Everyday Music: Exploring Sounds and Cultures

John Henry “Bones” Nobles: Bones Percussion, Beaumont

Bones Percussion, Beaumont In the living room of his white clapboard house in Beaumont, John Henry Nobles is light on his feet, moving from foot to foot in a shuffle or tap step. He is pleased to meet me after talking to me three times on the telephone earlier in the evening. I’d never been to Beaumont before, and finding his house in the dark is difficult. I explain to him that I had gotten his contact information from a librarian at the Institute of Texan Cultures, which produces the annual Texas Folklife Festival in San Antonio, where he has performed on different occasions. John Henry Bones”Nobles Beaumont, Texas, November 12, 2010 “ 108 / John Henry “Bones” Nobles Nobles reaches into a drawer in his china cabinet and takes out a pair of “bones,” a handcrafted musical instrument he’s made from the ribs of a cow. To play them, he places them on both sides of his middle finger, the seven-inch convex surfaces facing each other, so that about two-thirds of their length lies along his palm while the remainder extends above his fingers on the backside of his hand. His wrist is loose. When he shakes his hand back and forth, the bones click in a rapid rhythm and percussive sound. As he demonstrates, he talks about his life. He points to a portrait of his wife Virgie and his daughters Gloria and Ethel, whose lives are chronicled through snapshots framed on the walls and neatly arranged on tables and shelves alongside his trinkets, knickknacks, ceramic plates, and souvenirs of his travels and performances in schools, nightclubs , and festivals. The “click-it-y” sound of his bones punctuates his stories with improvised rhythms that go late into the night. Driving to, Beaumont, Texas, November 12, 2011 Bones Percussion, Beaumont \ 109 JOHN HENRY NOBLES JR. was born in Opp, Alabama on April 18, 1902. His father, John Henry Nobles, was a preacher, and his mother, Pateroney Lee, was part Cherokee and Choctaw Indian. As a boy, he helped out on the sharecropper farm his parents worked and was also able to make a little extra money by shining shoes in town. “It was a nickel for a shine,” he said, “but it was always two boys, one working against the other, one shining one shoe, the other shining the other shoe, and the one who shined the best got the nickel. If you couldn’t pop the rag and give a hoodledoodlee, you didn’t get anything. Well, I made sure I was the one going to get that nickel and I could pop that rag so loud I sounded like a buck dancer.” Nobles made his first set of bones when he was nine years old. “I don’t care how much rhythm we had,” he said, “we didn’t have any way to let it out. My dad was making fifty cents a day. Three dollars for six days. There wasn’t any money to buy musical instruments. The only way for us to let out our rhythm out was to find us some bones, but the fact is we didn’t use bones at first. We cut our rulers at school at the six-inch mark and made us two little sticks to knock and that would give us our vent. “Bones” Nobles’s house, Beaumont, Texas, November 12, 2011 110 / John Henry “Bones” Nobles “Well, after a while, some of them boys got a little combo going and I wanted to play with them. One boy had a Jew’s harp, a rub board, and I was the bones player. “See, I found this old cow, and the buzzard done cleaned him up and the weather had done cleaned him up, too, and had made them bones white. I went and got me a saw and sawed me off some bones. That put me above them boys who only had sticks. They kept asking me, ‘Johnny, where’d you get them bones?’ And I’d say, ‘A man done come through here from up the country and gave them to me.’ “Bones” Nobles in his living room, Beaumont, Texas, 1985 Bones Percussion, Beaumont \ 111 “I went out there and cut me a bunch of bushes and covered up that old cow so that they couldn’t...