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  • “Fixin’ to Die Blues”The Last Months of Bukka White With an afterword from B.B. King on Bukka White’s Legacy
  • David W. Johnson (bio)

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Booker T. Washington (“Bukka”) White shared a remarkable account of the actual life of a blues musician—not the romantic conception of that life that many in music, film, and the print media have portrayed before and since. Bukka White, before his show at the Chessmate Coffee House in Detroit in 1968, photographed by W. T. Helfrich.

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A faint odor of bedpan greeted me as I entered the room in the rehabilitation unit of Beverly Hospital in Beverly, Massachusetts. In bed lay the stocky figure of Booker T. Washington White, clad in a white hospital smock. The upper half of the hospital bed had been raised so that Bukka (as the Vocalion record label had dubbed him in 1937) could sit. His wide torso looked even wider in the smock—not the wiry sort of blues icon I had in mind when I called his doctor’s office to ask if he was well enough to have a visitor. White had suffered a stroke a month before while on a flight from Memphis to Boston, where he was scheduled to play a week-long engagement at a small concert club thirty miles north of the city. After spending eight days in the intensive care unit, he had been transferred to the rehabilitation unit on Sunday, July 4. By the time I visited him on Thursday afternoon, July 29—the day before he was to leave the hospital and fly home to Memphis—I was told that he had regained enough strength in his right hand to be able to play some guitar while sitting up in bed.

In July 1976 I knew almost nothing about Bukka White other than that he was an old-time blues musician. I was the lifestyle editor of a local paper who had been writing about music, mostly rock, for seven years. I owed what little I knew of Mississippi Delta blues to the Robert Johnson album owned by college friends, and I had heard Skip James in person. I thought White must be like them.

As I introduced myself, I could tell almost immediately that he was not interested in talking to me that day. In hindsight, this was more than understandable: I was not only a complete stranger, but a reporter seeking an interview—and most emphatically not a medical professional in a position to help him leave the hospital, which was his overriding goal. As the hospital publicist had told me, “He wants simply to go home.”

White had compelling personal reasons to return to Memphis. He had traveled to Boston with a tragic loss on his mind: only ten days before, the daughter of his longtime domestic partner had been murdered almost outside his door. Presilla was one of three children of Leola Morris, the woman with whom White had lived for years in Memphis, and “the night she died she was walking in the alley almost to [White]’s house when her boyfriend shot and killed her. [White] and Leola heard the shots and ran out to discover her already dead.”1

Although I had spoken with his doctor’s office, I cannot recall if White had received advance notice of my visit. In those days my journalistic curiosity was greater than my sensitivity. I thought of White as a newsworthy musician whose performance I had planned to cover had he not suffered the stroke. As a journalist, I had a reporter’s urge to document his presence north of Boston in a story for my newspaper. On a personal level, I did not want to miss such an opportunity to learn first-hand about the nature and history of the blues.

For several minutes we negotiated about whether he would allow me to interview [End Page 16] him without being paid. He hinted that he was accustomed to receiving money for an interview. In 1976, during an era when reporters were full of ethical self-awareness following the Watergate scandal, I avoided responding...

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