The Magic Keys Albert Murray (read novels website TXT) 📖

went back up to Sugar Hill to see him that next Saturday afternoon, he said, Let me tell you something, young soldier, this proposition don’t really come as no big surprise to me at all. Hell, I know something extra special was up from the very get-go. Here you were on your very first trip to New York City and you’re going to be here for only a few crowded days with the goddamn time clicking like a goddamn roller coaster, and here he come calling to tell me he’s bringing Shag Phillips’s temporary replacement by here to make my personal acquaintance! Some nice neat kid fresh out of college down in Alabama and on his way to work on his master’s and Ph.D. as soon as he can come by enough cash to go with his college commencement grant for advanced study.

I remember, I said, and I see what you mean, but at the time I thought that visit was mainly about rhythm and tempo because he was getting me ready for my first recording session—and also because he probably knew that I grew up knowing about you from placards and also from pictures and articles in the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier.

Yeah, that’s a good point, all right, he said. But mark my words. If he had any doubts about you being ready to record you wouldn’t have been heading for that studio in the first place. No, he had something else in mind, and this proposition just goes to bear out my hunch about what it was.

And when I said, You really think this goes back that far, Daddy Royal? He said, No doubt in my mind, now that I think about it. But here you come talking about a temporary replacement and anybody could see he was already treating you like you were his adopted son or at least some kind of newfound nephew or godchild or something, knowing full well that you are not about to give up going on to graduate school to get yourself at least a master’s degree. In literature, not music, even when you stayed on beyond that first summer. I know he knew that because I know him. So I knew he had something else in mind other than keeping you out on the road with the band.

Look, he said, just think about it. This whole thing is as plain as day. All we’ve got to do now is just continue what we started the very first day he brought you up here and have continued off and on ever since you came back to go to the university.

I’m telling you, young soldier, he said, even when you left the band to stick around out there in Hollywood, he didn’t give up on you. He just chalked it up as some more useful experience that went right along with what he had in mind for you when the time came. And he knew what he was doing because you didn’t give up on school for them bright lights out there either.

We spent the rest of that afternoon looking at some of the items in his collection of show business memorabilia that he had not gotten around to bringing out for me to see before. But this time he limited his ongoing remarks to identification and chronology, saving all anecdotes for the actual work on the project.

And when I stood up to get ready to move toward the door, because it was time for me to head back downtown, he said, Of course you know good and well by now that all this about me and my story is just the beginning of this thing. What they got in mind for you goes a long way beyond me and this. As a matter of fact, as soon as I just said that, it put me in mind of something, some old professor in Germany or Switzerland or somewhere over there said to me when I was first touring over them countries across the water years ago. It just popped into my mind again after all these years. He said people started dancing before there was any music to dance to. So dance comes first and then music. Of course, you know as well as I do them professorial cats over there got theories about everything. But I bet you music follows dance this time, if you get my point.

He had come on along the hall to the elevator with me then, and just before I pushed the button, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, Of course, you also realize that this whole thing just might have got started with Hortense Hightower down there in Alabama in the first place. This could have been the deal from the very beginning. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if all of this wasn’t the main point of the deal when she got the boss to let you fill in that summer when Shag Phillips had to check out. She knew the boss knew damn well she wouldn’t be asking him to take somebody in there that couldn’t cut the mustard. And you know as well as I do that she wouldn’t even think about asking him to do something like that before checking it out with Joe States. No way she would ever go straight to the boss with something like that without first checking with old Joe.

XXIV

So there I was once more en route south and into the also and also of a very old place once more. Me and all of the obligations, expectations, and ever-alluring and expanding horizons of personal aspirations that were already beginning to be part and parcel of those now ever so wee lullaby rocking chair storybook adventure times even before I was yet old enough to stay awake for the long winter night tell-me-tale-time semicircle around the red brick fireplace beneath the Mother Goose chime clock mantelpiece.

Southbound once more by