Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis

By Ian Zack

“Finally, the biography that Rev. Davis deserves. Ian Zack takes ‘Blind Gary’ out of the footnotes and into the footlights of the history of American music.” —Steve Katz, cofounder of Blood, Sweat & Tears

Bob Dylan called Gary Davis “one of the wizards of modern music.” Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead—who took lessons with Davis—claimed his musical ability “transcended any common notion of a bluesman.” And the folklorist Alan Lomax called him “one of the really great geniuses of American instrumental music.” But you won’t find Davis alongside blues legends Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The first biography of Davis, Say No to the Devil restores “the Rev’s” remarkable story. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with many of Davis’s former students, Ian Zack takes readers through Davis’s difficult beginning as the blind son of sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South to his decision to become an ordained Baptist minister and his move to New York in the early 1940s, where he scraped out a living singing and preaching on street corners and in storefront churches in Harlem. There, he gained entry into a circle of musicians that included, among many others, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Dave Van Ronk. But in spite of his tremendous musical achievements, Davis never gained broad recognition from an American public that wasn’t sure what to make of his trademark blend of gospel, ragtime, street preaching, and the blues. His personal life was also fraught, troubled by struggles with alcohol, women, and deteriorating health.

Zack chronicles this remarkable figure in American music, helping us to understand how he taught and influenced a generation of musicians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9780226234243

Book preview

Say No to the Devil

Ian Zack is a New York–based journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Forbes, and Acoustic Guitar. He worked as a concert booker for one of the oldest folk venues in New York, The Good Coffeehouse, where he got to know some of Rev. Gary Davis’s students.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by Ian Zack

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-23410-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-23424-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226234243.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zack, Ian, author.

Say No to the devil : the life and musical genius of

Rev. Gary Davis / Ian Zack.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-23410-6 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 0-226-23410-X (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-226-23424-3 (e-book) 1. Davis, Gary, 1896–1972.

2. Guitarists—United States—Biography. 3. Blues musicians—

United States—Biography. 4. Musicians, Black—United

States—Biography. I. Title.

ML419.D386Z33 2015

787.87′1643092—dc23

[B]

2014026575

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper)

We can’t be a devil all our lives. We have to sing some good songs sometimes to keep the devil off us.

Rev. Gary Davis

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Anti–Robert Johnson

Prologue: You Got to Move

1 There Was a Time That I Was Blind (1896–1916)

2 Street-Corner Bard (1917–28)

3 I Was a Blues Cat (1928–34)

4 Great Change in Me (1934–43)

5 Meet You at the Station (1943–49)

6 Who Shall Deliver Poor Me? (1950–55)

7 I’ll Be Alright Someday (1955–57)

8 I Can’t Make This Journey by Myself (1958–59)

9 He Knows How Much We Can Bear (1960–61)

10 Let the Savior Bless Your Soul: The Reverend in the Pulpit

11 Children, Go Where I Send Thee (1961–62)

12 Lord, Stand by Me (1962–63)

13 On the Road and Over the Ocean (1964)1

14 The Guitar Lessons: Bring Your Money, Honey!

15 Buck Dance (1965–66)

16 Where You Goin’, Old Drunkard?

17 There’s a Bright Side Somewhere (1967–70)

18 Tired, My Soul Needs Resting (1971–72)

Epilogue: When I Die, I’ll Live Again

Selected Discography

Notes

Index

Gallery

Acknowledgments

Icould not have written this book without the help of hundreds of people who gave their time, insight, and expertise along the way.

When I first discussed the idea of a Rev. Gary Davis biography with Davis’s former guitar student Stefan Grossman, his offer was characteristic: I’d be happy to help you 100 percent. Over the course of several years, Grossman not only provided me with personal artifacts from his private archive, including photos, letters, documents, and other ephemera, but also acted as a sounding board and guided me in my research, never tiring of my countless arcane questions. His deep affection for Davis is palpable, but it neither clouded his judgment nor intruded on my independence as a scholar.

Thanks also to Mitch Greenhill of Folklore Productions and Chandos Music, Davis’s management company and music publisher, who shared documents and memories of the Reverend and of his father, Manny Greenhill, Davis’s longtime manager.

