| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
Our Singing Country |
||
|
my tin cup happy, marking down one more good deed on their passports to heaven. We aim to please our customers, and I think we do." Thus the faker rambled on while a smiling Negro man served delicious food and a bottle of wine.
Later on through the long Texas afternoon, amid the cheerful talk, the faker lady, in a voice untamed and natural and free as a bird's, would sing us songs of the road. She and her family for generations back had lived as gypsies,
"This lady," said the faker, "who has joined her fortunes with mine, and passes as my wife, travels with me now from Miami, Florida, to San Diego, California. We belong to that fringe of human society who take life the easiest way. We toil not, neither do we spin, yet none of Sharon's daughters was clad as she or slept more sweetly." Raising a tent flap he showed me rich purple hangings, thick-Persian rugs, a divan spread with soft silken covers, amazing magnificence. "With our burros, Abednego and Sennacherib, to pull our covered wagon, we travel as we like. Our rackets roll in the money." He lay flat on his back on the mesquite grass, puffing a cigar, as he gazed at the white patches of clouds that swept across the rich azure of a Texas sky.
I glanced curiously at Abednego and Sennacherib as they munched their alfalfa. They seemed as old as the pyramids and as solemn as a pair of Aztec idols—which they, indeed, resembled. They seemed to talk to each other with their ears. Fastened loosely to the great bony heads, these absurdly long appendages moved constantly in a fashion that astonished and fascinated me. And here close by sat this pearl of a woman, dressed like a princess, strumming her guitar and singing the songs of gypsy life.
She despised the clumsy horn fastened to my recording machine, and I caught few of the tuftes. I remember that she sang me the first blues that I had ever heard, moving me almost to tears; and a pathetic ballad of a factory girl, who got splinters in her toes. Many and many another she sang that, unhappily, are gone with the Texas wind.
Finally came the tune of
Whoofee-ti-yi-yo, git along, little dogies} Itys your misfortune and none of my own.
I had never before heard it.
"To me," she said, "that's the loveliest of all cowboy songs. Like others, its rhythm comes from the movement of a horse. It is not the roisterous, hell-for-leather, wild gallop of 'The Old Chisholm Trail,' nor the slow easy
[238] |
||