3
THE BIG HOUSE
Ferriday
1945
The church ladies walked faster in the 500 block of Fourth Street. They did not want the sun to set on them there. The conflict, as old as Eden, had been burning on the black side of Ferriday since the first guitar man jumped from a freight and played for his liquor between Maryland and Carolina avenues. Now and then, a few brave preachers, washed in the blood and bulletproof, would set up near the nightclubs and hold church in the twilight. They warned that Satan lurked in the drink and lewdness and would come among them, to sift them as if wheat. But the pull of sin was strong, and people swarmed to Fourth Street after dark. They stepped out in spats and pearls from big Packards and rattling Model As, or stumbled from a Trailways bus, searching for this one place where the brimstone smelled a lot like good barbecue, where the shrieking and wailing had a rhythm to it, and a wild kind of joy. Here, young men played the blues with tiny bags of graveyard dirt tucked into the bodies of their guitars, and fine women moved in a way the human backbone should not allow. The best of the clubs here, or the worst, depending on your affiliation, was a place called Haney’s Big House, one of the biggest venues for blues and R&B between Memphis and New Orleans, and when preachers railed against the devil’s music, this was precisely what they were talking about.
But Haney’s was no mean little juke with a tub of iced-down beer and a few Mason jars of home brew. This was a place where four hundred people squeezed in on weekend nights—the entire population of Ferriday was less than four thousand—to dance, drink, gamble, fight, and cut, all of it washing onto a dirt street where a rattling old tour bus idled in the weeds. Slot machines spat out a hundred nickels at a time, and floorwalkers kept the peace with brass knuckles, clubbing a pistol out of a man’s hand or cracking his head before he did something stupid and violent enough to bring in the white police. It was a club where roofing knives routinely shook loose on the dance floor and women toted straight razors in their underwear, so it was for good reason that the boss tried to keep things as calm as possible.
The big man here was no flashy kingpin but a serious-minded African American businessman named Will Haney, who reigned over not only this den of iniquity but also a motel, laundry, and a modest fortune in rented shotgun houses and even sold insurance on the side. He was said to be a decent man and slow to anger, despite being in league with the devil. But Haney knew rough music was money, knew the power of the blues the same way the sponsors of the Grand Ole Opry understood the appeal of lovelorn ballads and cheatin’ songs—knew how the blues could bite down hard on people like a big snapping turtle and not turn loose till lightning burned the earth.
“It’s where I got my juice,” says Jerry Lee, and he has to think back almost seven decades to taste that first night again, to find the guitar slingers and harp blowers and piano men, young scorchers and scarred old relics in rumpled, sweat-stained, pin-striped suits and two-tone patent-leather shoes, playing boogie like it was their last night on earth. They played in the styles of Kansas City, St. Louis, New York, and the Oakland clubs, though he did not know them then. Their names are lost to him now, too, if he ever knew them at all; nor can he recall any one piano player, any one style or trick that he tried to emulate, specifically. It was more the feel of it, the rawness, the pounding rhythm that struck him, slapped him, as if the music there had blown open a rift into a whole other dimension. “I fell right in,” he says.
The white people called it Bucktown. “They said if you were ever black for one night down there, that you would never want to be white no more,” said Doris Poole, who worked the counter at the dime store on Saturday nights back then. “Women used to come in there and buy those slate knives, those knives that would fold . . . put it down in their bosoms before they went out on Saturday night.” One thing is sure. The first time little Jerry Lee climbed to the window to look inside, to see what the shouting was about, he knew he belonged there too, no matter how golden his hair, and he would never really make it back to the other side.
You can take me, pretty mama,
Jump me in your big brass bed.
He is asked, again, about the luck of it. Would his music have had the gut and grit and power if he had been born someplace else, someplace more peaceful, instead of smack-dab in the convergence of these two cultures living in uneasy and brittle peace, where people, black and white, all had someone’s boot on their neck. Would he have been the musician he became? “If is the biggest word in the English language,” he says, and his pride will not let him concede that his light might not have shone out the same way from any place, any time. Still, there was a reason he shuffled down Fourth Street so often as a boy, humming church music and cowboy songs, while on the other side of a thin wooden wall, the greatest names in blues were waiting for him to figure a way in. There was no pretense here. Here big-city blues stalwarts like Big Joe Turner or rising stars like young Riley King would check their pomade in a backstage mirror and go on to shout the blues.
You can rock me, baby,
Till my face turn cherry red.
Will Haney is important to the legacy of rock and roll because of the house he built, and he did not build it for white folks. He was a man above foolishness, who ran a dance club and did not dance, who rarely drank but when he did, did with grim purpose. He was just short of six feet and short of two hundred pounds, moonfaced, with a permanent serious look, like he always had something better to do. In a black-and-white studio photograph taken in the 1940s, he poses in a chair against a fake garden window; he looks supremely unhappy, like a man waiting to be shot out of a cannon. He built a small empire in the Jim Crow South, in a town where the Klan burned a good friend to death in his own store. He had served his country in France in the stench and poison of the trenches, doing soul-killing servant’s work, and came home to sell insurance for Peoples Life Insurance of New Orleans, collecting on policies that cost pocket change and paid out barely enough for a pine coffin. But when the floods came to Concordia Parish, he traveled to New Orleans to stop the company from canceling his customers’ insurance.
