'We Imagine Immortality for Them'

In the CD player was a disc my oldest son burned for me years ago, a compilation of some of the music I grew up listening to – Howlin’ Wolf, Freddie King, Buddy Guy, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters, Mississippi John Hurt and a song I first heard only later, “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues,” a twelve-bar short story performed by Blind Willie McTell (1898-1959) in 1940. The lyrics begin in the third person with Little Jesse the gambler – “Sinful guy, good hearted but had no soul” – dying in bed after being shot by the police. With the fifth verse, Jesse takes over narration: 

“Eight crapshooters to be my pallbearers

Let ’em be veiled down in black

I want nine men going to the graveyard, bubba

And eight men comin’ back”

 

It’s a tale of misery narrated with braggadocio:

 

“Send poker players to the graveyard

Dig my grave with the ace of spades

I want twelve polices in my funeral march

High sheriff playin’ blackjack, lead the parade”

 

I have a weakness for story songs and McTell’s is a good one. The association here is unlikely, I know, but listening again to “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues” reminded me of a late-twentieth-century Polish blues – Zbigniew Herbert’s “What Our Dead Do” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, Ecco Press, 1999). Jan tells the narrator he had a dream in which his father is in a coffin talking to his son as he walks beside the hearse. Jesse had called for eight pallbearers. Jan’s father, “six men in black livery / walk nicely at our sides.” The father tells him not to fuss, not to buy flowers or a gravestone, and reveals the location of hidden money and “cuff links with real pearls.” The poem concludes:

 

“this is how our dead

look after us

they warn us through dreams

bring back lost money

hunt for jobs

whisper the numbers of lottery tickets

or when they can’t do this

knock with their fingers on the windows

 

“and out of gratitude

we imagine immortality for them

snug as the burrow of a mouse”

 

[You may know Bob Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell” from 1983. And here’s an interesting juxtaposition of “St. James Infirmary” and “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues.”]