MISSISSIPPI BLUES

The music is in Ted Hawkins voice. The lilt, flow and curve of the rhythm ripples through his words. The music is in his body too. His hands dance with the words and his body sways forward to start a sentence, back to finish it. He is an old, Black man from Mississippi, but the fire is still in his belly, and he is young with ambition. Opportunities come late to Black men from Mississippi, if they come at all. Fame is a White passer-by of the homes where the Blues was born and dies . . .

Some have it rough. Some always had it that way. “I didn’t have any parents,” Ted Hawkins says. “I brought my ownself up. All the things that you guys have for free, didn’t happen to me. I didn’t have no protection like that. I didn’t have nobody to look after me.”

What saved him, what got him on the musical track was “a man by the name of Professor Longhair. I was with him. He came to a reformatory school for boys. He walked among the kids, and he came to like me. And him and Miss Williams, Professor G.W. Williams, his wife, two people who was caretakers of that institution, took me and taught me a song called ‘Somebody’s Knocking At Your Door’. And then they took me to Jackson, Mississippi, and put me up on a stage. And I went out there and sung and rocked the house. When I was twelve years old.”

The early immersion in music was not enough. Hawkins became involved with petty crime and spent time in jail. “When you a child,” he explains, “and you don’t have nobody to say ‘That’s hot. Don’t touch it,’ sooner or later you gonna get burned. You got to.”

Still the music was always there. For him, “music was all I had. Didn’t have no education. You know, Black people that don’t have no education, they can either sing, box or play ball.”

Out of jail, music was his life and livelihood. Ted Hawkins became a street performer, spending some twenty years on Venice Beach, California. “I had more success at Venice Beach than anyplace else,” he recounts. “But I hadn’t always been at Venice Beach. Before Venice Beach I was downtown Los Angeles. And people began to crowd around me. I began to stop traffic and stuff. So the police made me move on. They came down and broke it up, ‘cause the folks was backing out onto the street. The police just said: ‘You have to move. You causin’ trouble here’. And I said: ‘Well, other folks are playin’ here’. And they said: ‘You, we don’t want you. ’Cause when other people sing, the traffic keep on going. But you cause the traffic to stop’. I said: ‘Where can I go?’ And somebody said: ‘Go to Venice Beach’. So that’s where I went.

“I saw a great crowd of people at Venice Beach,” he continues. “Fire Eaters, and walkin’ on glass, and all kind of people. It looked like it was a place for the rejected. There was arms out for anybody, no matter how small. Venice Beach is a wondrous corner of America where you can go to and do your thing.

“I was there, and I stood and I sung, and my legs got tired and my feet got tired. So I walked the back streets until I found a milk crate. That was in 1974. I found that milk crate and brought it back to the beach, and I sat down on that milk crate and started singing. And I’ve had that milk crate ever since.

“I was hopin’ that somebody would come by and see me and do something for me,” he adds. “Many people came by and saw me. And I did a few things but it wasn’t about nothin’. I went to England and tried to make it there, but when I come back, I was just as broke and just as down an’ out as ever. I had to go back to Venice Beach. I didn’t get any rest, not even one day off. And I finally got those bills down. And made a little money to get somethin’ to eat.”

Most of the songs on The Next Hundred Years are about falling in or out of relationships. It’s a funny thing, but sometimes it seems that those who sing or talk about relationships most, understand them least. Perhaps we all talk about what we don’t have and live what we have? It seems to be a bit like that for Ted Hawkins.

“Ain’t nobody been able to hold me,” he says matter-of-factly. “You know, I’ve never fallen in love like that. Love is what keeps people together. And, you know, love wasn’t given to me, so I don’t have it to give. If it was given to me then I would have it to give to somebody else. But it was never given, so I ain’t got it.

So are his songs a search for love? “Not exactly a search for it. I don’t want it. (laughs) I don’t want it.” He pauses. “Those songs are sent to me spiritually by Sam Cooke. They’re brought to me by Sam Cooke. Sam is dead but he’s still alive. Elvis Presley is dead but he’s still alive. When you die . . . You gonna leap outta that body one of these days, and you’re gonna see yourself lying there, and things are going to be beautiful. To live is to sleep. To die is to awaken.”

