Chapter 2: Sukey Jump: 1889-1909

According to Eric Partridge's “Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English,” one meaning of the word "sukey" (circa 1820) was a general servant or "slavey." Hence a "sukey jump" referred to a dance or party in the slave quarters; after slavery, it was simply a term for a house dance.

Huddie William Ledbetter was born on the Jeter Plantation, about a mile and a half southwest of Mooringsport, Louisiana, on the 20th of January, 1889. The telephone, the automobile, the electric light and
the Kodak camera were all recent inventions, though none of these were manifest in the Ledbetter household.
The census-taker spelled the lad's name "Hudy," which is the way it sounded. Huddie is probably a variation of "Hugh;" William was either in honor of the baby's uncle, William Terrill Ledbetter, or of the owner of the plantation, William Jeter. The proud parents were Wes and Sallie Ledbetter, both of whom had been born into slavery. The baby, Wes's first, was born in the ninth year of his marriage. By then Sallie's first son, Alonzo, was fourteen years old.
Though Huddie's immediate family was small, his extended family was ample. His uncles and aunts all lived close by in the quarter, and he had several first cousins of his own age: Edmon, son of his Uncle Bob; Percy, son of his Uncle Terrill; and George (Pugh), son of his Aunt Mary. By the time he was two years old, he had also gained two girl cousins, Edmon's sister Blanche and George's sister Queenie, as well as a sister by adoption. In 1891, Wes and Sallie adopted a baby whose mother had died in childbirth. This was Australia Carr who was born in Mooringsport. The quarter was home to dozens of field workers and their families and everyone benefitted from a built-in child care system.
The children began working in the fields as soon as they were able. There were many light tasks which they were best suited for: feeding the family poultry; weeding the truck patch; and following along behind the mules in cotton-planting season, dropping the seeds into the furrows. At certain times of the year the cotton demanded everyone's attention; men and women, boys and girls, all worked long hours during spring planting, summer chopping or weeding, and fall harvesting. After the crop was harvested, sometimes close to Christmas, there were about three months of relative calm before the cycle began again. In Louisiana, these were the three months when black children could go to school.
Huddie's musical education began before he was old enough to go to school, however. By the age of five he had already attracted the attention of the grown-ups with his singing and playing of the kazoo, jew's harp, reed flute and various mouth instruments. Then he started to agitate for a "windjammer," a small diatonic button accordion introduced to the region by German settlers and later popularized by South Louisiana Cajuns. According to Huddie, his Uncle Terrill brought him one when he was five years old. He was just "a little bitty fellow" when Terrill came up from Mooringsport, riding a mule, and gave him a present of a windjammer. But his cousin Queenie remembers it differently:
“Huddie come down to my daddy's house and he told my daddy he wanted an accordion. My daddy, Ken Pugh, was his uncle. My daddy said,
"Well, you help me find some of this fat pine and I'll carry it to Shreveport and sell it, and I'll get you an accordion." Well, my daddy did. He and Huddie got the pine — Huddie wasn't nothing but a boy — got the pine and they went on to Shreveport in the wagon, sold the pine, and got the accordion.” (Queenie)
"He was a natural born musician. His daddy bought him a little rocking chair when he was little and, they said, before his feet could touch the floor in that little rocker, he was playing the accordion." (Viola)
It soon became obvious that Huddie, small as he was, was deadly serious about his music. Bob and Terrill brought out their guitars and taught him many of the fiddle tunes that were so popular at the breakdowns or square dances; and Huddie transposed them to his little accordion and mastered them. Tunes like "Dinah Got a Wooden Leg," "You Can't Lose me, Charlie," and "Poor Howard:"

Poor Howard's dead and gone,
Left me here to sing this song.