Librarians and archivists are the unsung heroes of historical research. Dozens assisted me with long-distance queries about their collections, including Greg Johnson at the Blues Archive, University of Mississippi; Anna St. Onge at the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York University; Scott Krafft of the Northwestern University Library; Henry Fulmer at the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina; Kristin Eshelman at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut; Jason Prufer of the Kent State University Main Library; Lynn Richardson of the Durham County Library; Scott Sanders of Antioch College; Marilyn Graf at the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music; Alvin Singh of the Lead Belly Archive; John Rumble of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum; Maureen Russell and David Martinelli at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive; Tiffany Colannino of the Woody Guthrie Archives; Gavin W. Kleespies of the Cambridge Historical Society; and Meredith Rutledge-Borger of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

Special thanks to Todd Harvey at the Library of Congress, who on my behalf plumbed deep into the library’s holdings (particularly the expansive Alan Lomax Collection), sometimes based only on my hunches or suppositions; Jeff Place at the Smithsonian Institution, who not only was a font of knowledge about Folkways Records and Moses Asch but also allowed me to employ his interns for my research during their off hours; and Aaron Smithers and Jamie Vermillion at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who help administer the Southern Folklife Collection, one of the great archives of American music.

It’s a fitting tribute to Davis’s own patience and generosity as a teacher that so many of his former students jumped at the chance to provide recollections, artifacts, and insights into his life and music. In addition to Stefan Grossman, several deserve singling out, including Ernie Hawkins, Alex Shoumatoff, Joan Fenton, Barry Kornfeld, North Peterson, Larry Brezer, John Mankiewicz, John Dyer, Allan Evans, and Woody Mann. Other musical acquaintances of Davis also shared stories and items from their own collections, including Larry Cohn, Andy Cohen, and Happy Traum.

Fortunately for posterity, some talented folklorists and promoters took an interest in Davis and his music early in his time in New York and throughout the folk revival. Izzy Young, folk music’s Jeremiah, shared insights, copious opinions, and precious relics from his priceless collection, including diary entries and concert posters; Ed Pearl, the irrepressible owner of the Ash Grove club in Los Angeles, knew Davis as well as any promoter, and his insights proved invaluable; Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records provided background on a number of key episodes, including enough detail that I was able to locate a long-lost lawsuit over the song You Gotta Move; John Ullman, who hosted the Reverend on the West Coast twice, provided many stories about and insights into Davis’s life on the road; and John Cohen, one of the first New Yorkers to take an interest in Davis after his move from the South, shared photos and memories.

A number of historians were generous in their willingness to educate me and provide leads for my research. First and foremost, Ronald D. Cohen, professor emeritus of history at Indiana University Northwest, who opened his vast Rolodex to me, eagerly prodded me down fruitful roads, and read the raw manuscript; also Neil V. Rosenberg at Memorial University of Newfoundland, who sent me unpublished excerpts of interviews as well as copies of newsletters from his days in the Indiana University Folksong Club; Michael J. Kramer of Northwestern University, who gave me entrée into Northwestern’s archive of the Berkeley Folk Festival and helped me get in touch with festival organizers; Elijah Wald, who not only walked me through the publishing process but also offered terrific advice on improving my narrative and provided me with unpublished materials from his own research; Jeffrey Noonan of Washington University in St. Louis, who educated me about nineteenth-century parlor guitar styles; and William Lee Ellis of Saint Michael’s College, who shared materials and insights from his extensive research on Gary Davis.

In addition, I owe a great debt to the late Robert Tilling, whose lovingly compiled book in tribute to Gary Davis was an invaluable source. When I called him just weeks before his death, he told me: I was hoping someone like you would come along, and he encouraged me to make use of the anecdotes he’d collected over many years from Davis’s friends and musical contemporaries.

Research assistants around the country helped me look through archives and scan microfilm reels, including Steven Kruger at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Aja Bain, Adam Schutzman, and William Leisek at Smithsonian Folkways; Manu Shetty at the University of Chicago; Ashley Turner at Harvard University; and Nancy Morgan and Michael Panzer at Temple University. Much appreciation also goes to Vennie Deas Moore, a talented researcher who assisted in efforts to track Gary Davis and his family in South Carolina.

Court clerks too provided invaluable help, often at great distance. Thanks to Peggy La Maina, deputy county clerk, Atlantic County, New Jersey; Keisha Elliott, deputy register of deeds, Durham County, North Carolina; Sharon A. Davis, chief assistant register of deeds, Durham County, North Carolina; and Kali Holloway, assistant director of communications, New York State Unified Court System.

