Down On The Corner: Adventures In Busking & Street Music

DOWN ON

THE CORNER

ADVENTURES IN

BUSKING

& STREET MUSIC

CARY BAKER

A Jawbone book

First edition 2024

Published in the UK and the USA by

Jawbone Press

Office G1

141–157 Acre Lane

London SW2 5UA

England

www.jawbonepress.com

Volume copyright © 2024 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Cary Baker. Foreword © Dom Flemons. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD: FEEDING THE STREET BY DOM FLEMONS

INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF HISTORY OF BUSKING

PART 1: ORIGINS

1 MAXWELL STREET PART 1: A DAY IN THE LIFE

2 MAXWELL STREET PART 2: ARVELLA GRAY, GRANNY LITTRICEBEY, AND A MARKET SCENE’S DEMISE

3 STREET CORNER SERENADE: THE RISE OF DOO-WOP ON URBAN AMERICAN STREETS

4 BUSKING BLUESMEN: PRE- AND POST-WAR

PART 2: THE EAST COAST

5 WASHINGTON SQUARE: SINGING THE RIOT ACT

6 RAMBLIN’ JACK ELLIOTT: NOT BUSKING, JUST SINGING FOR THE FUN OF IT

7 OLIVER SMITH: AN ORDINARY MAN’S LUCKY DAY

8 MOONDOG: THE ROAD TO CARNEGIE HALL, AND THE SIDEWALKS ALONG THE WAY

9 SATAN & ADAM: ANGELS OF HARLEM

10 MARY LOU LORD: TUBES AND TROLLEYS, SQUATS AND PITCHES

PART 3: SOUTH AND MIDWEST

11 CORTELIA CLARK: FIVE ’N’ DIME STREET SINGER

12 OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW: CURBING THEIR ENTHUSIASM

13 TIM EASTON: THE WORLD AS AN ACOUSTIC STAGE

14 NEW ORLEANS PART 1: BLUES WITH A SIDE OF BOURBON

15 NEW ORLEANS PART 2: DAVID & ROSELYN, GRANDPA ELLIOTT, AND MORE

16 PRESENT-DAY NEW ORLEANS BUSKING: TUBA SKINNY, ROYAL STREET ROYALTY

17 GEORGE ‘BONGO JOE’ COLEMAN: AMERICAN PRIMITIVE

18 POI DOG PONDERING: ALOHA TO AUSTIN

19 LUCINDA WILLIAMS: HAPPY WOMAN BUSKING

20 VIOLENT FEMMES: WHAT MADE MILWAUKEE FAMOUS

PART 4: CALIFORNIA

21 PETER CASE: NERVES OF STEEL

22 FANTASTIC NEGRITO: THE POWER IN NOT CARING

23 WILD MAN FISCHER: NOT SHY ANYMORE

24 TED HAWKINS: SOUL AMID THE SUN, THE SKY, AND THE SURF

25 STREET RELIEF, WILD SPACES, ROLLERBLADES: THE BUSKERS OF VENICE BEACH

PART 5: EUROPE

26 ELVIS COSTELLO: WATCHING FOR DETECTIVES

27 GLEN HANSARD: SWELL SEASONS ON THE STREETS OF DUBLIN

28 BILLY BRAGG: RIFF-RAFFIN’ THE TUBE

29 TYMON DOGG: FIDDLING, STRUMMING, AND CLASHING

30 MOJO NIXON: LONDON CALLING

31 MADELEINE PEYROUX: BUSKING BY BENZ AND BARGE

EPILOGUE: PLAYING FOR CHANGE, ‘BUSKERS ARE IN THE JOY BUSINESS’

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: ‘IF I MADE YOU LATE FOR WORK, THEN I’VE DONE MY JOB’

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

ENDNOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FOREWORD

FEEDING

THE STREET

BY DOM

FLEMONS

WHEN I BEGAN BUSKING around the age of seventeen, I called it ‘feeding the street,’ and even though it was more challenging than playing in a venue, that was part of the fun.

In my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, I was one of a few buskers to brave the hundred-degree heat with my guitar and banjo. During my high school and college years, I would stand on the corner at the neighborhood art walk on 1st and Roosevelt Streets, belting out songs ranging from Hank Williams to Cat Stevens, Lead Belly to Chuck Berry—or whatever suited my mood.

