Leroy’s Blues
2022; Saint Louis University; Volume: 55; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/afa.2022.0044
ISSN1945-6182
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoLeroy’s Blues Terry Sanville (bio) They don’t build ships like those anymore. These days, cargo vessels are floating bricks, huge container craft a couple of blocks long. But in 1969, freighters that could haul maybe 7,000 tons steamed upriver to Newport, a supply terminal a few klicks outside of Saigon. I worked there as a stevedore in the Army during the Vietnam War. Can’t say for sure how this college guy ended up on the docks unloading four-holded freighters in the blistering sun. Bad luck, I guess. More likely, it was my bad attitude. I lived on Long Binh Army Base in a corrugated metal hooch with twenty other G.I.s, part of a company of nearly three hundred truck drivers and stevedores. I’d been assigned to the office, to prepare Morning Reports and other paperwork. But I mouthed off to a sergeant and disobeyed an order, got busted back to private, then assigned to a ship platoon. I knew nothing about ships or unloading them. But then, neither did Leroy. Big, Black, and from the Watts neighborhood of L.A., Leroy kept to himself, read Ebony magazine, and listened to soul music on his tiny record player. Being whitebread from Santa Barbara, I had little in common with him, except for music. At night, I’d haul my guitar outside onto the raised boardwalk that connected all the hooches and clumsily play ’60s protest songs, folk music, and a little rock. “Where’d ya learn ta play?” Leroy asked one night shortly after he’d arrived. “Ah, ya know, just picked it up.” He stood over me, his hulking body blocking the glare from the descending flares blazing in the black sky above the base perimeter. “Ever play blues?” he asked. I grinned. “Nah, too many notes.” “Just play the right ones.” “Can you play?” He nodded. “How can you stand being without a guitar?” “I can’t.” Leroy slumped onto the boardwalk next to me and leaned back against the hooch’s metal wall. I passed him my ax. He used his big thumb and fat fingers on his right hand to pluck the strings while bending them with his left-hand fingers. Blues sounds poured from my little Harmony. “That’s damn good,” I said. “Feels good.” “Yeah.” After work and chow, we’d meet on the boardwalk. Sometimes we’d smuggle a couple of beers out of the EM Club to prime the pump. I’d let Leroy play for an hour or so, then beg him to show me some of his moves, strange chord fragments and notes flying past. He’d hum along as he played. “Why dontcha sing something?” I asked. “Don’ like ma voice. But the damn sound jus’ comes out. Can’t stop it.” “Yeah.” The rest of the guys pretty much left us alone. But a few joked that a white boy didn’t have the soul to play Black music. As the months passed, I caught glimpses of [End Page 331] where that music came from as Leroy’s life story slowly leaked out, mostly a cliché by today’s standards but strange to me, a twenty-year-old Catholic kid that never knew poverty, abuse, or overt racism before shipping out to Vietnam. But Leroy had his own unique wrinkles: quitting high school after the Watts riots in ’65 burned down his family’s grocery; living next to the L.A. River in a hobo camp; hitchhiking to San Francisco to check out Haight-Ashbury. With no skills or student deferment, he got drafted and landed on the same docks as me. The Army was good at throwing people together that normally would never meet. Every morning in the dark, we stevedores boarded deuce-and-a-halfs and rumbled south along Charlie Road to Newport. We worked twelve-hour shifts. Of all the jobs, Leroy had one of the better ones. He operated a winch that lifted cargo out of a freighter’s hold and safely placed it on the dock, to be whisked away to storage sheds by huge forklifts. While he sat on his deck seat in the...
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