Private tapes and concert recordings of Davis proved extremely beneficial in my research into his life story and music. In addition to the college archives referenced above, Lou Curtiss in San Diego copied several concerts from his collection; Manfred Helfert in Mainz, Germany, provided a rare live radio performance of Davis’s from 1961; and Richard Noblett sent recordings made of Davis in England in 1966 and 1971.

Many thanks to Thomas Tierney, Toby Silver, and Michael Brooks at Sony Music, who provided me with scans of recording cards and other documents from Davis’s 1935 American Record Corporation sessions; Chris Clough and Bill Belmont of the Concord Music Group, who provided copies of Riverside and Prestige recording contracts; Gary Kueber of Open Durham, who provided a photograph of one of Davis’s Durham residences; Louis Jay Meyers of Folk Alliance International, who allowed me to duplicate one of the few lengthy interviews ever given by Manny Greenhill; Gordon Lutz and Michael Rogosin, who helped me locate filmmaker Lionel Rogosin’s long-overlooked interviews of Davis and his second wife, Annie; Alan Balfour, whose knowledge of the British blues scene and extensive musical collections proved invaluable; Mitch Blank, who shared treasures from his museum-worthy archive of folk music audio tapes and memorabilia; Marty Kohn, who volunteered to search newspaper microfilm for me in Detroit; Leigh Cline, who provided tremendous help and a slew of contacts in the Canadian folk scene; Adam Machado, who assisted with helpful leads from his own folk and blues research for Arhoolie Records; Bryan Brown, who digitized for me many out-of-print Davis LPs; Alastair Cochrane, who provided me with scans of concert flyers from Davis’s shows in Glasgow and Cambridge; Scott D. Record Fiend Wilkinson, who sent me liner notes about Blind Connie Williams from his great blog; Paul Swinton, who passed along details from a 1971 interview of Davis in England; Kirsten Dahl, who provided a wealth of information about her late ex-husband, Ian Buchanan, as well as copies of some of Buchanan’s tapes; Yuri Bernikov, of Russian-Records.com, for Stinson catalog scans; Jocelyn Arem, who gave me some tidbits uncovered for her impressive Caffè Lena History Project; David Dubosky, who helped me press the New York City Police Department for details of Davis’s arrests; Georges Chatelain, who sent me photos taken in London in 1971; John Tefteller, who scanned some seventy-eight labels from his extensive collection; John Byrne Cooke, for his wonderful photos of Davis at Club 47 in the early sixties; Veronica Majerol, for some French translation; Jim Marshall, who sent me a flyer from Davis’s 1971 Brighton, England, concert; Sheldon Posen, who connected me with folk sources in Ottawa, Canada; and Roger Misiewicz and Helge Thygesen, who provided documents and record scans relating to Davis’s 1935 sessions.

Much appreciation to all who agreed to be interviewed for the book, either in person, by phone, or by e-mail: Billy Abercrombie, Phil Allen, David Amram, Bruce Barthol, Bo Basiuk, Harold Becker, Alex Bevan, Danny Birch, Ragtime Rick Blaufeld, Liz Blum, Roy Book Binder, Spencer Bohren, Oscar Brand, Larry Brezer, Derek Brimstone, David Bromberg, Rolly Brown, Joe Boyd, Bob Carlin, Leigh Cline, Samuel Charters, Earl Crabb, Alastair Cochrane, John Cohen, Larry Cohn, Bruce Conforth, Larry Conklin, Michael Cooney, Rev. Frederick Crawford, Lou Curtiss, Kirsten Dahl, Barbara Dane, Dr. Burt D’Lugoff, John Dyer, Ari Eisinger, Allan Evans, Seth Fahey, Joan Fenton, Richard Flohil, Steve Gilford, Harvey Glatt, Wavy Gravy (née Hugh Romney), Dick Greenhaus, Mitch Greenhill, Stefan Grossman, Jim Hale, Johnnie Hamp, Ernie Hawkins, Fred Hellerman, Rev. James Herndon, Paul Hostetter, Jerry Houck, Doris Houston, Beau Johnson (née Bill Dawes), Earl Jones, Robert L. Jones, Bob Kass, Steve Katz, Jesse Kincaid, Ken Kipnis, Barry Kornfeld, M. William Krasilovsky, Jack Landrón (aka Jackie Washington), Joel Latner, Lyle Lofgren, Taj Mahal, Barry Melton, John Mankiewicz, Woody Mann, Jim Marshall, Al Mattes, Dan McCrimmon, Ralph McTell, Doug Menuez, Janet Morris, Chris Morris, Michael Nerenberg, Richard Noblett, Barry Olivier, Hank O’Neal, Tom Paley, Bernie Pearl, Ed Pearl, North Peterson, Mitch Podolak, Andy Polon, Brendan Power, Simon Prager, Jerry Rasmussen, Ron Rebhuhn, Robin Roberts, Jim Robinson, Mark Ross, Charlie Rothschild, Tom Rush, Rick Ruskin, Tony Saletan, Alex Shoumatoff, Molly Scott, Gene Shay, Harvey Shield, Marc S. Silber, Dr. Alvin Singh, Betsy Siggins, Vic Smith, Alan Smithline, Ellen Stekert, Chris Strachwitz, Harry Sunshine, Mike Taub, Harry Taussig, Terri Thal, Robert Tilling, John Townley, Happy Traum, Harry Tuft, John Ullman, Dick Waterman, Dick Weissman, Harry West, David Wilson, Geoff Withers, Izzy Young, and Howard Ziehm.