These first few years in the communal atmosphere of the quarter, surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins and neighbors, shaped Huddie's whole life. He never liked to be alone; he always liked to be surrounded by music and friendly faces. But after the cotton harvest of 1894, when he was still five years old, the Wes Ledbetters made a move. In terms of distance, it was not far — about three miles — but symbolically it was a giant step. They had several reasons for moving, and one of them had to do with the new management at the plantation.
William Jeter died in 1893 and left his plantation to his second son, Francis Ford (Frank) Jeter. The eldest son, Virgil, had become a physician, and had no interest in running a cotton plantation. Frank Jeter moved to establish his authority early, and both Wes and his younger brother Terrill found themselves in conflict with the new boss. Terrill moved with his wife and son to the fresher fields of Terrell, Texas, about twenty miles east of Dallas, but Wes didn't feel the need to go so far. He called on an old friend, a black man named Henry Sims, and made a deal to rent some land just across the state line in Harrison County, Texas. Sims had left the Jeter Place some years earlier and accomplished the rare feat, for a black man at that time, of buying his own land.
There was a feeling of freedom in Texas, renting from a fellow black and dreaming of actually owning land. All around them, landowners and renters alike, were members of the black community. Huddie started at Lake Chapel school where he made friends like York Bickham, Clarence Ruffin, and Sterling Myers, some of whom kept in touch with him all his life. Out in the fields the children started learning "hollers," the rhythmic songs that accompanied the work and made it more of a social activity.
When I was a little boy, going to a country school, we was living in the woods about three and four miles apart from each other. First little boy gets up in the morning, he wants to let the other one know he's up, wants to see which one beat the other. They had a little "echo" called "Ho-Day." And the first one get up, he'd run out and start hollering,

Ho-day! Ho-day! Ho-day!
The other one, way over yonder, holler,
Ho-day! Ho-day! Ho-day!
One right up close,
Ho-day! Ho-day! Ho-day!
Then I would say,
Ho-day! Ho-day! Ho-day!
Then I would say,
Ho-de-eddla-ay! Ho-de-eddla-ay! Ho-de-ay! (Huddie)

