The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience

Preface

Preface I don’t think I had gone much past second grade when I first saw Casey Jones, the Chicken Man. This tall, kindly-eyed, toothless figure with a weathered button accordion stood at the center of a crowd that gathered on the corner of Diversey and Clark, a dense Chicago intersection near my elementary school. The commotion that surrounded him stemmed less from his music making than from the large white chicken nestled on his hat. According to a hand-lettered sign that Casey wore, he had “trained 218 chickens in Chicago.” Apparently he named each one of them Mae West. “No dime, no show,” he kept repeating. Once he collected a proper amount of coinage, he removed the chicken from her perch. Then Mae began her part of the performance. She walked a tightrope, danced and bowed, drank something he gave her from a flask, and began hobbling with a drunkard’s gait. “Okay Baby,” said Casey, “shake that thing. Do the shimmy-she-wabble now. Do the boogie-woogie Baby.”1 In later years, along with his sign, a harmonica , a rag doll, and a bell, Casey hung a toy telephone around his neck. He’d “call” his chicken, who answered by pecking on the receiver. To repay her replies, Casey slipped the bird a few grains of corn. One heckler chided the performer on his appearance, mocking how Casey’s bunions protruded from his ragged shoes. Casey paused for a moment, then [ x ] preface Figure 1. Casey Jones, with Mae West, Chicago , 1973. Photo by Ted Gray. Used by permission. replied, “I always say there is more room out than in.”2 His critic vanquished, Casey began the trucking dance, wagging his finger in the air and singing the huckle-buck. As he moved, he referred to his whitened hair. “I may be ninety, but folks can natcherly see that I’m not an old man. Old man sho’ can’t dance like this. Only one thing wrong with me. I gets tired. Sometime, that’s all.”3 Born Anderson Punch in Marshall, Texas, in 1870, Casey Jones got his moniker from the folksong he often played. He reached Chicago in 1914, where he spent nearly sixty years roaming the city’s streets with his music and his succession of chickens—all of whom, he insisted, died of natural causes. Over the decades he appeared throughout the city and became a local hero, the subject of folktales, paintings , newspaper clips, and even a posthumous play.4 When he passed away in 1974 at age 104—indigent and without family survivors—he made the front page of theChicago Defender: “Street comedian, Casey Jones, dies.”5 A funeral home run by a Chicago alderman arranged a single evening’s visitation before Casey’s burial. The unending stream of visitors , however, soon caused a change of plans. His service took place instead at the city’s Third Baptist Church, allowing many more to pay their respects to the beloved performer. “Casey,” someone once told me, “was street-joy.”6 The image of Casey Jones—“dressed like a junk man, think in terms of a scarecrow”—never seems to fade.7 He signaled in my childhood the presence of American folklore and folklife. With his chickens called Mae West, his ceaseless stream of colloquial speech, and his squeezebox melodies of an earlier day, he indelibly demonstrated that reservoirs of culture thrive not only in institutionally sanctioned preserves such as museums and concert halls, but also in the streets and marketplaces. Casey Jones—part hustler, part Pied Piper, ever the wise fool, and not one bit crazy—could transform a sidewalk into a theatrical milieu. Despite the rush hour buses lumbering [ xi ] preface past, the prodding of policemen, and the tumult of pedestrians, Casey kept his bearings. A trouper’s creed anchored him through all these currents as he reminded his listeners “I’m a showman.”8 Casey personified what folklorist Benjamin Botkin called “‘living lore’ . . . responsive to the mood of the moment, though it had behind it the accumulated mother wit and wisdom of generations.”9 Botkin wrote those words to describe an endeavor he directed in the late 1930s for the Federal Writers’ Project. Conceiving of folklore in ongoing rather than antiquarian terms, he launched several Living Lore units, including one in Chicago, to document current folk expression and vernacular creativity.10 Cabbies, carnival high divers, garment...