I’m very grateful to John Tryneski, Rodney Powell, and Ruth Goring of the University of Chicago Press for their guidance, expertise, and extreme attention to detail throughout the publishing process; and to Leslie Keros, my esteemed copy editor, whose careful reading and probing questions greatly improved the manuscript.

And finally, a profound thanks to Wendy, Sam, and Hannah, who let me take on this project and provided so much encouragement and support along the way.

Introduction

The Anti–Robert Johnson

During the folk revival of the 1960s, young sleuths tracked down elderly bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Son House, and Skip James, finding them ensconced in alternative careers as farm laborers, train porters, or factory hands or, in the case of James, languishing in a hospital bed. They’d made landmark recordings on 78 rpm shellac discs in the 1920s and ’30s before disappearing, and now the bleary-eyed, disbelieving old men were whisked away to big folk festivals and feted like lost superheroes. Hurt became a genuine celebrity and folk icon. House was bestowed with the title father of the delta blues. And Lewis was invited to appear on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

While all this was going on, a man who had arguably been the greatest of all the blues-based guitarists to record before World War II contented himself by basking in the warm glow of his circle of admirers. He’d never been found or rediscovered because he didn’t need to be. He’d been hiding in plain sight all along.

Rev. Gary Davis had been living in threadbare poverty in New York City since the early 1940s. He preferred singing spirituals, not the blues, after his ordination as a Baptist minister. But his nearly unsurpassed ability as a musician was as plain as Scripture to his many young acolytes, even if the general public remained unaware.

Bob Dylan, who rubbed elbows with Davis in Greenwich Village in the early sixties and recorded a number of his songs, considered him one of the wizards of modern music. Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead guitarist who, like many folk and rock musicians, took guitar lessons from Davis in New York, said he had a Bachian sense of music, which transcended any common notion of a bluesman. And Alan Lomax, the celebrated folklorist, rated him one of the really great geniuses of American instrumental music, a man who belongs in the company of Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet.¹

Yet Davis—the Rev to his musical flock—never became an American cultural icon like Armstrong or Muddy Waters. Four decades after his death, his genius has gone largely unrecognized in the popular culture, even though he exerted a considerable influence on the folk scene of the sixties and on the early rock scene of the seventies. Indeed, many of Davis’s musical contemporaries stood in awe of his abilities. Danny Kalb, a founder of the Blues Project, the seminal sixties blues-rock band, called Davis absolutely the best overall American guitarist. (Kalb, it should be noted, shared a bill with Jimi Hendrix at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and jammed with Waters.) And Jorma Kaukonen, the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna guitarist who has made Davis’s repertoire central to his own for forty years, regards the South Carolina native as one of the greatest figures of . . . twentieth century music.²

*

Davis’s relative cultural obscurity today stems in large measure from his life choices. Though he remained, up until the last years of his life, one of the world’s greatest, if not the greatest, of all traditional blues and ragtime guitarists, as an evangelizing minister he steadfastly refused to perform blues music—that is, play it and sing it the way he could—on the concert stage or in a recording studio for most of his career. (In private with the door shut—and out of earshot of his devout second wife, Annie—was another story.)

