The historian Simon Schama reveals how a teenage fantasy developed into a real and lasting romance
Why should the blues make you feel so happy? This is what I remember asking myself as the student ship MS Aurelia sailed under the Verrazano-Narrows bridge, on its way from New York back to Britain. Maybe it was an American thing, this peculiar mix of loss and desire; the need to get away and the certainty you’d be back. Maybe I, a first-time summer visitor to the United States, was already an American thing?
A few weeks earlier, on a sultry August night, I’d sat in a piano bar in one of the funkier streets in Washington DC, listening to a fat, black bluesman do Muddy Waters and Leadbelly: Mannish Boy, Hoochie Coochie Man. For such a big man his voice was high and sweet, and as he moaned and chuckled and did the little soul gasp, you felt as if all the troubles of the world poured away, along with the sweat beading on his cheeks and dripping onto the keyboard.
In the red-lit shadows, I took pulls at my Lucky Strike, put my mouth to the open-necked beer bottle and fancied that with each drag I was closer to becoming the Hoochie Coochie Man myself.It was September 1964. I was 19. The Beatles had conquered America and America had conquered me. It was not a starry-eyed infatuation and has never been since. New York had been more garish and prematurely decrepit than I’d imagined; bundles of rags laid out on the Vanderbilt Avenue sidewalk would twitch and growl and stick out a grimy hand. The diner coffee was thin piss and the Coney Island hot dogs the worst things I’d ever tried to eat.
American ugliness was not hard to find. I had been yelled at and roughly ushered to the right, white, front end of the Greyhound bus in Virginia. President Lyndon Johnson, for all his embrace of the civil rights movement, had bared his knuckles at the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party for its presumptuous attempt to unseat the racist delegation of that state at the party convention in Atlantic City. And I’d got into shouting matches with buzz-cut students in Georgetown about the ominous powers Congress had given the president to escalate the conflict in Vietnam.
But to say I had found America jolie-laide is to sell the jolie short. There had been moments in my first American summer when I’d been so gripped by a sense of belonging that I thought I’d never go back to my university in the Fens; back to the tweed and the bad eggs of a Cambridge college breakfast....
Read entire article at Simon Schama in the Times (UK)
A few weeks earlier, on a sultry August night, I’d sat in a piano bar in one of the funkier streets in Washington DC, listening to a fat, black bluesman do Muddy Waters and Leadbelly: Mannish Boy, Hoochie Coochie Man. For such a big man his voice was high and sweet, and as he moaned and chuckled and did the little soul gasp, you felt as if all the troubles of the world poured away, along with the sweat beading on his cheeks and dripping onto the keyboard.
In the red-lit shadows, I took pulls at my Lucky Strike, put my mouth to the open-necked beer bottle and fancied that with each drag I was closer to becoming the Hoochie Coochie Man myself.It was September 1964. I was 19. The Beatles had conquered America and America had conquered me. It was not a starry-eyed infatuation and has never been since. New York had been more garish and prematurely decrepit than I’d imagined; bundles of rags laid out on the Vanderbilt Avenue sidewalk would twitch and growl and stick out a grimy hand. The diner coffee was thin piss and the Coney Island hot dogs the worst things I’d ever tried to eat.
American ugliness was not hard to find. I had been yelled at and roughly ushered to the right, white, front end of the Greyhound bus in Virginia. President Lyndon Johnson, for all his embrace of the civil rights movement, had bared his knuckles at the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party for its presumptuous attempt to unseat the racist delegation of that state at the party convention in Atlantic City. And I’d got into shouting matches with buzz-cut students in Georgetown about the ominous powers Congress had given the president to escalate the conflict in Vietnam.
But to say I had found America jolie-laide is to sell the jolie short. There had been moments in my first American summer when I’d been so gripped by a sense of belonging that I thought I’d never go back to my university in the Fens; back to the tweed and the bad eggs of a Cambridge college breakfast....