Page 13 - BiTS_04_APRIL_2026

The other thing that came out of that night was how good a match, like a ball and
socket, all this beautiful music was to what was going on in the streets and in the
halls of power.

BiTS: how did you become a 'lead' for Rev Davis and others.

AC: I got to be Davis's lead boy a couple of times, once in Chicago when he played
the Quiet Knight, and I was working for the guy who owned it doing handy work. He

knew I was a picker, and he asked if I'd put Davis up at my apartment while he was
in Chicago for two weeks. Uh, yeah!...

A year later we moved to Detroit, down the street from two friends who were about

to get married, Loring Janes and Sue Mosher. The Rev Davis came out to marry them,
and while he was staying there, he did a bunch of gigs all over Michigan. We even
took him to the Gibson factory in

Kalamazoo. He played in Lansing, Ann
Arbor, at the Chess Mate in Detroit, I
think he even went to Traverse City

at one point.

I was okay as a lead boy, and he
instructed me on how to do it, his

hand on my outstretched arm, just
resting on it, and he could follow me
at a natural pace. He could see a little

and was fiercely independent.

BiTS: Thanks for telling me that.
How did you advance your guitar

playing?

AC: I should also say that the

Instructional appendix to Alan
Lomax's Folksongs of North America
was very helpful. The licks were
clearly described, with each one

keyed to several songs in the book.

When I first learned to drive, I picked
up a hitchhiker who was carrying a guitar case. Once he was in, I asked him what he

had, and said he'd just mustered out of the Army and used his muster money to get
a brand-new D-28, four hundred bucks out the door, case and all. I asked him if he

knew how to Travis pick, and he showed me by miming it on his leg. Once I saw it,
I could do it. He didn't even have to tell me to lift my thumb back on the 'and' of two
so it would be in place to play the low note at three.

BiTS: I have seen you described as a musicologist. Is that how you see yourself?