The business of saving souls is what occupied him, and fame didn’t seem to motivate him, even when it appeared within his grasp. Barbara Dane, a white blues singer who shared a good many concert bills with Davis in the 1950s and ’60s, recalled that he never sought out the limelight. He ran into, of course, a whole lot of up-and-coming . . . musicians who loved what he did and caused his name to be highly revered inside music circles, Dane says. That was enough for him apparently . . . and that’s probably an important part of who he is.³

It could be said that Davis turned Robert Johnson’s legend on its head: he didn’t sell his soul to the devil, as Johnson was rumored to have done, to acquire superhuman blues guitar chops. Rather, Davis renounced blues music in his prime and devoted his life to God as a preacher. When recording blues material might have opened professional doors or record producers’ wallets—and stamped an express ticket out of poverty—Davis refused again and again.

Eventually, his gospel music got him to the Promised Land, or at least the Promised Neighborhood: a comfortable home on a street of well-tended lawns, off the mean sidewalks of New York where for nearly two decades he’d stood hour after hour playing, singing, and preaching for spare change while fending off muggers and the police.

His story is one of survival against the odds, gritty perseverance, unshakable faith, and talent’s triumph over towering adversity. It’s also a story of generosity—his own and that of his followers, who worked tirelessly on his behalf both during his lifetime and after his death to try and get him his due.

Davis couldn’t have begun with a poorer hand. The blind son of dirt-poor sharecroppers in post-Reconstruction South Carolina, he might have met the same fate as his seven (sighted, so far as we know) brothers and sisters, none of whom lived to the age of thirty. Davis would later attribute his survival to God’s hand: he’d been denied the ability to see but given something special in return.

Without discounting that explanation, the sheer force of the Reverend’s personality, his razor-sharp intelligence, and his iron will to survive deserve at least part of the credit, along with, of course, his otherworldly abilities as a guitarist and composer. He’s one of those rare musicians who help change the very conception of their instrument, who see potential where others see constraint. In his case, he also managed to translate darkness—both literal and metaphorical—into light.

*

Some of his guitar students, mesmerized by his musical virtuosity and inspired by his doggedness in the face of hardship, had a tendency to idealize Rev. Gary Davis, perhaps in the wish to believe that he’d managed, against all odds, to fully transcend his harrowing beginnings. In that vision of his life, he emerged Buddha-like from the abyss of the Jim Crow South and achieved a kind of walking nirvana, doling out life lessons from an exalted spiritual plain as he plucked out impossible riffs on his beat-up Gibson. Some of his own music surely promoted that view: oh glory, how happy I am, there’s been a great change since I been born, must have that pure religion—must have religion in your soul converted, and so on.

In truth, Davis was uncommonly giving, spiritual, tenacious beyond most usual conceptions of the word, funny, charming, quick-witted, and, of course, profoundly gifted. But he was also cocky, competitive, sinful, and at times unfaithful to the religious virtues he sang about so mightily. His music, one might say, was profoundly aspirational, and if he sometimes fell short of a commandment or two, the only one he had to answer to was God.

He seemed to understand that about himself. The devil may have ruled on terra firma. But in the words of one of Davis’s spirituals, A Little More Faith, a final repose would be found in heaven, where my sins are forgiven and my soul set free.

Prologue

You Got to Move

All I know is, the house exploded after listening to him because they didn’t know him. I mean he was just a new star.

Robin Roberts

On the morning of December 6, 1949, the music community in New York City awoke to tragic news: Huddie Ledbetter, the iconic, silver-haired folk singer and onetime murder convict known to his legion of fans as Lead Belly, had succumbed to complications of Lou Gehrig’s disease on Ward R6 of Bellevue Hospital.¹

From his tenement apartment on Tenth Street on the Lower East Side, Lead Belly had held court for nearly two decades as the alpha songster of the New York folk scene, a larger-than-life figure and one of the best-known balladeers in the world. Before it finally took his life, the degenerative muscular disease formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) had laid low a man who in his prime had had a barrel chest and taut muscles honed by picking a thousand pounds of cotton a day with a partner back in his native Louisiana.²

Word that Lead Belly had passed into immortality at the age of sixty-one shook fellow musicians from the nightclubs of Greenwich Village to the jazz lounges of Harlem. That day the folklorist Alan Lomax, who, along with his father, John, had discovered Ledbetter in 1933 at the Louisiana State Penitentiary—where he was serving time for slashing a man with a knife—announced that a memorial concert would be held to honor him, the first ever staged for an American folk singer.³

Lomax planned the concert in consultation with Lead Belly’s grieving wife, Martha. As part of the memorial, he’d wanted to show a movie he’d taken of the singer in his prison uniform at Angola, but Martha was said to have told him, I’d rather see him in his coffin than in his stripes, and Lomax heeded her wishes.⁴

After nearly two months of preparations, the show took place at midnight on January 28, 1950, at New York’s stately red brick Town Hall on West Forty-Third Street. It turned out to be the most spectacular musical gathering in the city since John Hammond’s monumental From Spirituals to Swing concert in 1938 brought together the leading lights of blues, gospel, and jazz under one roof for the first time.

