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from no experience. But Negroes will always have a reason to sing the blues, as long as
there’s a Mississippi, Alabama, and a Georgia.

I was raised 15 years in the Orphanin’ Home and when I came out, I met a lot of interesting
people, like Big Boy Crudup, Roosevelt Sykes, Jazz Gillum, Curtis Jones, Elmore James and I
was the youngest blues piano player to ever record – I recorded with Peatie Wheatstraw.
Billie Holiday loved the way I played piano. But I don’t think she was the best singer. Oh no,
Bessie Smith was. There was no woman in the world to beat Bessie Smith after Ma Rainey.
Ma Rainey was the greatest in the world and after Ma and after Bessie there’s no one else.
Bessie was killed in Mississippi from an automobile accident, when they couldn’t take her
in a white hospital – she bled to death because she was coloured. Bessie’s piano player was
Clarence Williams and he was the best ever. I met him at his music store in New York. All
the good blues players are now gone, like Big Maceo, Doc Clayton. All them guys is gone.
Blues is only a feeling that everybody feels – you can hand the blues to anybody – it
depends on the life you live.

If your woman walks out on you, that’s the blues. You think that you can do without her,
then you find you can’t, that’s the most common blues theme you can have. Sometimes it
causes murder. You murder her
then murder yourself. The blues
make a man kill himself, but not us.
A negro won’t kill himself over no
woman, he’ll look for another. A lot
of blues men got killed by jealous
women. Old Pinetop Smith, though,
he was killed by mistake. Another
guy looked like him, this guy
walked in and shot Pinetop Smith,
thought he was that other piano
player, Ruby Smith. He was killed
through a mistake, by looking like
another man.

No sense getting killed over no
woman. If you can’t get on, let her
go. There’s plenty women – there’s
a million women to every man.

Bourbon Street is the Red Light
District of New Orleans – it won’t
ever change. All the old timers are
down there, you can see them high as 80 years old, still playing and singing. They got some
people down there that the people here can’t never see, like Margaret Bush, one of the
greatest women piano players there’s ever been, and Bill Fugle, a piano player that’s never
been nowhere – they just ain’t found ‘em yet. If you’d ever seen Margaret Bush. she’s a long
tall woman she put her cigarette behind her ear, and she’d play the hell out of that piano.
She used to play with Andy Kirk. Bill Fugle had a beautiful sister, but she was stabbed by a
guy one night – Margaret and him was playing together and they come and told him that his
sister had got killed – she was laying in the alley when he went down to see her, it was
pitiful. And her mother was in bed at that time with the TB dying anyhow.