When I dropped my hat, it was showtime, and nothing stopped me from singing on the streets for a few hours at a time. Once I began to play in clubs and bigger venues, I never forgot the lessons in resilience and stagecraft I learned feeding the street. When you know that the audience doesn’t have to give you their attention, your method of delivering a performance changes drastically to get it.

With my guitar under my arm and my harmonica in a rack, I mimicked the sounds of the 1960s folk revival that I had heard on records. When I began to read about the heyday of Greenwich Village and Boston, I knew that I wanted to have those experiences, so I took my music to the streets of Phoenix, and eventually, as I got into college, I’d busk all over Northern Arizona in places like Flagstaff, Prescott, and Sedona. As no one had seen or heard the type of music I was playing, my busking act began to evolve into a show where I played old styles of music for passersby, making the old songs come to life like a human jukebox.

The best part about busking, to me, was that there was no right or wrong way to do it. All I needed to do was set down my hat and sing.

While many buskers are known to be constant travelers, there is a strong busking culture that belongs to the local performers who become known through their immediate communities. Many of these buskers earned a name for themselves by being fixtures of a city, developing an audience that would consistently see them while slowly building, one fan at a time, from casual listeners to dedicated die-hards.

Every location has its own type of appeal for a performer, and many buskers can be found at big exhibitions, markets, and street fairs, all the way to natural amphitheaters. When I lived in New York City, I busked all over town from the Bronx down through Manhattan and in Brooklyn, playing in the parks and on the subway. I learned how to take break sections on the platforms so that my songs wouldn’t get lost over the sound of trains going by. I saw every type of busker in New York City from insane preachers to horn-driven shout bands, the frantic sounds of the xylophone, the mysterious tone of the theremin, Peruvian pan flutists, and any number of guitar troubadours playing for change and feeding the street with their art and music.

When I was in North Carolina, I played on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill and got to learn the jive of the street people who lived out on the stoop before the area became fully gentrified. Many people who had roots in the rural parts of the state would come up and compliment my country blues picking. They would lend an ear to a nostalgic memory of their upbringing. Some of them even took a moment to spin a yard to give me context for their admiration.

Even as I began touring internationally with The Carolina Chocolate Drops, I would busk on my own throughout England, France, Belgium, and other places around the world when the mood hit me. While playing on the streets, you have full freedom, within reason, to play or say anything you please. Once you start, it becomes clear that your audience is both distant and close to you. If you play a song that is appealing, they may stay or go. Every audience member is now part of a much bigger theater that you, the busker, are providing for them. The desire of the audience becomes a new element of the performing experience. The synergy only multiplies when more people are involved. All of the sudden, a bigger crowd changes the busking experience from a one-on-one conversation to a majority vote. If you are a good busker, you can bring the crowd, give them a thrill, and finally disperse everyone in a timely manner, with a few extra dollars in your hat.

Music has always been about connecting with one another. Whether vocal or instrumental, there is nothing like a live musical performance and the impression it leaves on the audience. It can change the mind, melt the heart, or bring the hairs of the arm or head up on end in sheer excitement. There are many ways to experience music, but none are more organic and visceral than the sound of the busker standing out on the street and entertaining for everyone to hear.

I’ve seen buskers who are bare bones, holding a single battered instrument and having only the will to play for whoever passed their way. The master busker is not judged by musical quality alone but by their charisma and presence to enchant a crowd of strangers into their midst.

Busking requires no ego. In its most basic form, you or I could go to a street corner and start right now and begin working a crowd to a frenzy. There is a 50/50 chance it would work. Without something unique to grab people’s attention, we are just causing a disturbance. When a real busker masters their craft, an audience of passersby will be spell bound by their talents and skills. First, the attention of the audience alone is the reward for the performer, but if they are really good, that attention will be rewarded with money. Sometimes it’s coins and other times its dollar bills, but over time it accumulates. A busker will play anywhere between a few songs to several hours before they pack up. They sing out into the open air, their voices unrestrained by microphones or the sound limitations of an enclosed space, and it rings across the surrounding buildings.

