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6 first gigs and Birmingham clubs When I was starting out, there were a lot of opportunities for a young fellow to play music. In fact, I need to back up here to describe some of my very first gigs. The earliest of my playing was with a woman named Theo Carr. She was a pianist and a singer, and she had some little clubs she played over the mountain— little places, like a bridge club; they would call on her to bring some music. She couldn’t really hire professional musicians, so she took me and my drummer friend, Herbert. We were just little children, out of elementary school. She gave us a few dollars and she’d pick us up and bring us home. I don’t think we knew but one or two songs, like “Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats,” and we could do “Sentimental Journey”; we could play a little song like that, and people liked it. Then somehow, right at the end of my time at Lincoln School, she hooked us up with this carnival : Heeny Brothers Circus, right down on Eighth Avenue. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these, but they had these little neighborhood circuses—not like the big circuses Finktum played in; not like a county fair. But they’d have, maybe, one little Ferris wheel, a little place where you could throw something at the rubber dolls; balls to hit the rabbits or whatever—just a few things. And they’d have a tent where they would have a comedian, and maybe two or three dancing girls. Carnivals were always low-key so far as a lot of people were con- firST gigS anD Birmingham cluBS 87 cerned, but if they came to a black community, it was like jubilation— because they had different dancers in there, and they had black music. They would have somebody come out and beat a drum or play some music to draw the crowd in. And that was my first gig, really. We’d go out in front of the place. They called it “balleting”; that is, you’re drawing a crowd. You’d go out front and you’d play a little tune—at that time, in the thirties, “Tuxedo Junction” was popular, so I probably knew how to play “Tuxedo Junction” already and just a few tunes, but that was all. We’d be finished around nine o’clock, and I think you got about a dollar, maybe fifty cents or something. So we’d look forward to that. One time we played at this tent show. And my friend Herbie was more streetwise than I was in elementary school. We were leaving and he saw Theo with one of the workers in the show, a white guy, and they were in a sexual position he could see from outside of the tent. He saw them having sex—you could see their shadows in that tent. I didn’t know what it was about. But it hit Herbie as being horrible: this miscegenation; this guy with Theo. I didn’t know anything about race relations. I knew that there was segregation—every kid would know that, because everything was separate —but Herbie had, I guess, a sense of race. He had more knowledge of worldly things than I did. Maybe I had been sheltered; I just hadn’t seen that. But this thing about race was big in his mind at that time. Herbie picked up a big brick and threw it at them, and hit them, in that big tent—and ran. I said, “What’d you do that for?” “They were doing the nasty!” I didn’t know what the nasty was. But naturally I ran, too, and I didn’t know what became of that. The next day I saw Theo. She had a big bruise mark on her arm, where she’d been hit. I never said anything about it, and Herbie never said anything about it. I had no sexual awareness whatsoever. Even when I got to high school, and Professor Whatley would play “Kokemo,” and they’d come together close—I guess they called that “shimmying”—I just thought it was peculiar. It didn’t arouse anything in me. I had no idea. I remember, back then, we had this large house on the corner, and there was a real shapely woman that would come down the street, and [3.144.212.145] Project...

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