Fahey may be gone, but Blind Joe lingers on...

In the beginning was John -- or Johnny. In fact there were two of us, one a doppleganger of the other. Johnny, as I was generally called when little (and still by close friends, relatives and the sarcastic), was,  in school, just John. Then there was the Other John, also often called Johnny back then, at least by close friends -- and especially girlfriends. John Fahey, later to grow an alter ego named Blind Joe Death (but who at the time was going by Blind Thomas on Fonotone Records recordings), was one of my oldest friends. That is, he was a lot older than me, and we both lived in the same twilight zone known as Azalea City (the official nickname of Takoma Park, MD, but also Takoma, D.C., honest to god, it knows no boundaries). I met John Fahey/Blind Joe in 1954, when he shot me with a zipgun,  but that is another story. This is not that story.  It's also not another "brush with death" story, although that does make for an interesting new angle on an already old Open Call theme. No, this is about how I wound up being "Calhoun" and even AJCalhoun, the front initials getting added later by another dear friend who also lived for a time in Azalea City and who is still alive and well and, well, we'll maybe get to him in  a bit.

Now Johnny who was me, that one used to be a huge fan of the Amos 'n' Andy Show. Rather bad taste, right? Well not in the early 1950s, when everyone, and especially all my frankly "colored" friends, and I, would make sure we were home in time to watch the week's  morality play about how incredibly stupid  people could be when trying to avoid just doing the right thing because it was too much like  work. That part was played, in the character of George "Kingfish" Stevens, by the late, great Tim Moore, and Captain Bringdown, Mr. Sensible, Amos, the  cab driver, was played by Alvin Childress, who frequently narrated the weekly fiasco with Kingfish being the usual butt of his lesson. And of course there was Andy (how else could it have been Amos 'n' Andy?), played by Spencer Williams, as a (mostly) good natured foil for the Kingfish's every scheme, scam and screwup.

_{The late, great Johnny Lee}

But for me the show would never have worked as well as it did if not for the sometime unscrupulous lawyer,  sometime "personal consultant",  Algonquin J. Calhoun, played by the brilliant Johnny Lee. Lee as Calhoun (and he was almost always referred to by his friends as just "Calhoun") was something electric for me. His desire to do good as an attorney balanced by his inveterate love of working the system against itself (usually once Kingfish had hatched a plot from which no possible good could come), and his naturally hysterical, histrionic nature, was a character to which I could relate. It appealed to the anarchist in me. I always wanted to do good, but I was also a sucker for any crazy idea. Chaos was good. Then, when said crazy idea would go horribly wrong, I, like my idol Calhoun,  would go 180 degrees on everyone involved,  lie, run away, etc. I also could mount an oral defense of anything I believed in, no matter how righteous (civil rights for instance) or wrong (we were putting the hubcaps back on the car!) and tended to get my preach on equally hysterically, which some part of me recognized as the often extremely emotional Calhoun-in-court,  as he so often was, pleading the case for George Stevens, who was beyond any doubt guilty of whatever he'd been accused of, and probably far more.

I  loved Algonquin J. Calhoun. He was art in motion. Johnny Lee was a genius. I was the same inside. We looked nothing alike, yet somehow I felt like Calhoun much of the time. Friends trying to make pointless points in arguments or street corner debates would turn to me and say "Isn't that right?" That's all it took to turn  me into a manic street preacher (never a member of that band, though I still admire their choice of name).

So one day I was around the corner on Third Street, at Doc's drugstore, in the DC part of Takoma Park,  about a block behind Coolidge High School, buying penny postcards ("postals" my mother used to call them), and, stepping  out into the baking July day, I stopped and looked around to see if anyone was around, if anything was happening.

Nothing.

I mean,  not even a passing car, and Third Street is quite wide along there.

I felt like that guy in the very first episode of "The Twilight Zone", the one called "Where is Everybody?" It really gave me an uneasy feeling, "the air still and clear as glycerine."

Then I noticed a large paper cup sitting on top of the mailbox out there in  front of Docs, on the sidewalk, right by the curb. I walked over and looked at the cup. This is important, because it is what caused The Voice to speak when there was nobody there. But not quite yet.

