“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

a kind of polemic recently, for me the tramp was the sort of proto-proletarian from the
Marxist sort of view, he's been, he's been disenfranchised, he's been dispossessed, he was a
worker – a share cropper as it would be in the united states -, and that was taken way from
him. Therefore they became wanderers, indigents. And that takes everything away from
you but also gives you a real power. If you take anything away from somebody, like they
did to black people in the United States, then some of those people will say your system
doesn't work but mine religion, of nature, my charismatic appeal to other people – for
these people were very charismatic, people would walk miles to hear them sing, they had
to have their mojo, you know -, and it's like in a way artists are more like responders to
this particularly individualistic way of looking at the world, you know like the closing
pitcher who gets up at the end of the baseball game and he's got one lease, and all he's got
to do is take six of the best pitchers and shut them down. And a lot of people can't do that.
They can pitch for innings, and there's a little bit of leeway, but a great closing pitcher
stands up and says ok, nobody's going to hit a ball at all for me. And he's got that “it”, that
mojo as it were, and when you see someone stand up and do that it's wonderful. When
you see that same person throw a bad ball right at the beginning, it's, you want to weep,
because all that guy's got is what they call his 'stuff', the stuff he has and he's called upon
to do it. And the greats somehow always manage to do it
OV: that once chance
JB: yeah, and that's what a blues man will do. He'll got into a town where maybe some of
the guys there want to shoot him. All the white people want to lynch him or force him into
a chain gang or something. And it, that movie where – might have been called Honey
Dripper -. about a blues man travelling around. It showed the current practice where if
you were a vagrant, if you were a person moving through an area, without a sufficient
amount of money in your pocket to do certain things, you could be arrested and kept in
prison for two weeks, or something. But every blues man would be having times where
they were going through the world without much in their pockets, the next gig or
whatever it might be. So the law used to go around and pick these guys up, ad the they
would say to them ok, if you do seven days working for cotton picking say, we'll let you
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