In the following book, you will get a moment to meet a group of musicians who are all drawn together by the excitement, spontaneity, and potential financial gain of busking. Their methods are all honed from their unique environments and individual personalities and life stories. The chapters ahead give them the full respect they deserve because the nature of the profession leaves a lot of room for erasure. A busker can disappear as easily as they appear, without a single trace left behind. This book allows us to hear the full story of feeding the street, as it has been done for over a century in the United States. It gives us a glimpse into the lives of the buskers who have enriched our daily existence with music and performance art. It’s a dollar in the hat, with the acknowledgment that the world is always a better place when busking is a part of the picture.

Special thanks to Cary Baker for giving a new voice to a music tradition that will continue to live on forever and will find new homes wherever the music takes it.

A resolute preservationist, storyteller, and instrumentalist, Dom Flemons has long set himself apart by finding forgotten folk songs and making them live again. His work has been recognized with a Grammy award (plus a subsequent nomination), two Emmy nominations, a USA Fellowship Award, and inclusion in an exhibit at the Country Music Hall Of Fame & Museum. Raised in Phoenix, Flemons comes from a family of civil rights leaders, Tuskegee Airmen, and preachers who were prominent figures in the Black community of Arizona. After graduating from Northern Arizona University (which presented him with an honorary doctorate in 2022), Flemons moved to North Carolina and co-founded The Carolina Chocolate Drops. After leaving the group in 2013, he established a solo career that has led him to collaborate with hundreds of artists in the Americana music scene. His latest project is Traveling Wildfire (Smithsonian Folkways), a follow-up to his 2018 Grammy-nominated album Black Cowboys.

Dom Flemons in Flagstaff, Arizona, 2004. Courtesy of the Dom Flemons collection

INTRODUCTION

A BRIEF HISTORY OF

BUSKING

BY CARY

BAKER

STREET SINGING, ALSO KNOWN AS BUSKING, has been a form of entertainment for centuries, as far back as ancient Rome. Historically, street performers would travel from town to town, performing for tips and relying on the generosity of passersby to make a living. The buskers could be comedic, theatric, political, or, of course, musical.

‘Satirical songs were also a part of Roman life in a less political and exploitable way,’ note authors David Cohen and Ben Greenwood in their book about the origins of street performance, The Buskers: A History Of Street Entertainment. ‘It became the custom at funerals to sing songs about the deceased, drawing attention to his or her characteristics.’¹

The term busker may have its root in the Italian word buscare, along with the Spanish word buscar, meaning to look for. The Spanish word traces its origins to the Indo-European word bhud-skō, meaning to win or conquer.² From there, it seems to have entered the English lexicon as what Merriam-Webster defines as ‘a person who entertains in a public place for donations.’

One of earliest recorded instances of street singing is in ancient Greece, where musicians, jongleurs (defined by Merriam-Webster as an itinerant medieval entertainer proficient in juggling, acrobatics, music, and recitation), and actors commonly performed in public spaces. During the Middle Ages, troubadours and minstrels would travel from town to town, performing songs and spinning tales to crowds gathered in public squares. In Big City Rhythm & Blues magazine’s 2022 busking issue, Dirk Wissbaum writes of how, in medieval Europe, ‘poor peasants would play a pennywhistle or other instrument and dance a jig in hopes of making a little money.’³

The term troubadour was the word in Languedoc (a region and former province of southern France) for a finder or an inventor, but it came to mean a knight who wrote poetry and music performed in courts throughout the country.

In the USA, busking dates back to the nation’s eighteenth-century origins. Benjamin Franklin, the venerable early American writer, scientist, statesman, philosopher, and, as it turns out, public orator, was himself a street performer, as he recounted in his autobiography:

I now took fancy to poetry, and made some little pieces. My brother, thinking it might turn to account encourag’d me, & put me on composing two occasional ballads. One was called the ‘Light House Tragedy,’ & containe’d an account of the drowning of Capt. Worthilake with his two daughters; the other was a sailor song on the taking of ‘Teach or Blackbeard the Pirate.’ They were wretched stuff, in the grub-street ballad style, and when they were printed he sent me about the town to sell them. The first sold wonderfully, the event being recent, having made a great noise. This flatter’d my vanity. But my father discourag’d me. Verse-makers were always beggars; so I escap’d being a poet, most probably a very bad one.⁴

Buskers became disseminators of news before the widespread use of a printing press, during which books were rare and costly. During the nineteenth century, the rise of industrialization and the growth of urban centers led to an increase in street performance. Singers, dancers, magicians, even acrobats took to the streets. This era also saw the emergence of new forms of street performance, such as the one-man band, in which a musician might play several different instruments at once.

