"lve been trying to get the old man to move away from here for years," smiled Maurice Hulbert Jr., a lanky young man in his 20s. Leaning against a printing press, one ear cocked to the unsteady beat of an air condi-ioner, Hulbert nodded toward his father. "He talks about it sometimes," the son continued, "but they will carry him out in a box. Beale Street is in his blood." "It all started here a long time ago," explains Hulbert Sr., a nattily attired Negro in his 70s. "This is the cradle of the only original American art form. This is where the blues were born. ,
This, mister, is Beale Street." Hulbert says the name with pride. He's the mayor of Beale Street, the old-timers tell you, and he remembers things as they once were. This year marks the 150th birthday of this bustling Mississippi River port and "The Mayor" has seen a lot of its history written right here on Beale. Once it rivaled Greenwich Village for color and notoriety. Both have slipped a long way, Shade your eyes to the sun and squint through the time-worn window of Hulbert's print shop and you can see Beale Street as it is today — the way his son sees it. "Nothing here," says the young man, downing a soft drink.
"Nothing but old buildings and memories of a lot of things that probably never happened in the first place. There's still good music — Booker T. lives here and Johnny Winter and Albert King are in town this weekend, but they're not on Beale Street. Nothing is." Whatever it once was, Beael isn't much today. The official Memphis guidebook calls it dilapidated, which is being kind. The Memphis Housing Authority sees Beale not as it is or was but as it will be after a $240 million urban renewal project plows under the rubble and gives birth to a " 'blue-light' district of night clubs and restaurants reminiscent of Beale Street's colorful past."
Whatever that means, it's bpuad to be an improvement. But the old ways die hard in places like this and the future can he frightening to the hardy handful of Beale Streeters who were here shortly after the turn of the century when W. C. Handy used to spread his music sheets on the cigar counter of Pee Wee's saloon. Handy wrote "The Memphis Blues" at Pee Wee's, getting his inspiration from the street, but that was a long, long time ago. "The white kids like the blues," says Hulbert the elder, shutting the door to his shop behind him and stepping into the mind-bending heat, and Handy would have liked that.
His music was for everybody. If you ask me, he was way ahead of his time. Walking along Beale, past the long-boarded-up Daisy Theater, where the rank smell of urine fills the air, the ghosts of happier times are everywhere — and Handy's spirit dominates the street. His statue casts a giant shadow from its perch in Handy Park, where pigeons land disrespectively on the stone likeness of the great man's trumpet and sleeping drifters take cover from the sun. "Back around 1910," Hulbert recalls, "things were really happening around here.
Handy was at his best and there was gambling and corn whisky and policy houses and plenty of women and good times. Lots of things went on here that wasn't right with the law, but they were right as far as we were concerned. As the kids say now, we were doing our own thing." Which may explain why, on a blistering Saturday with the temperature nudging the 97-de-gree mark at noon, a half-dozen white kids from half a country away walk down Beale, shading their eyes from the sun, searching for the truth. "I didn't come all the way down here to see a lot of broken - down buildings and cracked-up sidewalk," explains Bob Thomas, a New. Yorker who says he's skipping his col-lege graduation to be here for a blues festival.
"I came to hear the music, but I figured that as long as I'm here I might just. as well see the street. This is where `sour was born, in the truest sense of the word. When you listen to Winter or Jimi Hendrix, or Janis Joplin or Charley Musselwhite, you know their roots are here, even if they have never been near this street. If it hadn't been for Handy, there wouldn't be much worth listening to today." And so it is that the late W. C., a quiet genius whose music made other people rich, has taken his place today as the man who closed the generation gap. Those who remember him well don't seem too surprised by his most recent accomplishment.
"Handy wasn't much when it came to getting paid," recalls Robert Henry, a 79-year-old pool room onerator. "I remember when his band used to make $2.50 a night right across the street from my place. Funny thing was, the white folks always liked Handy the most. The blacks never did think too much of him until he packed up and moved to New York. "But Handy's music was the real thing. The songs of the fields, the long days in the sun, the hard times, it was all there. Handy told it like it was a long time before anybody thought up that expression. First time heard it, I thought they must have had Handy in mind when they made it up."
A block or so away, in a house that's scheduled to be torn down to make way for that $240 million project, Otto Lee, a member of Handy's last band, collects pictures and clippings of his former friend and waits for the bulldozer. "I used to call him Professor Handy," Lee says in a cadet; pleasant voice. "There were other bands, but Handy was the master. He wanted to have a band that would make headlines from Beale Street to Broadway; but it never worked out. Professor Handy would have liked things the way they are today. He was such an honest mad who believed in love and kindness that he would have liked playing for these young folks."
Just around the corner, in an old hotel that has seen better days, Sun Smith, a blind trumpeteer well into his 70s, fingers his horn while sitting in the breeze of a fan and gets ready to go to work. "I play some new songs, like `Chicago'," Sun says, slipping his mouthpiece into his instru-ment, "but mostly I play Handy's music. 'St. Louis Blues', `Memphis Blues', 'Beale Street Blues', those are the songs people like to bear, especially the young people. The blues never did go away, but now they're really back. The blues are gonna outlast me." The blues outlasted Handy, outlasted Beale Street as he knew it and. will outlast the street as it is today.
The blues, it would appear, are gonna' outlast us all.
Source: 69-08-09 Cumberland MD Evening Times
