Alan Govenar Read Online Free Page A

street and did whatever he could to eke out a living. “I stuck around there awhile,” he said, “and they come to find out that I was playing up and down Dowling Street there. So that began to get around, see, and I began to ride the buses free. The bus driver stopped and picked me up anywhere he’d see me with that guitar. And they’d have a big time on that bus…. I’d pick up quarters, halves, dollars. He’d even shill me a couple of dollars…. And one thing that the bus driver did—God in heaven knows that I’m not lying—he knowed that I drank, so he stopped at the liquor store on the corner of Dowling and Leeland at his own risk. Sent me in that liquor store and I got me a half a pint of liquor and he wait till I come back and then he takes on off. He brought me on back to Elgin and Dowling, and I goes on down to Holman, and I told him, ‘Now, I wants to get off here.’ And he say, ‘Well, I’m gonna let you off here…. But you try to catch me on my next round.’ And every day, I’d catch that same man. And that’s the way that I’d ride them buses and didn’t pay nary a dime. Just get on there with that guitar. And one night, I looked for us all to get arrested. They had a dance on the bus. I got to playing that ‘Little Schoolgirl’ [referring to John Lee ‘Sonny Boy’ Williamson’s ‘Good Morning, Little School Girl,’ recorded in 1937]. They all got up and went to swinging on the bus. Bus driver drive slow; he just had as much fun as anybody.” 8
    Sam didn’t move to Houston until about 1945. He was living in Grapeland, about 130 miles north of Houston in January 1940, when he filled out his Social Security application, but it is unclear exactly when he left. He did say that Lucien Hopkins, a family friend, lent him the money to buy a new guitar and urged him to go to the city. In interviews, Sam often jumped between time periods for the sake of telling a good story. One time, Sam said he got on a bus in Houston around 1940 and played a song that he said he had made up called “Play With Your Poodle,” but the girls listening to it didn’t know what he meant. However, Tampa Red actually composed “Let Me Play With Your Poodle” and recorded it on February 6, 1942. But for Sam it didn’t matter. He wanted to talk about those girls who apparently didn’t understand the lasciviousness of his song. “I’d see them little school girls come by,” he recalled, “and I’d say, ‘I want to play with your poodle.’ And they’d say, ‘Listen to that man. That man saying that.’ ‘I wants to play with your poodle. I mean your little poodle dog.’” 9
    As much as Sam bragged about the tips he made from his music during the early 1940s, it was barely enough to support himself, and he often went back to Leon County to stay with his mother. “She’d always take him in,” Clyde Langford says. “He might bring her a little something, maybe help buy a few groceries. He’d do what he could, though in those years, my daddy said it wasn’t much.” 10
    Sam never served in World War II, though he did say he was drafted. But on the night before his induction, he said, prior to moving to Houston, he was stabbed in a fight after winning all the money in a crap game, and his injuries made him unfit for military service. 11 However, if he had indeed served time in jail or on a chain gang, he would never have been drafted in the first place. It’s likely he invented the stabbing story during the 1940s. It was another way for Sam to cast himself as a victim to elicit the sympathy of his audience. Moreover, it was means for him to save face; a man of his age and generation who didn’t serve in the armed forces was looked down upon.
    Sam did sing “European Blues,” apparently about World War II, but he