looked like a train had gone through a tunnel from one end to another.
My daddy was a preacher and what you’d call a “professional student,” and he felt that this would take the mischief out of me, as well as teach me discipline that was necessary to be a son of a man of the gospel. I took my share of beatings, too: tied up by the wrists and whipped because I wasn’t acting serious-like during church services. I’m talking about this happening to me as a young fella of eleven years—not a child anymore, either! He took me out back to the barn and trussed me up and used the leader-line of a mule team on me—I’m talking about a seriously thick piece of leather! He kind of had what they call a “Napoleon complex”—I didn’t know then that he wasn’t six feet tall until I grew bigger than he did.
My daddy would drag my mother and me and my sister and brother—they were too young to work--all over, looking for someplace to work while he did his preaching. I can still see pictures in my mind of her in a home-made dress and high heels, standing over a hot wood stove and cooking on a Sunday. My mother and I had to go work in the fields to feed ourselves because my father would come home for two days and be gone again. On Sundays and Wednesdays, folks would take the preacher’s family into their house and show their hospitality that way. I remember one family—the Turberville’s--whom I thought were rich because Mr. Ross Turberville had two mules and a tractor.
You would have to meet my kind of kinfolk to understand them--they just did things their own way and nobody had better interfere--what we called “rounders.” They would as soon as fight, steal, make moonshine or just get into plain mischief--just imagine how a raccoon would act if they were part-human. It just had to rub off on me, growing up with people like this. I can remember Peapaw Whitlock living with us, whittling and then spitting on that stove, and drinking boiling coffee—I never would have believed it in my life, but it was that hot.
He also did something that I learned about when I was on the road as a musician: Peapaw would smoke regular tobacco—Bull Durham was his brand—during the day, but at night…then he’d take something else from another pocket and light up that. When I first smoked marijuana, I knew what it was! I said to myself, “That old sonovabitch, he was smoking pot!” Of course, it was during the ‘30s and ‘40s, and people’s attitudes were different, and so was the practice of indulging in those kinds of things. Especially for us folks who lived back in the hills and hollows—it was more understood as a way of combining medicine with driving out the pain of making ends meet and getting through the harshness of living.
For example, there was Aunt Berthie and Uncle Elvin--they were my kin from Marked Tree, Arkansas. Aunt Berthie was a great big woman, with hair down to the ground, and Uncle Elvin was my Peapaw (grandfather) King’s brother. Well, you sure can say they were a little bit odd: in their home, they had pigs in the bedroom and chickens roosting on the head of the bed. They ran a store there, a kind of general store where you could buy all kinds of goods. I can see those wooden sidewalks in my mind…but the point is, the government wouldn’t let them sell anything out of that store unless it had a lid on it or a wrapper. I would have been hard-pressed and double-dealt to buy anything from them, but they were kinfolk.
Well, it wasn’t too long before Aunt Berthie went into an institution for the mentally handicapped. One day, Uncle Elvin called Peapaw King and said, “Hey, one of Berthie’s relatives has died, and we gotta take her to the funeral.” They had a pick-up truck with a chair in the back of it--it was something straight out of “The Beverly Hillbillies.” So, they took her out of the side door, which was quite a feat for a woman of her size and put her up in that chair.
Then they took off, doing about 45 miles an hour down a bumpy gravel road with Berthie perched up there, and rocks zinging from under the tires and smoke flying in the air. Peapaw said, “I felt the truck hit a bump and looked up and everything got real springy under the wheels, as though we had just shucked ourselves of some extra weight.” Both men looked in the rearview mirror and saw Berthie tumbling end-over-end in the gravel behind them. Uncle Elvin said, “Doggone, she’s gone and dove out of the back of the truck!” So, both men went and picked her up, dusted her off and put her back in the chair, turned around and drove all the way back to the institution. They hauled her out of the chair, dusted her off and backed the truck up to the side door. Then they went to the front desk and declared, “She ain’t quite ready yet!”
Like I said, growing up with these folk can leave a lasting imprint on a young boy’s mind--and I was an impressionable child. Being poor was a way of life that was just something that we accepted--so the petty criminal activities in which the family participated was just considered another way to make ends meet--it was a way to survive!