I think I’ll stay asleep for a while, I reply to this nugget of wisdom. He laughs heartily.

There is a song called ‘Ladder Of Success’ on the album. “No matter what you know, it’s who you know,” Ted Hawkins says. “You’ve gotta know somebody who knows somebody who can give you a helping hand. Many people have gone to their grave and not found somebody. They didn’t make it because they didn’t have somebody to build up their image in the eyes of the public. They didn’t have no good PR.”

For him, during his long years of performing, was it difficult to know that right somebody, simply because he was black?

“Like Little Richard,” he replies, nodding his head. “He’s cryin’ out now, that I didn’t get nothin’! You didn’t give me nothin’. He’s been cryin’ out so loud that now in America they’re beginning to notice him. His name is on the Wall of Fame now. And every time you see a Special, Little Richard is there. In his old age he seem to be doin’ alright now. Jackie Wilson, if he was White, he would’ve been so rich now. Instead he worried himself to death. He sung so hard. He never did recover. Al Green . . . There was some great singers.”

“But you can never catch up,” he expands. “Just like you can never make up for lost time, you can never make up for lost sleep. If I go to jail, if you go to jail right now, and get out six months from now, you lost six months. That six months is gone. If you lose sleep, that sleep is gone. I lost all that time in the past, of strugglin’ an’ tryin’ to get somewhere. It didn’t happen. That time is gone. So what I’ll do now is start now and go on up the King’s highway.”

However, Ted Hawkins believes that some of the problem lies with Black people themselves. “White folks are not like us,” he explains. “They stick together. If a White man build a small peanut hut, all the White folks will come to him and buy peanuts, until he get a peanut factory.

“We are like a bunch of crabs in a barrel. Each crab is holdin’ on to each other. You can’t pull one out because everybody’s holdin’ on to each other. You might even get pinched in the process of tryin’ to get one of the crabs out of there.”

Ted Hawkins has been on his own island of music over all these years. He knows little of LA Rap, or of Public Enemy, much of whose work has been trying to bring black people together in a strong and unified community. However, if he has managed to escape the LA rap of NWA, Ice-T, Ice Cube and Snoop Doggy Dogg, he has not escaped the reality of the violence they chart.

“What I do know is that there’s too much violence,” he says passionately. “Period. You can’t stop at a red light unless it’s: ‘Get out of the car!’ With a gun in your face. Your standin’ at the bus stop waiting for the bus. An’ there’s some kids that passin’ by and they want some action because they’re bored. So they shoot. This is what’s happening now. Right this minute, while we’re talking, in Los Angeles. It’s a shame.”

Ted Hawkins has waited a long, long time for his break. Now on Geffen, he is intent on doing everything he can to break on through. Listening to The Next Hundred Years, as I write this, I get the feeling that perhaps the need for that break has dictated things a little too much. His voice is superb, very evocative, deep and grainy. It has that essential soulful passion that you find in Otis Redding’s music. But the backing is much too studio. In fact, if any sound dominates, it is that of session Country. “I’ve always liked Country music,” he says simply, “because the words are so meaningful. I don’t want to be pin-pointed as a Blues man per se because I wouldn’t get a chance to sing the other stuff.”

Still, despite a sometimes flat backing, Ted Hawkins sings the Blues with a passion learned in the University of Hard Knocks, as he calls it. And, for him, the dream is still alive. The desire to be remembered; the hope is that somewhere, sometime in the future, when the name of Ted Hawkins is mentioned, someone’s face will light up, and they will talk about that great voice.

“You shouldn’t die without leavin’ something, so that people know that you’ve been here,” Hawkins says. “Just think of it: live all your life and don’t do nothin’ an’ then die. Accomplish something. Because I feel that we are all put here for some kind of a purpose.”

Ted Hawkins’ purpose was to sing for the enchantment of the soul. He has accomplished that.