The program for the tribute read like a who’s who of blues, jazz, and folk music: Woody Guthrie, W. C. Handy, Sidney Bechet, Eubie Blake, Pete Seeger, Count Basie, and Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry among them. With Lead Belly’s famous twelve-string Stella guitar suspended high up in the center of a gray curtain, the A-list musicians took their seats on stage for the first act, waiting for their turn to approach the microphone and pay tribute to the departed songster.⁵

One of the performers that night was all but unknown to the crowd, though Lomax, Lead Belly, and a few of the musicians in their circle by then were certainly familiar with South Carolina–born Rev. Gary Davis: the fifty-four-year-old blind Baptist preacher had arrived in New York City six years earlier from Durham, North Carolina, where he’d tutored Blind Boy Fuller, one of the best-selling country bluesmen of all time. While in Durham, Davis had landed a single recording session of his own that had captured his nearly unrivaled virtuosity as a guitarist, even if the 78 rpm records released under the name Blind Gary hadn’t sold well. Not long after, he’d found God and been ordained a minister.

In New York, Davis lived with his second wife, Annie, in a shabby East Bronx apartment, subsisting on pass the hat offerings at small churches where he preached, the nickels and dimes that rattled in his tin cup when he performed on street corners in Harlem and around the city, and a welfare check. Davis’s rasping but powerful voice, his personal magnetism, and his showmanship served him equally well as a street evangelist and itinerant Baptist minister for poor storefront congregations.

Although he’d pointedly chosen the mission of serving Jesus over leading the life of a blues singer, Davis possessed a staggering guitar technique grounded in blues and ragtime, and he was a born entertainer, whether performing spirituals or the secular rags and dance tunes (but no sung blues) he then included in his repertoire. He not only played the daylights out of his instrument but also drew upon a musical bag of tricks, such as pounding on his acoustic guitar like a drum with his right hand while picking out notes and entire chords with his left, making the guitar imitate human voices, and even creating a reasonable facsimile of an entire marching band on his six strings. All of which he punctuated with ecstatic cries of Good God! and improvised yelps of spiritual delight. It made for a riveting show.

At the end of the first act of the Lead Belly tribute, a major New York audience got its first introduction to the Reverend. With the other performers—including Guthrie and seventy-six-year-old W. C. Handy, known as the father of the blues—seated on the stage, Robin Roberts, a young aspiring singer and actress, got ready to lead out Davis. He carried a metal walking cane and wore dark aviator glasses, a suit, and a guitar slung in unorthodox fashion around his neck rather than over his shoulder. As Roberts offered up her arm, Davis gave no indication of any nerves. In fact, he almost seemed to size up the beautiful brunette from behind his black shades.

"How old are you?" he asked.

I’m twenty-three, his escort replied.

Davis responded with what would become something of a trademark: a bit of southern folk wisdom, tinged with sexual innuendo. Young mules, he told her, "always kick hardest."⁶

According to the script for the program, Lomax gave the following introduction to the crowd at Town Hall and to a radio audience tuning in live on WOR in New York as the blind musician emerged from behind the curtain:

When Lead Belly was a young fellow, he played second guitar for the greatest of the blues singers of that day—Blind Lemon Jefferson of Dallas, Texas. They roamed the streets together the dry days and the wet—singing for ten hours at a stretch, their fingers finding the new chords and figures that came to make Negro folk music. Meet now one of these great street musicians, Reverend Gary Davis.⁷

Like a gifted athlete in his prime, Davis had a knack for seizing the spotlight, and his brief performance that night became the stuff of quiet legend.