Let me give you another example of how they survived: they were “miners.” Oh, no, there was no prospecting for gold or other precious minerals—that was too much hard work for nothing. Their theory was simple: what was once yours is now mine. One time, Peapaw and Uncle Elvin—this must go back about 55 years or so— were out on an “excavating” mission in Mississippi, riding around in an old beat-up car. They were gonna dig up something somewhere, but they just weren’t sure what it would be. Then they came upon a farmhouse and went out and stole this farmer’s chickens—chicken coop and all! They opened up the back of this old car and put the whole thing in there—chickens and coop and all—and drove away in the dead of night.
Well, sure enough, just like Aunt Berthie and the truck, the chicken coop and the chickens fell out of the back of the car, and there were chickens running around loose all over the place. My grandpa, Peapaw King, went back to the farmer’s house—the guy from whom they’d just stolen the chickens and the chicken coop!!—and knocked on the door. “Could you give us a hand out here?” he asked, “We got ourselves a problem with all these chickens!” The farmer followed him back to the car, helped them round up all those loose birds and tie up the chicken coop, and put it in the back of the car again!
They started up the car and began to drive away—but that’s not the King family way of doing things, so they stopped and thought a minute. As a token of their appreciation, they backed the car up alongside the farmer, who was still standing on the side of the road. Uncle Elvin stepped out and handed the farmer a chicken, which the startled man placed under his arm like a loaf of bread. Sure enough, my grandfather and Uncle Elvin drove off and left the poor farmer standing on the side of the road, scratching his head with one hand, holding a hen in the other, and wondering why two men were out in the dead of night with a trunk full of squawking chickens and a coop that looked a lot like his. To tell the truth, a Pentecostal preacher was holding a revival in Lepanto, AR, and he, Peapaw and Uncle Elvin were in cahoots with this chicken stealing. After he stole the chickens, Peapaw left a note on the chicken house, “We steal from the rich and give to the poor, we left you six, to raise us some more.”
Peapaw King also got himself thrown into the Polk County Farm in Arkansas for stealing a loaf of bread and a quart of milk— don’t forget that I’m talking about the times of the Great Depression---and my grandmother, “Big Momma” King got a job working there in the kitchen. It was like a complete scenario from the Paul Newman movie, Cool Hand Luke: they bull-whipped him with a cat-o’-nine tails, and “Big Momma” slipped him some red pepper powder to put in his shoes and helped him break out of there. They had the hounds on his trail real quick-like, but that pepper stuffed them up. I saw those scars on his back from when they whipped him.
On the other side, it was the Whitlock’s that were trouble. My Peapaw Whitlock was a moonshiner, and he died because of it. I remember him literally lighting that stuff up—if it had a blue flame, it meant it was real, real good! He was going out on delivery—but of course, he had to sample it a bit to make sure it was of the proper quality and strength—and he got himself drunk.
So, there he was, taking a case of freshly-made brew across a newly-cut cornfield during the night on what must have been the coldest Thanksgiving Day on record—I mean, it was nasty bitter cold, down near New Albany, MS. He was carrying a pint jug with him on the way back—that was to be expected—but he didn’t see or couldn’t see—depending on his condition—where he was going, and he tripped over a corn stalk. The fall didn’t kill him, but he landed on a sharpened cut stalk of corn, and it punctured his chest. He turned over on his back in the middle of the rows and just froze to death. The boy who was running the fence on that farm came out the next day to work and found my grandfather lying there with his arms outstretched to the heavens and a pint of moonshine behind him. Lord knows if he was trying to ask for help to raise himself up or he was trying to reach out first for that lost jug!
The only joy I had was when I would have a few spare moments to hear music at the church, or when I sat with my grandmother, “Big Momma” King, who would play her dobro for me. Thank heaven for those moments—they were the shining light in my life as a three-year-old boy! It was a beautiful National dobro, made in the late 1880s, and there were hula dancers on the front and back. Big Momma would sit me down and play gospel-style to me, “Turn your radio on, get in touch with Jesus.” I can still hear her now!—and I have that dobro with me. I’ve gone and had it painted—at one time, a lady named Genya Revan, who played with 10-Wheel Drive, had it and kept it safe for me.
See, it was always with me—the music—it was in my soul and in my spirit. So, when I look back at those hard times, I can say I was a singer, and I sang all the time! I’d be working out in the fields with the migrant workers and the poor black folk who were sharecroppers, and they’d sing all the way to the fields in the back of rickety, bouncing trucks, and then they’d be singing while they were working, and then on the way back home. I’d be singing right along with them. So, yes, I’d say my roots were always there in gospel, blues and soul music—I was born living the blues, and I learned to sing them to get through those harsh times!