And from way over yonder came the echoes of the young boys within earshot in the Caddo Lake country. This was Huddie's own description of a holler from the 1890's, though he greatly exaggerated distances beween houses, which were a quarter- to a half-mile apart at most. It was only three and four miles back to the Jeter Place. Neighbor Preston Brown remembered Huddie as an integral part of a close-knit community.
“I knew him for a long time. Huddie Ledbetter and them [the other Ledbetters] used to use water out of our spring when their well went bad. They had a well on their place, didn't have a spring. We had a spring on our place. Back then, this country was thick with houses, they was just all around everywhere. All out there, you'd see them plowing. Farmers, dogs and hogs a-hollering and singing everywhere. It weren't lonesome, cause we stayed too close together.” (Preston)
Not as close as the houses in the quarter, which were only a few yards apart, but it was still a close-knit community on the Texas side. Often the cousins came to stay with Wes and Sallie, and often Huddie and Australia went back to the Jeter place to sleep over at Bob and Ada's, and visit with Uncle Ken and Aunt Mary. Within the community, first cousins were practically like brothers and sisters. Having only one boy and one girl, Wes and Sallie were short of hands around the farm, so the cousins served a practical, as well as a social, purpose. Likewise, Bob and Ada Ledbetter had only the two children, so they borrowed Huddie and Australia when they needed additional help on the land.
More musicians were flowering in the family. Edmon learned to play the guitar from listening to his father, Australia began to show an interest in playing, Queenie took up the organ, and all the children were sang. Huddie preferred to be unique and refrained from taking up the guitar for the time being. Instead he learned the mandolin, piano and organ and his parents encouraged him to play in church.
During their first few years in Texas, Wes and Sallie were able to save up enough money to achieve their dream of owning land. In 1897 they bought sixty-eight and a half acres down the road from Sims, near the south shore of Caddo Lake. The seller was "Doc" Wascom, a white man who had somehow come into possession of large swaths of land in Harrison County. He was gradually selling off portions to the blacks who moved in to the area, many of them from just across the Caddo parish line.
The acreage that the Ledbetters bought from Doc and Sue Wascom was known as Block No. 1 of the John Carroll survey, one mile south of Caddo Lake, and about nineteen miles from Marshall in Harrison County, Texas. The total purchase price was $240, to be paid off in four annual installments of $60, due each year from 1898 through 1901 on New Year's Day. The original deed and certificate of authentication were filed at the county courthouse in Marshall in February, 1904, indicating that the land was bought and paid for. The price may seem low, but only a few years earlier William Jeter had bought 160 acres, more than twice as much land, for only $300.
Wes began a few months of unprecedented hard work. He was still farming the Sims land, bringing in the cash cotton crop, when he set about clearing brush, cutting trees, and building a house for his family on his own land. He was working sixteen-hour days. Sallie worked at his side and the extended family helped. Edmon and Blanche spent many days and nights at the new "home place" in Texas. Huddie and Edmon were both eight years old when Wes bought the land, and Blanche and Australia were big enough to do chores. To make things more difficult, however, the Ledbetters lost one full-time helper in the midst of all this furious activity. Sallie's son Alonzo married Queenie Ruffin, older sister of one of Huddie's new Texas friends. The newlyweds rented a place nearby, and kept in close touch. While he was farming for halves, Alonzo began a part-time career as a preacher.
Alonzo Batts would have been the perfect son for Wes; he was the image of his step-father: serious, religious, reliable, and hard-working. Huddie, by contrast, was fun-loving, free-thinking and mischevious, though certainly capable of bouts of industriousness. Wes would have been happier if Huddie, not Alonzo, had become a preacher. Though he was never a devoted churchgoer, Huddie became an accomplished cotton-picker and shouldered his share of the chores around the home place.
Chores varied from family to family, but it didn't always mean less for those in a large family. Queenie Pugh, for instance, was the eldest of six girls who came in succession after a string of six boys. Her father, Ken, died when she was ten and when the youngest Pugh boy grew up and left home, Queenie helped her mother out by taking over the family plow. Unfortunately for Queenie, none of her sisters learned to plow, so she was forever stuck with it.
“Cause the others claimed they didn't know how to plow! I knew how to plow. I had to get up in the morning, go to some people's cow pen and milk, for to get milk for us, and then I had to come back and get my plow.” (Queenie)
At night she did the sewing for the rest of the girls. Apparently, her sisters never learned how to sew, plow, or even to milk a cow; but whoever she was sewing for held the light while Queenie operated the turn-of-the-century Singer sewing machine.
“I'm sewing on my machine my daddy bought before he died. I used to have to iron. My mother, she washed and ironed for white people, and I would have to stand up on a box and iron. I been working hard all my days.” (Queenie)
Preston Brown remembers not having to work too hard when he was small. He was the youngest member of his family. After school, the "grown" kids went into the fields while Preston tended to the family geese. His job was to keep the geese around the pond and see to it that they didn't get into the crops and eat the growing corn. "We had a great big bunch of geese," said Preston, "and we had to mind them geese!"
Huddie often got so involved in his music that he neglected his chores. At times, Wes was exasperated by his son's attitude, and Sallie was called upon to mediate. From the very beginning, Huddie loved to sit around with Bob and Terrill, learning reels and breakdowns and watching the joyful faces of the dancers and listeners; he particularly enjoyed the attention from the grownups who marvelled at his diverse musical talent.
At age fourteen, Huddie finally decided he must have a guitar. When Wes bought it for him, he had no trouble learning to play some of the popular local square dance pieces; "Green Corn," he got from a player named Bud Coleman.

Green corn, come along Charlie,
Green corn, come along Charlie,
Green corn,
Green corn.

More and more, now that he had his guitar, Huddie spent Saturday nights playing at sukey jumps, especially at the Jeter Place where he and Edmon often appeared as a duo. The accordion was becoming a thing of the past. "Sometimes he played a mandolin and I'd second him with a guitar," said Edmon, "and sometimes we played the guitar together. Used to play all round here. Up to Mooringsport, over to Leigh, and back on the Jeter Plantation." When Huddie got the guitar, he taught Australia to play.
“I didn't ever play with him, but Australia and Huddie - them two played together. Played guitar together. When Huddie learned Australia how to play guitar, she have a good time and he would have a good time. Huddie learned Australia how to play guitar.” (Queenie)
In the following conversation, recorded by Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax in Washington in 1940, Huddie gives us some idea of all the dancing going on at a sukey jump, circa 1900. The conversation is being recorded onto discs which contain perhaps three or four minutes each, and are spinning around at 78 revolutions per minute. There is no time for long pauses or considered answers. While the interview sounds a bit like a word association game, it does gives an impression of what the dances were like.