Seventeen-year-old John Cohen, a future member of the seminal folk revival group the New Lost City Ramblers, had a seat in the packed house, having convinced his father to take him to the late-night concert. Cohen had been listening to Lead Belly’s records for two years, and he was aware of Pete Seeger and the Weavers, but he was unprepared for what he saw now on the stage. They closed the curtain and a short time later this one old man comes out into the spotlight with his guitar and cane. We had no idea who he was, Cohen recalled. He played two numbers on the guitar, then went back behind the curtain. It was amazing. I was really just learning to play the guitar. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.⁸

Tom Paley, later Cohen’s bandmate in the New Lost City Ramblers, remembers being seated on stage for the first act next to Woody Guthrie, who occasionally sneaked back behind the curtain to have a drink before returning to his chair. When Davis came on, Paley did a double take. He’d once scooped up two Blind Gary 78s at a secondhand record shop and listened in awe to the guitar playing on those scratchy old records. He never expected for a moment that Blind Gary would materialize before his eyes. When they brought this blind man up with the guitar and introduced him as Reverend Gary Davis, I didn’t know the Davis part of the name, Paley says, but he was blind and his name was Gary and I thought, ‘Could it be this amazing guitarist from those old records?’ And, yes! Yes it was!⁹

In Cohen’s recollection, the Reverend played two songs that night: You Got to Move, a driving spiritual featuring impossibly syncopated guitar—which would become the subject, two decades later, of a copyright lawsuit with the Rolling Stones—and Marine Band, an instrumental rag in which Davis’s lone guitar imitated the brass bands of his youth. The effect on a crowd that had never heard this orchestral style of fingerpicking, or the guttural shouts of a street evangelist, was startling.¹⁰ People just went mad because he was the most exciting new thing at the entire concert, Roberts remembered.¹¹

The New York Times report on the show singled out only two performers by name: Jean Ritchie, the Kentucky folk singer, and Davis. The attentive audience gave heavy applause to the Rev. Gary Davis, blind singer from the Deep South, the Times said.¹²

Dan Burley, a Kentucky-born boogie-woogie pianist, also performed that night. Burley moonlighted as a journalist and an influential one at that, as managing editor of the New York Age, the city’s leading black newspaper. Burley seemed to grasp the significance of Gary Davis’s performance, writing the following day that Davis was a likely successor to the great folk singer, guitarist Lead Belly. In fact, as the ethnomusicologist William Lee Ellis has written, Davis may have possessed a repertoire equal to that of the prolific Lead Belly, who recorded two hundred songs in the two decades after his discovery and probably took untold others to his grave.¹³

But even though the audience—and a good many of the performers—left Town Hall that chilly winter’s morning believing they’d witnessed the emergence of an extraordinary talent and possible heir to Lead Belly, nothing ever came easily for Rev. Gary Davis. Committed as he remained to his church work, he would be relegated to the musical margins and a life of urban poverty for another dozen years. Davis would live hand-to-mouth as he’d done for decades, counting on the kindness and good taste of those who heard him shouting his songs over the racket of city buses and police sirens or preaching the gospel in a cramped storefront.

Still, on that big stage, with the spotlight upon him and the roar of the New York crowd in his ears, Davis must have sensed how far he’d come on a perilous journey that began deep in the South Carolina countryside.

Chapter One

There Was a Time That I Was Blind (1896–1916)

It’s so hard I have to be blind

I’m away in the dark and got to feel my way

And nobody cares for me¹

Rev. Gary Davis

Elderly blacks in Laurens County, South Carolina, still remember an old railroad trestle and a putrid piece of rope that hung from it for decades. The rope, they say, had last been put to use back in 1913 by a white mob that lynched a black man accused of rape. While the rope and trestle live on only as jagged shards of memory, other unpleasant reminders endure of the harrowing environment in which Gary Davis grew up, most notably the Ku Klux Klan Museum and Redneck Shop, housed in what used to be a segregated movie theater. Items available for purchase at the shop include white hooded robes, Klan stickers, and photocopies of Whites Only segregation signs.²

A few paces away is the Laurens County Courthouse, a Corinthian-columned building that looks about the same as it did in Davis’s youth. The courthouse square in the city of Laurens, the county seat, retains a retro feel, its red brick storefronts adorned with Coca-Cola and Bull Durham Tobacco ads painted on the side. It doesn’t take a lot of conjuring to envision the old stagecoach route that linked Laurens County to Greenville and Spartanburg to the northwest in the 1800s. Back then, if you had traveled along that dirt thoroughfare from the courthouse and veered off a great distance into the gently rolling hills, you’d have eventually found yourself amid a quiet patchwork of ragged farms, mountain-fed creeks, and lush forestland miles from any hint of bustle. This is the place where Gary Davis’s life began—and might well have ended, if not for his astonishing musical gifts.³

Laurens County was in the midst of social and economic turmoil in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Union victory in the Civil War had left the state’s farm economy in ruins. Many white farmers who’d depended on forced labor had been wiped out as four hundred thousand South Carolina slaves became free under the watchful eyes of federal troops and the Freedmen’s Bureau. Farmers who’d managed to stay afloat still needed a workforce, and newly freed blacks had few skills outside of farm work, so the uneasy alliances of sharecropping and tenant farming had arisen in place of outright servitude.