The  cup, I could see, was almost two thirds full of cola, sweating profusely, and was delicately balanced on the curved top of the (olive drab -- dear god, I'm old) mail box. Just sitting there. The slightest breeze, even a passing car, could have caused it to tip and fall off. And yes, it might have fallen  harmlessly toward the gutter, but I've seen stuff not fall the way one might wish it had. Trust me, I've seen some  awful things happen that could easily have gone the other way.

A soda falling toward the mail  flap side of the mailbox would spill along the hinged bottom of that flap and co'cola would go...inside the mailbox! Jesus H. Christ! We put all  our mail in that thing, and so did everyone else. It was a federal crime to damage or otherwise molest the US Mail, and there was a reason for that, I was quite sure. Besides, my family's mail went  in there. My mom wrote postcards to dozens of people "down home" almost daily.  No  interwebs back then. Al Gore was a poor little rich kid who hadn't yet invented that. So she wrote all the time, and any time something happened.  Didn't have to be much. It was almost like a primitive form of twittering.

So  I had to get that cup offa there. And I did.

I slowly approached, my right hand extended, my forefinger pointing toward the very center of its balance, so it couldn't possibly somehow manage to go the wrong way. I looked around. Not a living soul anywhere. Still, I was quite sure, the cops would appear out of nowhere if I screwed up my mission.

I  moved forward with the grace and agility of a ninja, til my fingertip came into contact with the cool, soggy side of the cup. I simply leaned forward at that point, and the cup began to tilt streetward. Thank  God! It wasn't gonna turn on me. The mail was going to be saved.

And it was. The cup slowly fell over toward the street and  landed with a soul-cooling splash! in the gutter. The mail   was safe.

I looked around again, to see if anyone had possibly seen me do this, seen me doing something pointless and annoying. I didn't want to pick the  thing up and put it in the grey municipal trashcan near the mailbox, because, as my mother would have reminded me had she been there, I didn't know where that thing had been.

I turned to leave, and that's when I heard The Voice.

"Calhoun!"

I looked around, surprised, since there had been absolutely no one nearby the  whole time  I'd been out there killing time.

"Calhoun?"

I looked around, as no one named Calhoun was answering. I also thought it interesting someone named Calhoun might be in the neighborhood, where we usually only saw guys like  Flea and The Swami (the turbaned Indian guy who rode a Harley) or Brown, the janitor who worked at my elementary school about a block to the west. Nobody named Calhoun I knew of.

"Calhoun,  why'd you knock that drink off there?"

It took me a moment to put two and two together, but when I did I felt like an insect under a microscope. No, more likely under a magnifying glass. I looked everywhere, but couldn't get a fix on the direction  of  The Voice, although it sounded vaguely familiar. It was so disembodied!

"Why'd you do that??" it demanded. I knew now it was addressing me, but I couldn't, in my twelve year old brain, figure out why it cared. Still,  it didn't take much to spook me. My head did almost a 360, my body following right behind it, trying to see who was talking to...me!

No one. I got really nervous and started to walk toward the corner around which lay my house but another hundred feet.

"Where you goin'?" it demanded. I almost hollered "Home!" but caught myself. I started to run.

"You can run. I saw what you did!"

I ran like hell.

I spent the rest of the afternoon  in the cool basement, listening to R&B and jazz on the Webcor portable record player and pondering who had spoken to me that way. And why.

That evening, after dinner, I had almost forgotten about the whole incident, and wandered across the street to the edge of the ballfield behind Coolidge, where one could  sit on the little grassy bank of earth a safe distance from  where Fahey and the Swami and Flea and the Jarboe brothers, et al,  used to play cards, pass remarks at the passing girls, and torment the beat cop. Fahey, as usual, was there, lying on his back with his guitar across his stomach  and his cards held up in the air over his face. I liked John, despite the long-ago zipgun  incident, because he treated me like a regular person even though I was so much younger. He didn't discriminate on account of age (one can get some insight into why this was by reading the chapter "Neighborhood" in his inspired book "How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life").