Lomax: I want Huddie to tell you about the way they put on the square dances down in Louisiana when he was a boy, growing up, in the backwoods. Huddie, what did they call square dances?
Ledbetter: Called them sukey jumps.
Lomax: Why did they call them sukey jumps?
Ledbetter: Well, because they danced so fast, the music was so fast, and the people had to jump, so they always called them sukey jumps.
Lomax:ú Do you know what "sukey" means?
Ledbetter: Sukey - well, that's a cow sometimes when you tell her, "Sukey, sukey, sukey," you know, keeping the cow away.
Lomax: Did they ever holler that at the dances when they had them?
Ledbetter: They'd just holler "Sukey jump!" and they'd holler, "One dollar bill, baby, won't buy you no shoes," just anything they feel like singing in there.
Lomax: What kind of music did they have?
Ledbetter: Well, they had a fiddler in them times; and accordions.
Lomax: And what were the names of some of the tunes they played?
Ledbetter: The tunes was "Poor Howard," he was a poor boy and he played the fiddle. He was the first fiddler after the negroes got free from slavery time. Poor Howard was a negro used to play for them at the sukey jumps. And the number he played was "Poor Howard, Poor Boy."
Lomax: How does that go?
Ledbetter: [Plays and sings.] "Poor Howard, Poor Boy" goes like this.
Lomax: Huddie, did they call the sets [as in square dance calls] at these dances?
Ledbetter: They called the sets all the time when they danced; they called "Shoo-fly," you could shoo-fly, and the square dance.
Lomax: How did that sound? Give us a sketch of how they called the sets down there.
Ledbetter: When they called the sets, they holler,
"Hey, man, you swing mine and I'll swing yours,"
but when they first get on the floor, they holler,
"Grab your partners, step the right way round,"
they always drive right way,
"Now, man, you know you're going wrong,
now circle left way round,
and when you get back to your home,
grab your partner,
the first man on the head, shoo-fly."
When you get the shoo-fly, then they holler,
"Shoo-fly, Shoofly"
then they come to the holler,
"One dollar bill baby won't buy you no shoes."
[Huddie goes on singing and playing, calling the set "One dollar bill. . ."]
Lomax: Huddie, did they have any real fast numbers at these dances? Do you remember any of those?
Ledbetter: They'd pick 'em up.
Lomax: When they'd do the hoedown and. . .
Ledbetter: They'd pick 'em up, you know, they'd have some fast ones when they'd just go, like, "Green Corn, Come Along Charlie," "Gonna Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In," and, "Tight Like That," sometimes they'd holler, say, "Tight like this!"
[They are both talking at once through here.]
Lomax: What did they mean by that Huddie, really? I mean, tell us confidentially what they mean by "tight like that."
[Lomax may have been fishing for some sexual innuendo, but Huddie wasn’t playing along, perhaps realizing there was nothing confidential about this interview.]
Ledbetter: "Tight like that" means when you got your partner, grab and hug her tight, and keep her going, but when it comes time the boy grab his partner, he grab her and giving her a hug, he says, "Tight like this, it was tight like this, but now it's tight like this." And the boys'd be jumping on "Tight like that."
Lomax: What were some of the dance steps, Huddie, when they were playing some of these fast tunes?
Ledbetter: Well, ain't no dance steps you could do but "breakdown," and that's a fast number. You can't dance no tap dance, I don't think, a fast breakdown number, course you might, but that's where all the tap dances [Huddie is talking very fast, as though he's afraid of being interrupted] . . . all the tap dances come from the old "buck and wing" what they used to do. Well, the breakdown dance, nobody do 'em now, but I don't guess nobody know nothing about it very much, but me, and I do the breakdown. When you do it you got to do it real fast, and when you breakdown you ain't tapping, you just working your legs. Now, a long time ago my grandfather, great-grandfather, say, "you ain't dancing til you cross your legs." So I guess now, nobody dancing because they don't cross their legs hardly ever. But when you do that old breakdown, and wing down, and green corn and that old ground shovel and, uh . . .
