Music and Memories

Provine Hatch, “Little Hatch”

The 78-year-old Hatch, of El Dorado Springs, Mo., was born in Sledge, Miss. He first picked up a harmonica as a boy.

“I was working in the fields, chopping and picking cotton. . . . I got me a harmonica when I was a little fella. . . . It didn’t cost me but a quarter. . . . I couldn’t put the thing down. I would just get in bed at night, crawl down under the blankets and couldn’t nobody hear me. I would play light and soft. . . . I worked myself right on up to the best harmonica player. They know me all over the world.”

“I’ve been playing music a long time. I’ve gone all over the country, I’ve been to Germany, Belgium, Amsterdam. . . . I’m just like horse stuff . . . all over town.”

“The blues is something like trouble, you know what I mean? It’s your wife or your woman giving you trouble, and you start singing the blues. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid, when I didn’t even know what it meant.”

Weepin’ Willie Robinson

Robinson, 73, of Boston, emceed blues shows and sang for the first time at a B.B. King performance in the late 1950s in Pottstown, Pa.

“I wanted to be a singer because they seemed to be the ones getting all the girls. . . . I talked to B.B. King and he said, . . . ‘Go up on the bandstand and sing.’ . . . I sang ‘Woke Up This Morning.’ I was lousy, to tell you the truth. I was lost. I knew the song, but I forgot it by the time I got with up the band. . . . He had a 21-piece band. It scared me to death. . . . I finally got myself together enough to finish. . . . [Afterward] he said, ‘Now, see, you tried. Keep on going.’ ”

“I started picking potatoes and tomatoes, helping my father out. We picked all the way to a place called Cheapside, Va. My father sent me to New Jersey. He told me he would join me in about two weeks. That was in 1939. I haven’t seen him since. I had to grow up with the big boys.”

“Singing the blues is, how can I put it? It’s like medicine. There’s nothing that gets you higher than the reaction of a crowd applauding for you when you’re doing something. . . . As long as you can think and talk, you can sing the blues.”

David “Honeyboy” Edwards

Edwards, an 84-year-old Chicagoan, has been playing professionally since he was 17. He recalls when Alan Lomax, a renowned folklorist, traveled to Mississippi and recorded him:

“I was playing on the weekends, making whiskey, having fun with the girls . . . and this man came in and said, ‘My name is Alan Lomax. I want you to do some recordings for me.’ I told him where I lived. Monday morning, he drove up in the yard. He was driving a ’42 Hudson, six-cylinder. It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. . . . We went 14-15 miles. He drove me to Clarksdale. . . . We went to a big school out there that the government had put up. . . . He started recording me about 12:30. A big storm cut him off in the middle of the session. . . . That was 1942. He gave me $20. That was a lot of money then.”

“I made a lot of money, I throwed away a lot of money. . . . Big cars and women. . . . You got to live, you know what I mean?”

“I can play country blues. I can play rock ‘n’ roll blues. You got to keep up with what’s going on. It’s easy when you know how to do it.”