The Early Years
Box Set: Vol. 1 liner notes

"Clambone" Jefferson was born March 1, 1907, just outside a garbage dump in Columbia, South Carolina. His mother, a recently-immigrated Afro-Cuban Jew named Carmela Goldfarb, had no idea she was pregnant at the time. She merely stopped by the dump to discard an old mattress. As she bent down, splat! There cried the Clam. Jefferson's patrimony remains unknown, although throughout much of his life, he has been gripped by the belief that his true father was, in fact, Woodrow Wilson.

Carmela was a wealthy woman. One day while making hominy biscuits, she accidentally stumbled upon a tonic formula that could speedily remove unwanted knuckle hair. This discovery, fortunately, occurred during the great knucklehair epidemic of 1905.

Jefferson lived with his mother in luxury until he was four, when she accidentally mailed herself to Omaha, Nebraska. He was sent by the courts to live with his only known relative, a vicious bootlegger and killer by the name of Pee Wee Wilson, in a three-room outhouse in the very depths of Louisiana Bayou country. It was here that Jefferson had his first musical experience. Pee Wee, when he wasn't out knifing prostitutes, played an accomplished accordion, usually when he was blind drunk. He kept his nephew locked in a four-by-six cedar crate, only letting him out to battle for food scraps in a sawdust ring with four snarling one-eyed hounds. Pee Wee and his friends would laugh wickedly and flick peanut shells off their bony knuckles at the weeping, hungry boy. Afterward, Willie would squat in his crate, feral, miserable, his legs cramping, and hear his uncle work the squeeze box until the late hours. He thought to himself, "after I murder this man, I will learn how to play."

In 1917 Jefferson was sent to the Louisiana Boys' State Reformatory Home for the crime of disemboweling his uncle with a tuning fork. He quickly amazed his fellow inmates with his easy mastery of a number of instruments, including the saxophone, drums, slide trombone, and hurdy-gurdy. His was a new kind of American music. Despite his bloody, desperate roots, and despite never having heard a note of recorded music in his life, Jefferson played a joyous fusion of gospel, ragtime, and bluegrass. It was a revolution waiting to happen.

One of Jefferson's fellow inmates was a young man named Louis Armstrong. He heard Jefferson playing in the prison courtyard one day and said, "I've got to ask that boy what he calls that sound." Armstrong never got the chance. He was sent to the infirmary that very day for swallowing poison sumac. When he came out, Jefferson had been locked in solitary confinement after biting off the warden's head. Still, young Louis Armstrong never forgot Jefferson's playing, and always cited him as a major influence. "It sounded like a clam," Satchmo said, "only with a bone in it." This was not an original assessment, but everyone pretty much agreed. The nickname stuck, Jefferson would say later, "like wet rice to a wall."

At the age of seventeen, a handsome, lanky, and totally deranged Clambone Jefferson was released from prison. He began a journey deep into the heart of the south, descending into a seamy world of clinging vines and thick, viscous swamps and broken down old juke shacks populated by big-hipped rough-skinned women packing three different kinds of heat. Clambone strapped his bag over his shoulder and wandered places where most men dare not go, not even on a bet, not even on a triple dog dare. He went down, down, down into the depths, into the dirty stanky hungry maw of the south. It was there, people say, that he made a deal with the devil.

This is not true. Instead, he made a deal with a white farmer and hillbilly guitarist named Doc Thompson, who lived just outside Natchez, Mississippi. The deal was this: Jefferson would do some day labor on Thompson's farm if Thompson would teach him how to play guitar. The two guitarists worked in the fields all day, beat each other senseless with gardening hoes for a couple of hours, and then started playing out on Thompson's front porch, a keg of moonshine between their legs. From these Natchez Sessions, as they are now called, came some of the first blues ballads: "Shrimps In My Shoe," "If I Had One More Minute I'd Pass This Stone," "Deal Me Another Queen Of Hearts," "The Devil Bit My Ass In Two," and "Won't Stop Drinkin' 'Till I Start Drinkin' At Dawn." These songs would have been lost to history forever if musicologist Alan Lomax hadn't run out of gas in front of Thompson's farm one night, if Jefferson hadn't beat Lomax up, drugged him and taken his recordings, and if he and Thompson hadn't then sold their collected songs to a record company in New York for more than $1,000.

In 1930 Jefferson shot Thompson dead, stole his car and his prize sheep, Tootie, and lighted out for Chicago, where jazz was hot and jazz was cool. The city was alight with jazz, and a new jazz band was being formed there by Satchmo himself, one of the most important of the century. Clambone was not asked to be part of this band. Instead, he got a job selling toasters door to door, at which he proved surprisingly effective. "All I had to do was show those ladies my shiv," he later said, "and I was in."

But late at night, he'd take his horn, his guitar, and a surprisingly large piano around to the city's many underground jazz showcases, places with names like Maxwell's Finger, The Wet Grotto, 237 W. Randolph, and Help, My Boots are Full of Blood. There he would play until dawn, or until he killed somebody, whichever came first. All the great jazz musicians caught snippets of Jefferson's songs, most of which were improvised. These tunes, including "I Can't Find My Hat," "Buy My Eggs on Tuesday," and "It's a Long Way Home Next Door," became part of the American jazz repertoire, although Clambone never could remember a note. All through the '30s, he was just too damn drunk.

The 1940s came along soon enough. They were a time of great tumult and change in American society, and in American music. Clambone spent the entire decade in a coma. On Dec. 6, 1941, after attending a meeting of the American Nazi Party, he injected a quart of sugar water into his left leg. He staggered about his bedroom, quickly composed a fight song for the University of Arizona, and collapsed.

He awoke in 1951. A beautiful nurse was hovering over him.

"Where am I?" he said.

"Why, Memphis, Tennessee," she said.

She had such a kind face, like an angel's. She reminded him of his saintly mother, who had mailed herself to Omaha so many years ago.

The nurse held his hand tenderly. "You're going to be OK," she said. "I'm going to take care of you. Forever."

Clambone ripped out his IV, slugged the nurse in the face, pinched her wallet, and fled the hospital into the street. He ran for blocks and blocks, running like he had nowhere to go, which he didn't.

Finally, worn out, he collapsed on a park bench, panting to himself, "that's all right, mama, that's all right." He started saying it louder and louder, then singing it, until his voice became a quivering, plaintive wail that fused together the blues and country yodelling, with a distinct, rhythmic backbeat.

Clambone's voice was heard, the legend goes, all throughout Memphis that spring morning. As he moaned away on the park bench, he was approached by a tall, handsome man wearing a cowboy hat.

"Hello," the man said. "My name is Sam Phillips."

Clambone never saw the man again.

Reviewed by Neal Pollack
01.25.99