Alan Govenar Read Online Free PDF Page A

Sometimes two dollars, just to hear one song and all that. I was doing pretty good at that time. Sometimes, I’d make a round from Third Ward to Fourth Ward. I’d go on a bus out there and back and I’d have seventy dollars. See the people that were living there, they didn’t know how much I was making with them little fifty cents and two bits and dimes. All you have to do is keep working, and then go count your
    money.” 16
    Generally Sam worked by himself, but sometimes he’d make his rounds with a friend. “I had a friend play with me by the name of Luther Stoneham. We was playing on the corner of Pierce and Dowling. We walked to Harrisburg [Boulevard] and every joint we play they want us and we get in that joint and play. When we got back from Harrisburg, we counted up on the corner Pierce and Dowling a hundred and eighty-one dollars. And that was just from that corner. But when we put out all that money on the concrete, here come a load of cops. They want to know where we got this money. That’s the only time I was ever questioned on Dowling Street. We had it down on the concrete. We had to divide it, you see. I had to call a man [to tell them] that I played in his cafe for them to know that we made that money like that. They thought we had done robbed something. I told them it would be silly for me, if I had robbed something, to count my money down on the street. I was talking to the cop and they called two more carloads of cops. I wasn’t intending for them to take it. So they told us, ‘Y’all get that money off the street and go to your house and count it.’ They knowed I was a musician.” 17
    Sam never played at the El Dorado Ballroom or any of the more “respectable” clubs in the Third, Fourth, or Fifth Wards. His talking blues spoke to the experiences of the people who listened to him on the street and in the cafes or bars that he frequented—the day laborers, the domestics, the custodians, and others who toiled long hours for low wages. He was building a reputation for himself, and in 1946 word of mouth about him attracted the attention of Lola Ann Cullum, who was married to the respected dentist Dr. Samuel J. Cullum and was well known in the African American community for her abiding interest in blues and jazz.
    As early as 1940, Lola Cullum had organized a musical program for the Retail Beer Dealers Association, under the auspices of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, in the hope of getting radio station KPRC to “replace the music by records, now heard on the Saturday night programs for colored, with that of local talents.” 18 According to the
Houston Informer,
the program included a public school teacher and a quartet featuring Novelle and Leonard Randle, as well as Percy Henderson and the young blues guitarist Lester Williams.
    On March 26, 1946, the
Houston Informer
reported in a front-page story that Dr. and Mrs. Cullum were the hosts of W. C. Handy, who came to Houston for the first time in forty-eight years to perform at Don Robey’s Bronze Peacock Dinner and Dance Club with the Wiley College Log Cabin Theatre. While Cullum had helped to plan musical programs around Houston, her first foray into the record business was with Amos Milburn. She had heard Milburn in a San Antonio nightclub, and was so impressed with his vocal capacity that she asked him to come see her when he was next home in Houston. When they finally got together, she made “some crude paper-backed tapes” of his singing and sent them to the Mesner brothers at Aladdin Records, who invited her to bring Milburn to California. 19 Cullum had probably heard about the Mesners from Houston blues pianist Charles Brown, who was already an established star on the Aladdin label by the time she found Milburn.
    Guitarist Johnny Brown, who worked as a guitarist and sideman for Milburn, recalls, “Mrs. Cullum was a full-figured woman. She was light skinned. And she had