Composers: I’m a Yard Man

Old Gus Cannon strums his banjo by the coal stove in his little house just south of the railroad tracks in Memphis. He plays and sings the songs he wrote himself—songs like Madison Street Rag and Walk Right In. Half a century ago, he toured the South with a medicine show, but the last time he played downtown in Memphis, he went to jail. He was giving a sidewalk concert for handouts when “the policeman took me by the seat of my britches and put me in his car.” A $26 fine was proof enough for Gus Cannon that for an old man there was less than a living in music.

Gus Cannon earned his keep by working as a yard man. Last winter the cold clamped down on Memphis. There was no work and no money, and Gus almost froze. When his stove went out in January, he hocked his banjo for $20 worth of coal. It was the first time that banjo had ever been out of his hands, and Gus Cannon’s neighbors had to get used to nights without his music. But just when poverty seemed to have him silenced, at 79, the old man made it as a composer: a group called the Rooftop Singers recorded Walk Right In and soon it walked right up among the top hits in the country.

Washboard & Jug. When representatives of a New York publisher turned up in Memphis in February to pay Gus for his old song, he was as cagey as he was surprised. ”I want my money,” he kept saying, peering out over his dime-store glasses. For publishers’ rights to the song, Vanguard Records gave him $500, plus the promise of a one-third cut in royalties if all goes well. Gus was also offered a recording contract to make an album for Atlantic Records’ Stax label.

Last week Gus was singing downtown again, this time in a recording studio. In his rich and resonant voice, he sang blues to his own full-chord banjo accompaniment while a friend kept time on the washboard and somebody else played the musical jug. Gus led the group through the old tunes—Long John Booker, The Chicken, Old Blue, and his own Walk Right In.

Down Home. The music came from the same pure stream Gus first tapped while working along the Mississippi levees and bumming around on Beale Street—the honest blues invented by people who had something to be blue about. But success now altered the atmosphere. Stax engineers tried hard to get a bluesy ”down-home” sound, and an English professor named John Quincy Wolf stood by as a consultant on ethnic authenticity. The Voice of America even sent a reporter to Cannon, armed with a tape recorder and an only-in-America enthusiasm: “This could be the start of a brand-new career for you!” Gus set the man straight with the deflating honesty that comes from long years of living Gus Cannon’s life. “No, sir.” he said, “I’m a yard man. I been rakin’ gum balls today before you fellas came over here.”

The VOA will broadcast its Gus Cannon story to Europe, Africa and the Near East this month. An original song or two will be played, with Gus doing the singing, and someone will warmly recall all the more attractive details of his success story. But, having discreetly pronounced Gus’s own all-inclusive account of his life “unintelligible,” the VOA will avoid telling the world the complete story of how a man gets to be a folk-music hero at 79—down home in Memphis.