At the same time, a violent struggle had erupted over Reconstruction, as whites aimed to take back what Robert E. Lee’s troops lost on the battlefield. One center of resistance was Laurens County in the northwest corner of the state. In 1870 it was the scene of a bloody riot, when a brief battle between white and black militias over a local election prompted thousands of armed white men to descend on horseback from surrounding counties; they chased down and attacked blacks over several days, killing six, including a recently elected black state legislator, whose corpse was left rotting in the road. As terrorist acts against blacks escalated statewide, President Ulysses S. Grant tried in vain to assert federal authority and tamp down the influence of the Ku Klux Klan by suspending habeas corpus in Laurens and eight other South Carolina counties and placing them under martial law. But by the time the century drew to a close, Washington gave up trying to impose its will and turned its attention elsewhere.

In 1895, South Carolina’s new constitution effectively resurrected the antebellum order. The charter imposed, among other things, a poll tax and de facto literacy test for voting—voters had to be able to read or interpret an entire passage of the state constitution, an impossibility for illiterate former slaves—as well as a ban on interracial marriage; it provided the legal basis for the Jim Crow laws and customs that would subjugate blacks for decades to come. The following year, the US Supreme Court established separate but equal as the law of the land from sea to shining sea.

If life was hard for most black South Carolinians then, it was especially so in Laurens County, where only 4 percent of blacks worked a farm they owned, the second-lowest proportion of the state’s forty counties. John and Evelina Davis were among the sharecroppers in Laurens trying to eke out an existence on a patch of someone else’s land. On April 30, 1896, their eldest son, Gary, was born.⁴

Gary Davis’s mother, the former Evelina Martin, was seventeen when she gave birth, and she would go on to have a total of eight children, most likely by multiple fathers. But with proper medical care for blacks practically nonexistent, six of her children died as infants; only Gary and a younger brother—probably a half-brother, named Buddy Pinson—survived, and Buddy would die in 1930 at age twenty-five, stabbed to death by a girlfriend with a butcher’s knife. That would leave Gary as the sole survivor of Evelina Davis’s large brood.⁵

The event that would define Davis’s life—the loss of his sight—occurred soon after birth. I’d taken sore eyes when I was three weeks old, he recalled in one version of the story. They [took] me to a doctor and the doctor put some alum and sweet milk in my eyes and they caused ulcers in my eyes. That’s what caused me to go blind. In his later application to attend a school for the blind, Davis’s mother would tell a similar story, blaming his blindness on medicines of doctor who made a mistake.⁶

A doctor who examined him as an adult would conclude that Davis had suffered both infant glaucoma and ulceration of the cornea,⁷ a condition that can result from neonatal conjunctivitis contracted from a mother with gonorrhea and also can afflict children with a severe Vitamin A deficiency. As to what led to Davis’s blindness, a family friend named Tiny Robinson gave a different explanation: she said Davis’s mother blinded him by trying to treat his eye infection with lye soap, an old folk remedy. Davis’s second wife, Annie, corroborated the story about the doctor as Davis himself told it. Both accounts seem plausible, but the common denominator was the absence of even rudimentary medical care. Davis said the doctor told his family that he might overcome it as he aged,⁸ but he never regained his sight.

Davis’s blindness was near total, as his blind school application would note, meaning he wasn’t in complete darkness. That jibes with Davis’s own description decades later in New York: I could tell the look of a person, but to tell who it is, I’m not able to do that.⁹

The exact location of Davis’s birthplace remains unconfirmed. However, in one interview, when asked about his parents, he said: "This was Mr. Abercrombie’s farm. He

Reviews for Say No to the Devil

[romis78 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an exceptionally well written and researched biography of Gary Davis. It's been a long wait for a comprehensive study, but well worth it.. Production quality of the book is excellent, with my only regret being the lack of a real discography. Also, in keeping with current trends, it should have been possible to have an accompanying CD. Small quibbles given the total results. As a bonus, the book was surprisingly cheap on Amazon.