Bo John (revised)

In the Spring of about 1952 sister Jeannie and I went on a yellow school bus with a young group from Pulaski Heights Methodist Church to the run-down Black neighborhood of College Station in Little Rock where we set up for a rummage sale just after dawn. Right next to the empty dirt lot where we set up the tables was a shack of a grocery store with weathered grey wood siding and old tin Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Royal Crown Cola, Orange Crush and you-name-it signs tacked on the outside wall. Then down the long rickety stairs from the porch of the store came a happy drunk Black man playing a great blues tune on a harmonica. It sounded like it came straight from the French Quarter in New Orleans. This image stayed with me over the years until in 1958 I started writing what that black man inspired, pulled it out of the "archives of the forgotten" and finally finished it in March 2013 and want to share it with you.

Bo John

Bo John first was a black babe when his pappy said to him,
“Son, I want you get way from that cradle. You’re a man now, Bo John!”
So Bo got way from his cradle and took to takin’ his stand
and he sweat like that black demon that made him so quick a man;
He sweat black sweat in the hayfield and he hoed till his guts was run,
but he knowed he had to hold his soul ‘cause he’s a man now,
Bo John.

On a dark day rainin’ grizzlies, a rainbow arched to the sky;
John jumped up like he’d struck magic and said, “I, John, wants a better life!”
So he stuffed some biscuits in a sock, swung his banjo on his side,
shoved his mouth harp in a pocket and let his smile grow sunshine wide;
He hit the road to New Orleans, music bouncin’ through his soul,
his boots barely pushin’ a mark in the muddy country road.
He pulled out his mouth harp, makin’ Dixie with every breath while
hums of jungle-drum rhythms beat deep in his joy-swelled chest;

New Orleans took him in with arms wide like this is home at last;
That’s when his eye caught Lila sittin’ in her crisp red gingham dress.
His blood fired to high noon, a new music risin’ his life;
Pretty as chicory coffee, soft as a snatcha cotton,
he knew Lila would be his wife.
He made any downs go up when Little Lila he wed,
washed the countryside with his Dixie playin’,
fillin’ full the souls of the empty half dead.

Bo made his pappy proud of what all he did. He said,
“Son, keep on pourin’ them Dixie musics over all the folks that is,
makin’ ‘em happy with them good sounds
like your mammy makes us happy with her good grits;
Yessir, jes’ keep ‘em dancin’ ‘till they knows it’s a new way of walkin’
and don’t want to slow up to sit.”

So Bo went on doin’ what his wise pappy said,
kept pullin’ people up by their soulstraps and
dancin’ way past when the sun had sunk deep in its bed;
Now when the rooster crows the dawn up,
it don’t take much tunin’ your spirit in to listen to Bo John’s
Dixie siftin’ its way through the cool fresh mornin’ mist.