John,  at some point, put  down his cards, sat up, and started picking out a tune on his guitar. I listened in fascination, wishing I had that gift.  I tried, God knows I tried, but I wasn't very good. And John was no teacher. He didn't mind showing people stuff, but it was up to them to figure out how to do it themselves.

He started picking out "The Prisoner's Song," considered by many to have been the first "country" song recorded, by Vernon Dahlhart. John knew I had a copy of that record (with "Wreck of the Old 97" on the  flipside, typical Apalachian disaster music) and would occasionally try to get me to sell it to him. He was a musicologist, although I didn't realize this til a year or two later. By then he'd recorded his first and defining album, the now extremely rare "John Fahey/Blind Joe Death" one. The one that would lead to him eventually holding the title "Father of American Primitive Guitar."

But that was later. Now, in 1957, he was playing "The Prisoner's  Song." John couldn't sing worth a damn, though. No one but him ever mentioned that.

John looked over at me and I looked away, expecting him to bug me about the record again. That wasn't what he wanted.

"Hey! Johnny!"

"Yeah?"

"You can sing."

"A little."

"You know this song. Would you sing a verse for me if I play it?"

"Aw, gawd. I....uh...what for?"

"I like the song, Johnny, and you know the words and you can sing and I can play. These guys need some culture."

"But..."

"Come on, please? Over here."

"Are ya'll gonna beat me up or something?" This was followed by many ha ha's from the rest,  especially Johnny Jarboe (yet another John or Johnny).

"No, I swear,  I just want to hear how this would sound if I could sing, because, you know..."

I got up and ambled over nearer the group. I rarely actually sat with them. It didn't feel respectful or something. John started to play the verse, looked at me, nodded a few times, I got the rhythm, and on the next starting point I started singing. I could sing. Not as good as my mother, who was actually once a serious jazz and blues singer, but I could sing ok. And for some reason, perhaps fear, I did.

"Oh if ah hayud tha wings of an an-jul, Over these prison walls I would flah, Straight to tha arums of mah darlin',  Ayund there Ah'd be willin' to dah..." And so on.

Eventually it petered out to overly enthusiastic applause. John waved his left arm in a vast gesture, and said loudly "Blind Thomas and Hollerin' John Calhoun, ladies and..." he looked around..."gentlemen?" There were hoots and catcalls then. Gentlemen. Ha!

That voice. "Calhoun." Oh, for God's sake. Crazy sonofabitch!

"I gotta go," I muttered.

"I want that record," Fahey replied. "Why don't you just go get it now? I'll give you ten bucks!"

"It's not mine" I muttered, thinking what I could do with ten US dollars. No. That record belonged to my mom first. Nope.

I waved over my shoulder and the rest of the old guys shouted parting obscenities softly.

^{_{One's reporter, circa: then (under restraint, having spotted a girl)}}

Soon people started greeting me with "Calhoun!" instead of "Hey Johnny!" It was strange at first. It got a lot stranger, though. People who couldn't know anything about the naming started to call me Calhoun. When my family moved to Maryland (a whole other trauma), it kept happening. I'm not making this up. I don't know how or why this happened, but it continued.

When I met my now-oldest, closest male friend in 1963, Marion from Norway (well, he was an American citizen, but I don't think he'd ever actually been here til he was declared persona non grata over there and was sent to live with his father around the corner from me) he one day began to do it also. In fact Marion was the first to call me Algonquin J. Calhoun, later shortening it to AJCalhoun. In the 1970s Marion  and I lost touch for a while -- 27 years, in fact -- and when I found him, via the magic of the internet, the reply to my email inquiry as to whether or not it was the correct Marion, I got back this reply only:

"That sounds like AJCalhoun."

Samuel Clemems had Mark Twain. John Fahey had Blind Joe Death. Foster Mackenzie III had Root Boy Slim. Me, well...

It  took even longer to find John again. Almost too long. He wasn't well, and now my old friend's  not alive (though hopefully well). But Blind Joe Death is around, still, and sometimes, on summer nights I wander down to the field off Third Street where I once sang with John Aloysius Fahey, and I just stand there among the lightning bugs and wait. Eventually I hear Blind Joe hiss: "Calhoun!" and I know everything is ok with the universe.

_{John, then, at Youngblood's hardware store, composing}