HARLEM NIGHTS: MY TRIP UPTOWN
William A. Wisdom

It was the summer of 1958. I was working in the Personnel Department of the NYU Medical Center just east of First Avenue on 34th Street, and I lived around the corner between Second and Third Avenue on 30th Street. (To learn why I had moved from Philadelphia to New York, see here.)

As the clerk-receptionist in the Employment Division, I greeted job-seekers, and I distributed, collected, and later filed their applications. For this reason, I saw virtually all of the dozens of daily visitors to the office, and remembered hardly any.

That’s the way I spent my weekdays from 9 to 5. But almost every Sunday when the weather permitted, I’d join the folkies in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square, strumming my tenor guitar and singing along with the likes of Roger Sprung — then as now a brilliant banjo player — and lots of other musicians of the new “beat generation”.

On one of my first visits to the Square, I thought that I recognized a job applicant from the previous week. Sure enough, he remembered me. Both of us being new to the Big City, we struck up a solid friendship. It turned out that he was also having trouble getting his draft board to accept his claim as a conscientious objector. Like me, he had not been raised in an historic peace church, which accounted in part for our common problem.

He played the guitar in a finger-picking style with which I was not familiar, and I enjoyed the sound. So he invited me to go to one of his guitar lessons. He assured me that his teacher — an excellent musician — wouldn’t mind, and that I’d have a good time. So we met near the Medical Center, and took a long subway ride up to 125th Street. We walked several blocks, and climbed three or four flights of stairs. When the door opened, my friend said, “Bill, I’d like you to meet my teacher, Brownie McGhee.” I might have fallen over or swooned or something, if I’d had any idea who Brownie McGhee was. But I didn’t. My knowledge of folk music was pretty much confined to The Weavers and The Kingston Trio.

The one-hour lesson turned into four or five hours of instruction interspersed with Brownie’s playing and singing and talking. This was regularly punctuated by his son “Turkey” running through, often playing with his younger sister. None of this turmoil fazed Brownie.

In the kitchen was Brownie’s wife and her women’s gospel group singing gorgeous music and laughing, singing and laughing. They apparently either didn’t hear or disregarded Brownie’s bawdy songs — i.e., most of them.

This was one of the most exciting evenings I had in an exciting city (e.g., I once accepted Jean Shepherd’s late night invitation to come over to the WOR studio to listen to his wonderful ramblings about his childhood and his readings from The Bobbsey Twins; and I saw the stage show of The Threepenny Opera, starring Lotte Lenya).

My friendship with my guitar-playing friend, and my acquaintance with Brownie McGhee, got me an invitation to a birthday party for the Reverend Gary Davis, certainly near April 30 (Davis’s birthday) in 1959 or 1960. I remember very little of this affair, except that Davis, as well as several others, played and sang a lot of very entertaining songs.

I had no more idea who the Reverend Gary Davis was than I had had who Brownie McGhee was. But in hindsight, I can guess who else was at that party. Sonny Terry, Lightnin' Hopkins, Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters, Josh White, and Son House, as well as McGhee, were all alive and active at that time. I would guess that at least some of them were there. But what did I know?

Copyright © 2006, William A. Wisdom