In the mid-1930s, he took the money he made and procured a patch of dirt on Fourth Street, which gradually grew into an iconic nightclub that closed only once, the day his mama died. It sold hot links and pork shoulder and fine fried chicken, and white beans and a chunk of cornbread. “A full-course meal,” said Hezekiah Early, who built his first guitar out of a cheese box and grew up with the legend of the place, and went on to play in Haney’s house band in later years. Haney arranged to have the bus stop situated at the restaurant’s front door. It had fifty tables, as well as pool tables, poker tables, and slot machines, for when gambling was legal—and when it was not. It was bigger than anything, black or white, so they called it the Big House.
“Back in those days, a white man could always go where he wanted, but white people never came down to Haney’s,” said YZ Ealey, a guitar man from Sibley, Mississippi, who played with Big Mama Thornton and L. C. “Good Rockin’” Robinson, and played three years in the house band at Haney’s. “Haney’s was strictly a black thing,” and if you wanted to drink, gamble, and hear live music, you paid Haney a dollar at the door. And when you walked into the Big House on a hot Louisiana night, into the screaming laughter and thumping drums and the roiling smoke, you could almost believe all that stuff the church folks were always going on about. You knew, one step in, that you had crossed over, say the musicians who played there. The hot-grease spat at you from the smoking iron skillets, and in the pit, flames licked at the sizzling meat. The air had a tang of snuff in it, and a funk of frying fish, and a cloying sweetness of gin and menthol. One-armed bandits lined a wall, clanking, ringing, the devil shaking hands on every pull. Sharks circled the pool tables, men who came in on sleeping cars but would leave running alongside the tracks, reaching for a cattle car, because Ferriday had some sharks itself. In the back rooms, men in good suits with good cigars in their gold teeth sat behind piles of money, bodyguards standing stone-faced behind them. But nobody stole at Haney’s. The games lasted all day and well into the night, drawing gamblers from Houston, New Orleans, and West Memphis, and before the sun rose, there would be wedding rings and bills of sale in the pot, but no IOUs. The house took a cut of everything. “Everybody got a talent,” said Ealey, “and Haney’s was running a nightclub.” At about nine o’clock, after the clientele was pretty well lubricated, the live music would commence with a hellish crackling as the musicians jacked their jerry-rigged, hollow-bodied guitars into big amplifiers. The stage was five feet high and ten feet deep and ran the length of one whole wall; it had to be that way, to hold all the wickedness that would be set loose into the night. It could hold an orchestra or just an old man by himself on a stool playing a mail-order guitar.
Haney called them “dances,” which was less likely to offend church people or scare the white folk, and cars lined up on the river bridge from Natchez, headlights making a glowworm a mile or more long. The dances were announced in a Concordia Sentinel column called Among the Colored. “You couldn’t walk in the place . . . it would be jammed, packed,” said Early, whose Hezekiah and the House Rockers played for years at the Big House. “Haney had his floorwalkers, but there would still be some hellish fights, but there wouldn’t be no shootin’.” There were black professionals here, people who, like Haney, operated solely on one side of the color line, morticians and doctors sharing space with barbers, sawmill hands, cooks and maids, track layers, and icehouse workers. The musicians called it the Chitlin’ Circuit, all-black clubs throughout the segregated Deep South where a man or woman with talent could leave with a wad of twenties and still have to sleep in the car. But if you played at Haney’s, you slept on clean sheets in Haney’s Motel, ate Haney’s ham and eggs, and drank Haney’s liquor, and if the police pulled you over, you said the magic word. “The sheriff pulled me over many times,” said Early. “‘Where you goin’? What you got in there?’ I’d say, ‘Mr. Haney gave us this liquor.’ I never went to jail.”
If you were anybody in blues, shoutin’ blues, rhythm and blues, any blues, you played the Big House.
Jerry Lee used to stand in the weeds and broken glass and watch the bluesmen disembark from their trucks and buses, “when I wasn’t old enough to go in,” and not yet desperate enough to sneak in. They had slept in their suits, often, big city suits, from Beale Street in Memphis and as far away as Chicago, and covered their chemically straightened and sculpted hair with kerchiefs, like a woman, till showtime. The guitar men and saxophone wailers, even the famous ones, carried battered cases inside, because no one toted another man’s baby. “Ever’body played Haney’s, big bands, horns and everything,” recalls Jerry Lee. Haney brought in Papa George Lightfoot, the harp man who would cross over and play some of the white honky-tonks in his old age, and trombonist Leon “Pee Wee” Whittaker, who could almost remember the Creation, who had played with the old Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels when the century was new.
Over the years, say the musicians who played in the house bands, the Big House hosted Charles Brown, the smooth Texan, and the elegant Roy Milton and his Solid Senders, who scored nineteen Top 10 R&B records, and Fats Domino, before “Ain’t That a Shame” and “Blueberry Hill.” He brought in the Slims—Memphis Slim and the House Rockers and Sunnyland Slim. A blind piano player named Ray Charles played here, and guitarist Little Milton, and singer Bobby “Blue” Bland; so did Junior Parker, a skinny black hillbilly named Chuck Berry, and a young Irma Thomas. Haney’s hosted young performers like Percy Mayfield, the gentle vocalist and songwriter who begged “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” and big stars of the previous generation like whiskey-voiced Tampa Red and his sometime partner, Atlanta piano man Big Maceo Merriweather, who reminded them, with every downward stroke, what they had endured and were enduring still.
So take these stripes from around me
Take these chains from around my leg