Lomax: What about "knocking the pigeon wing?"
Ledbetter: . . . pigeon wing and . . .
Lomax: . . . cutting the back step?
Ledbetter: . . . cutting the short dog, well, you got to cross your legs.
Lomax: Huddie, play us one of those tunes, something like "Gonna Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In," and tell us what it means, too, you know.
Ledbetter: "Gonna Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In" - long years ago, that was when they see the boss coming, you know? And the boys would see the boss coming, well, they didn't like him, you know, but they'd be together, nothing but negroes all piled up there together. When they'd see him coming, they'd say, "Well, we're gonna dig a hole to put the devil in," boy they'd start a-jumping. [plays "Gonna dig a hole. . ." with very fast accompaniment on guitar.]
Lomax: Huddie, can you play "Green Corn" on the twelve-string guitar?
Ledbetter: I think I can.
Lomax: Let's hear a little of "Green Corn." [Huddie starts to strum his guitar. Lomax interrupts] Slow and easy and sweet, Huddie! [Huddie slows the tempo] What is green corn, anyhow? Tell us about it when you sing the song.
Ledbetter: [Strumming and explaining] Now, this is a fast sukey jump too, but the boys take it easy sometimes when they want to sukey jump; keep them dancing so hard and take it easy on the ground, shuffle around with your partner, [sings, but doesn't explain "green corn". Lomax tries to interrupt with "What is green corn?" but Huddie either doesn't hear, or ignores him.]
Lomax: [Just as the song ends] What is green corn? What is green corn, Huddie? [Lomax likely wants to hear that green corn is some form of white lightning, but, again, Huddie is not co-operating. He keeps it simple.]
Ledbetter: Green corn is an ear of corn - when it's green. What they mean by green corn, they're just putting that in the words, you know, 'cause the man is green and they didn't know what they was talking about themselves. What they was speaking about is an ear of corn when it's green. Down south when the corn gets dry, why then that's corn - hard corn, then. But when they say "green corn", that means it's green, you can go out in the field and pull it and roast it. . .
Lomax: I thought you meant green corn whiskey.
Ledbetter: No, not no green corn whiskey, they didn't know nothing about no corn liquor at that time. They had old-time liquor, you know, that's real good liquor, wasn't no bootleggers then. Couldn't make no liquor. How are they going to make liquor when they're all slaves? [Huddie sounds condescending] The old boss — they wouldn't get no liquor till the boss would give it to them.
Lomax: Huddie, at these old-timey sukey jumps, did people dance in their bare feet, or with shoes on?
Ledbetter: Well, them that could get shoes, they would dance like that and lots of them didn't have — 'cause I know plenty boys in my time —
Lomax: [interrupting] . . .what about the women? Would they wear shoes or not?
Ledbetter: Well, when they could get them. If they couldn't, they just go barefooted.
Lomax: Would they ever circle left in these dances, or
Ledbetter: They's circle left right, they'd start out right. . .
Lomax: . . .they'd start right first?
Ledbetter: That's right. . .
Lomax: [talking on top of Huddie] How many times would they go around right?
Ledbetter: Well, you see, when they'd first start right, they'd go around right and then the man would holler, "Circle left way round,"
Lomax: And they'd gone one time around?
Ledbetter: That's right and then he'd holler, "Circle right way around again, and when you get back home, grab your partner," so when they first start out circling right way around he'd tell them to skip on up ahead and catch the next partner in front of them, and they'd keep on catching and he'd say, "Now, when you get home, circle left way around" and when they get home, they circle left way around, he says, "Now circle right way around, and when you get back to the spot, settle down. First man on the head, grab his partner and shoo-fly." That's the way they do that down there. (Library of Congress)