In the twentieth century, street singing became particularly popular as immigrants brought their native musical heritage and instrumentation to the streets of the new nation. Among them was the Siberian-born songwriter Irving Berlin, who sang for pennies on New York’s Lower East Side.⁵ Comedian George Burns started in the same neighborhood, performing with the Peewee Quartet. The same thing was also happening in the Deep South, with pioneering blues and jazz singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Blake, Eubie Blake, and Louis Armstrong among the performers.

‘Some of the oldest busking in the blues could be found in and around the towns that lie along the river,’ Wissbaum writes. ‘Especially in the Mississippi Delta, where during the 1890s until the depression, musicians could be found traveling to the many lumber, levee and turpentine camps found along the river’s edge. It was here they would keep a low profile until Friday night, when the men came out to have a good time and spend a little of their weekly wages. The busker was there to entertain. [Delta-born Chicago blues singer] Honeyboy [Edwards] told several interviewers that very story. He was one of the many guitarists who went to those camps and entertained the working men there.’

Blind Lemon Jefferson, often referred to as the Father Of Texas Blues, played the streets of Dallas and East Texas. His brother, Alec Jefferson, recalled how rough it could be: ‘Men were hustling women and selling bootleg, and Lemon was singing for them all night.’ As Drew Kent further describes in his liner notes to The Complete 94 Classic Sides, ‘Blind Lemon was singing for [street crowds] all night ... he’d start singing about eight and go on until four in the morning ... mostly it would be just him sitting there and playing and singing.’⁶

Another Texas blues legend, Sam ‘Lightnin’’ Hopkins, was discovered in 1946 while singing in Dowling Street in Houston’s Third Ward by Lola Anne Cullum, a talent scout from Los Angeles’s Aladdin Records. Imagine the odds. Cullum reportedly drove Hopkins 1,370 miles to LA for his first Aladdin session.

In the Southeast, ‘[Reverend Gary] Davis’s curriculum at the Spartanburg School For The Deaf & Blind was based on a teaching scholarship he had,’ explains Andrew Cohen, a historian and confidante of Davis’s. ‘In exchange for teaching guitar, he was able to learn Braille English, Braille music notation and most likely some other academic stuff, along with the school’s obligatory trade. Blind schools taught practical things: Macon taught piano tuning; Roanoke taught kitchen labor. In this case, the trade was mattress stuffing. Davis would return to local mattress factories when it was too wet or nasty to busk.’

It is more difficult to wield a piano onto the streets than a guitar, but that didn’t stop Roy ‘Professor Longhair’ Byrd, who plied his craft on New Orleans’s streets in the 1930s. According to writer and critic Robert Palmer, ‘He taught himself to play piano on a battered upright some neighbors had abandoned in an alley. At the same time, he was tap-dancing in the streets for spare change and making occasional appearances as an orange crate drummer with a children’s band.’⁷

During the Great Depression, many unemployed musicians and performers took to the streets to make a living. In the 1960s, the folk music revival led to a resurgence in street singing, as aspiring musicians took to the streets to perform the earliest American protest songs. Protest songs were paramount in the repertoire of folk musicians like David Bennett Cohen, who began playing in New York’s Washington Square in the 1940s. ‘One Sunday, I took my guitar,’ Cohen told NPR’s Weekend Edition in 2011.’I didn’t know anybody. Somebody came up to me and said, Oh, you play that? What do you got? I made a bunch of friends. It was an amazing place.’⁸

However, on April 9, 1961, the NYPD showed up with the mission of eradicating street performers. The protest was captured by filmmaker Dan Drasin in the seventeen-minute documentary Sunday. The film’s buskers were victorious—and Cohen went on to sign on as keyboardist for Country Joe & The Fish.

