Art Lewis was born in Houston in 1936 and first remembers listening to music
in church. "It had so much power behind it, you couldn't sit down. You'd
have to hold onto your seat and if you don't watch it you'd start hollering
'Hallelujah,' and 'Thank-you-Jesus'."
Lewis studied a few years at Texas Southern but credits his real education
to the hours he passed on the porch with his grandfather. "He was a storyteller
and everyone went to sit on his front porch to be entertained. He could tell
a lie into the truth, and most of my knowledge of life came from him. He taught
me to let your mind be the strongest thing about you, and that words can save
you or destroy you. He taught me how not to be afraid. It's invisible how
he taught knowledge to come to me. It's a form of relaxation that is the same
way with music. I relax myself and it comes. I play things that I've never
heard. Sometimes when I play a lick on my horn, it's just that time to play
it -- I can't force it and I can't delay it.
"I started playing in clubs when I was still a teenager. We were playing
blues but we were mostly into entertaining. I was standing on the corner one
day and Amos Milburn's brother who was a piano player came by and asked me
if I wanted to work tonight and I said, 'Work?' because I just got the horn
about three months before and I didn't know anything about working but he
said, 'Come on, we'll jam,' so I said, 'Okay.' He had a cousin who played
drums and could keep a beat, and that's why the beat is so important in music.
The piano player didn't know anything about the piano and I didn't know anything
about the saxophone. We only knew about three or four notes but we knew how
to entertain, like jumping off the bar and the tables and going out into the
streets. Our main goal was to get the customer to drink because the more the
listener drinks, the better the band sound. If you don't get people to react,
it don't matter how good the music you do. You have to entertain; you have
to get that lady out on the dance floor.
"I would hear the local bands around Houston in the Fifties, and I
knew a lot of guys who are famous today - guitar players like Muddy Waters
or Guitar Slim - and people ask me how it feel playing with people like Joe
Turner and T-Bone Walker. At the time, the only thing you're worried about
is getting to the job on time, how much does it pay and will the others get
there sober.
"I got with Bobby Blue Bland for a while in 1954 and '55 because his
bass player called and asked if I want to play with them in Florida, and we
came up the East Coast to New York and over to Chicago and St. Luis. Then
I went to Louisiana with Clifton Chenier and we played more white clubs than
black. The blacks and whites were listening to the same music but separate.
They eat the same food and listen to the same music and sleep with each other's
women, but they were not allowed to mix with the other, so when you break
it down, both of them were in a state of slavery.
"I went back to Houston when I got called to the army, but the war
was over and I had quit a gig just to find out that I didn't need to. That's
what brought me to El Paso. I was on my way to Mexico and just as I was coming
into El Paso, I stopped at a gas station and a guy stepped up to the car and
said 'Can I help you, Sir.' These were small words but they were powerful
words and I had never heard anything like that before. Those words, 'Can I
help you, Sir?', were part of my decision to stay here, and I have found more
democracy in El Paso than any other place I have gone.
"When I got here there was a lot of action over on Alameda but I played
in bars all over town. You could start in the Circus Room, where the Central
is now, and go past the bus station, and back down to the bridge on El Paso
Street, and all you had was entertainment and bands. On Saturday afternoon
you could have 500 people at the Hollywood Cafe. It was nothing for me to
play four or five gigs a day. We just played all the time, at the Whoo's Club,
the Alley Cat. You crossed over the Bridge and you had live music all the
way down to the La Fiesta.
"I sat in with Long John at The Lobby and I played with him at the
King's X for ten years, but when he left is when I became what I call an earth
citizen, and that's how my band The Earthmen came about. I started out as
a Negro and then a colored man and then a black man, but I evolved into a
citizen of earth, because the only way I'm going to let other people take
one inch of the earth is if someone holds a gun on me and says this is my
land and I say, 'Okay, this is your land,' and then he puts the gun down and
it's my land again.
"I don't ever remember packing a knife or a gun. Everyplace I've ever
been, the only instrument I ever used was my saxophone. As long as you're
on the bandstand you're safe, unless you're messing with someone's old lady
out there. There are very few musicians that got wiped out on the bandstand.
"When you're making jazz and blues it's better to have a little of
everything than a whole lot of one thing. Music is a powerful force. It can
make you laugh and dance and it can make you fight and raise hell, but I never
chose to do the negative end of it. I know the power of music, and what I
play is something to make you feel good.
"The blues does not affect the white man the same as it affects the
black man. When a white man listens to the blues, it's for entertainment,
but when a black man listens to it, it's for revenge. He's already mad and
the blues is just making him madder.
"The minute I walk in a club, I'm thinking, "How are the people
out there at those tables feeling?" I can sum up how they are listening
by the movements of their bodies and the way their mouths are going, and that's
what I play to.
"All music has the same notes. Symphony has the same notes, rap has
the same notes, blues has the same notes, religious has the same notes, every
style of music you can name has the same notes. C is C. It's all either four
beats or three beats or two beats. If you could tap the moon, you'd find that
it's the same note that you can tap on Earth."
--30--
©2003 Richard Baron
Send comments to Richard at rbaron@elp.rr.com.