Wes was sure there was the potential for trouble at the sukey jumps, which he personally did not attend, and he and Huddie got into countless shouting matches about the music. Wes thought he was helping by buying his son a pistol for protection. "Only for self-defense," said Wes. His fears may have been somewhat overstated, but Huddie was delighted to own a gun. At the same time, it was 1905, Wes bought a new horse and saddle for Huddie, which made it easier for him to get to the dances. This was like getting a new car for graduation. Huddie kept the horse for years; he took great pride in "Booker," a black stallion.

“He was black as a crow. He had a blaze face, and his name was Ol' Booker. I used to ride behind him, you know, on him. Used to go down to help him wash in that spring down there, further from the house that run right through their place. Used to take rags, take Ol' Booker down there, lather him all over, wash him, and we'd have brushes. He'd look so pretty. He had a curly mane, curly tail. He was pretty.
He'd go around to those dancing places and he'd come around and put me on the back of Ol' Booker; we'd go to the dances. He'd come around and ask my daddy to let me go with him. We'd go everywhere. All around over the country wherever they had those dances on Friday night and Saturday nights. I'd come in when he come in. (laughter) All of us danced. We were all dancing.” (Preston)

Huddie had an active adolescence. By the time he reached his full height of five feet, seven inches, at the age of sixteen, he had been playing at house dances for several years. He developed a strong personality and, as an obviously talented entertainer, he was attractive to many girls his own age growing up in the Caddo Lake community. Cora Brown for example, one of Preston's older sisters, was courted by the young Huddie. Preston laughs gently at the memory of the two teenagers who had to contend with the younger children kibitzing nearby.
“Huddie went with Cora. He courted her. He used to come up here in the summertime. Sat there and played guitar and us kids, we'd sit out there on the front porch - we weren't allowed in the room, you know. We'd be outdoors dancing, and they'd be in the house.” (Preston)
During his sixteenth year, Huddie began dating a neighbor named Margaret Coleman. Margaret's parents were Jim and Adline Coleman and they had four daughters. The oldest was named Pearl, then came Margaret, who was a year younger than Huddie, and the two younger daughters, Jiffy and Essie. Huddie began hanging around the Coleman household more and more during his last school term in the early part of 1905, and by early spring, Margaret was pregnant.
When Huddie finished school and got his horse, he started thinking about what he was going to do with his life. The most natural thing was farming, and Wes and Sallie suggested that he build his own house on the home place and start his own family. As the cotton grew taller and Margaret's belly grew larger, it became clear that some sort of decision had to be made. The young couple talked it over, the families discussed it, Huddie started building a two-room house but eventually, it seems, Margaret didn't want to get married.
Huddie could easily have started a professional musical career, if it had occurred to him, but he had no idea where to start. The Caddo Lake area was so cut off from the mainstream. He had seen nothing of the world beyond Shreveport, which the family visited, at most, once a year.
He knew the Caddo Lake country well. There were two general stores where local people did most of their shopping: T.J. Taylor's in Leigh, and Joe Morgan's on the Louisiana-Texas border, and there was a cotton gin in Jonesville, not far from Leigh. On the Louisiana side there was the small lakeside community of Mooringsport, the Jeter Place, and the Shiloh Baptist Church where Wes and Sallie had their membership. Huddie had an adolescent yearning to see more of the world. All of these destinations were within about half an hour's drive, even by mules-and-wagon. But a trip to Shreveport was an occasion and a whole day had to be set aside for it.
Margaret gave birth to a daughter, Arthur Mae Ledbetter, on the 28th of January, 1906, and Huddie took the opportunity to exile himself to Shreveport. Years later he wrote about leaving home in one of his most enduring songs, "Fannin Street." His mother was horrified at the idea of him going to work in Shreveport.
“She said something might happen to me, but I wanted to go down on Fannin Street. You couldn't go down there with short pants on, you had to put on long pants. When I walked up my mama caught me by the arm:

My mama told me
My sister, too
Women in Shreveport gonna be the
DEATH of yooooou.” (Huddie)

