Sing the blues in Memphis, Tennessee

“Well, when I first started hanging around Beale Street, it was sixty some odd years ago. I’m eighty-three and been here in Memphis ever since I was six, because they brought me here from Greenwood, Mississippi, but I been around Beale Street all my life. That’s where I came up on. Well, I first started playing down there, I was about fourteen or fifteen years old. I didn’t have a music teacher, nothing like that, but I go around people and see them play a guitar and I just watch their hands and come on back home and do the same thing. Then I joined Handy — W. C. Handy, that’s Christopher Handy — I started when I was fifteen years old. But I was a man that played with the band when one of the band people was off. But after that I got so good — I won’t say famous, now, but I’m famous now, though - I got so good until I got hired in W. C. Handy’s band.”