Today, it is very legal to perform in Washington Square—and unusual not to see performers there. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, Washington Square looks back upon a long history of outdoor performance, one of its colorful figures being David Peel, a street singer, marijuana activist, and close friend of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Kris Needs set the scene in an article for Classic Rock magazine:

Peel took The Fugs’ taboo-shattering street chant ethos to Washington Square’s gatherings which, by 1967’s Summer Of Love, included love-ins but were increasingly being infiltrated by politically vociferous elements incensed by the escalating carnage in Vietnam and intent on causing as much havoc and social unrest as possible. ... Man, he captivated the crowds in the park, including the future Joey Ramone and his brother Mickey, who sometimes joined in on the songs. Danny Fields, who had been editing teen magazines and was part of Warhol’s circle, had joined Jac Holzman’s venerable Elektra Records as a publicist and resident ‘freak on the street.’ ... Elektra had never recorded an album live at Washington Square, so engineer Peter Siegel was dispatched to capture Peel and his gaggle of like-minded stoners who called themselves The Lower East Side, bellowing over guitars, harmonica, and basic percussion to create the Have A Marijuana album.⁹

Today, street singing is a common sight in cities throughout the world. And it hasn’t remained low-tech: many of today’s musicians and performers use the internet to promote their act, but the tradition of performing on the streets for tips and donations remains constant. Some cities have even established designated areas for street performers—New Orleans’s French Quarter or Austin’s East 6th Street, for instance—allowing them to entertain tourists and locals while preserving the character and culture of their city streets. Busker’s Bunkhouse, a New Orleans organization devoted to aiding and even boarding (for up to three days) street performers, reports on its website that ‘licenses and permits exist, but they are not required as of this writing. The city’s noise ordinance prohibits public performance between the hours of 8pm and 9am; however, thanks to an email and letter writing campaign, it is not being stringently enforced at this time.’¹⁰

In the French Quarter, Royal Street’s pedestrian mall, a haven to the city’s rich talent pool, was due to be closed to automobile traffic, enabling musicians to perform unfettered. Unfortunately, at time of writing, that is not the case. According to New Orleans alt-weekly newspaper the Gambit, ‘To this day, officials not only refuse to block off the mall from cars, the various police forces operating in the Quarter have harassed and threatened musicians who’ve tried to do it themselves.’¹¹

Other cities have fought the tradition—even the entertainment capital, Los Angeles, where turban-wearing, roller-skating Harry Perry became the poster boy for preserving the right to play on Venice’s festive Ocean Front Walk. The late activist Jerry Rubin (not to be confused his namesake, the Chicago Seven defendant) launched SHAPE—Save The Healers, Artists, Politicos And Entertainers—to help preserve the outdoor entertainment tradition.

In adjacent Santa Monica, where the 3rd Street Promenade pedestrian mall has become a busking hub, street performance is legal if the performer has a permit—and provided they maintain a ten-foot interval from bus stops and pedestrian crosswalks. Andrew Thomas, CEO of Downtown Santa Monica, Inc, has decreed, ‘The Promenade is public space, and anyone is entitled to perform on the Promenade for donations if they secure a permit through the City Of Santa Monica. Because the street is public, the performance is protected by the First Amendment.’¹²

Farther back, street music was banned by New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1935; the ban was finally lifted by Mayor John Lindsay on May 20, 1970. Among those affected in the interim was the aforementioned Reverend Gary Davis: ‘Not so much that I liked it,’ he was later quoted as saying, ‘but that’s the best I could do. I was glad to get away from it [street singing]. Cause there’s too many different kinds of people you meet up with in the street ... they call it beggin’, panhandlin’.’¹³

Chicago, too, has a rich heritage in busking. In the 1950s, the South Side was alive with street-corner doo-wop vocal groups like The Magnificents, The Flamingos, The Moonglows, The Spaniels, and The El Dorados. Every Sunday from the 1940s until the 90s, Maxwell Street Market, due west of the Loop, became a stage to blues legends—initially Robert Nighthawk, Little Walter, Big Walter Horton, and Johnny Young, and later a second wave of blues performers including Maxwell Street Jimmy Davis, Blind Arvella Gray, and Little Pat Rushing. Sadly, a motion to list Maxwell Street among the National Register Of Historic Places was declined as a result of efforts by the encroaching University Of Illinois Chicago campus—efforts backed by Mayor Richard M. Daley. (An area located across the Dan Ryan Expressway on Des Plaines Street has been deemed New Maxwell Street Market and today features a new generation of blues, folk, and Mariachi performers.)

In 1982, musician and activist Cynthia Haring, aka Destiny Quibble, complained that she could not perform on the streets or subway platforms in Chicago