Shreveport was the big town and Huddie found it totally fascinating. He had seen the State Fair parade down Texas Street; the country wagons gathered to sell their produce on Commerce Street; the white folk in their finery, entering the hotels on Market and Spring; and he had heard about the night life on Fannin Street.
The 900 block of Fannin Street was the leading edge of Shreveport's legal red light district which had been set up by the city fathers in 1903. Things had been getting out of control, it seems, so the area known as St. Paul's Bottoms was set aside to contain prostitution, gambling and other forms of vice. The idea of having a red light district was not original to Shreveport; it was already being tried out in such places Memphis, Little Rock and New Orleans.
During the early 1900's, the Storyville section of New Orleans was a booming, legal red light district and the legendary birthplace of jazz. Its sporting houses served as a magnet for musicians, gamblers, pimps, prostitutes, and all manner of performing artists. Likewise, though on a smaller scale, the legal red light district of Shreveport became a magnet for similar folk in the Ark-La-Tex. The district was called a "bottoms" because it was a low-lying area near the Red River; during the sultry summer months there were fewer breezes and more mosquitoes than on higher ground.
The Bottoms, therefore, was home to a poorer class of people, generally blacks. When it was designated as the red light district, property values soared, existing large houses were rented to madams, and new house were built. The 900 block of Fannin Street was the priciest part of the new Bottoms, mostly because it was the closest to central Shreveport; it was home to the three biggest sporting houses, those run by Annie McCune, Bea Haywood and Nell Jester. These were houses of white prostitutes for the use of white men. Further into the Bottoms, there were houses of black prostitutes for white men, and black prostitutes for black men; generally the houses got cheaper and seedier all the way back to the railroad tracks. The large "white" houses on Fannin Street did not hire musicians, black or white; they had coin-operated player pianos which entertained clients waiting in the downstairs rooms.
There were two large saloons which catered to blacks right on the corner of Fannin and Beauregard which was virtually the gateway to the district. A third large saloon, the White Pigeon, looked over the railroad tracks at the north end of Beauregard. The Pigeon was owned by a white man; it catered to both black and white customers, each race having a separate entrance. The Fannin Street saloons were owned by and operated for blacks, one by George Neil, the other by Caesar DeBose. Neil was a light-skinned negro who could have passed for white. However that was not a safe thing to do in that obsessively color-conscious society. George W. Moxley, a light-skinned negro minstrel performer wrote to W.C. Handy about this very subject:
“I worked with several ofay [white] outfits in my time without any trouble. W.A. Mahara was the only minstrel company I traveled with, but I put on an Elks' Minstrel once in Shreveport and one in Dayton, both ofays. They would have hung me in Shreveport had they known that I was colored, and the same is true in plenty of other places.” (Handy 42)
Saloon proprietor George Neil had enough to contend with without trying to pass for white. The walls of his long, one-story frame building which housed a dance hall, stage, bar and restaurant, as well as a couple of gambling rooms, were reputed to be peppered with bullet holes. The Shreveport îTimesï reported that police had been openly assaulted by the clientele at Neil's, and "more than one Negro has been taken out, penetrated by a policeman's bullet."
It was a colorful enough place for the police chief to take a group of visting newspapermen for a night on the town. He sent word to Neil that he was bringing some out-of-town dignitaries, and Neil arranged a special show of hot ragtime music and specialty dancers. Pairs of dancers emerged in turn from the cakewalking crowd to put on a special "stunt" for the visitors. There were breakdowns, double shuffles, buck-and-wings and many more that the chief couldn't identify.
When two slender well-dressed couples started the show, the other dancers stopped and crowded around to watch, cheering, clapping and urging them on like testifiers at a backwoods prayer meeting. The first couples were young and supple, and "moved with the grace of leopards." As they finished, the music changed and a completely different pair moved into the limelight.
The man was undersized and coal-black. He was shovel-footed, buck-kneed and agile as a cat. The woman was chocolate-colored, broad, rather squat, bulged high in front and low behind, sort of shed-room-rumped effect, and badly pigeon toed. They faced each other and danced, turning 'round slowly, his huge foot slapping the floor with loud thwacks and her feet keeping time with a sort of forward and drag back movement. (Stuck 72)
The newspapermen were clearly impressed with the action in Neil's Saloon. There were can-can dancers whose act rivalled the well-known Moulin Rouge in Paris, though the Shreveport version was "perhaps more revealing;" and a hootchie-cootchie girl who performed a Little Egypt belly dance with sensuous abandon. The police chief noted in his memoirs that "her pelvis must have been hung on ball bearings."
Across the street from Neil's, next door to a Chinese restaurant, was the two-story frame building which housed Caesar DeBose's ground floor saloon. A stairway lead up from the rear of the saloon to a dark, unpainted hallway; off the hallway were doors leading to individual rooms. One upstairs room was set aside for high stakes gamblers, and the rest were for prostitutes. One day in 1908, a federal agent tracked down a notorious counterfeiter all the way from Florida to the gambling room at DeBose's saloon. In the middle of a game, the agent crept along the hallway, stealthily approached the door, drew his pistol and blasted the lock to smithereens.
In the pandemonium that followed, the counterfeiter leapt out of the window onto the roof of the Chinese restaurant and from there to the wooden awning on DeBose's building. He appeared to be heading for the telephone pole to slide down on when the awning collapsed under his weight, settling slowly to the sidewalk like an elevator, permitting the fleeing man to escape down the street. (Stuck 71)
Caesar DeBose was standing in front of his place, proudly surveying the busy street scene, when the awning came down and, with a tumult of crashing and creaking, knocked the cigar right out of his mouth. As the fugitive tore down Beauregard Street into the dark heart of the Bottoms, the terrified DeBose took off running in the other direction. The saloons run by Neil and DeBose are the places that Huddie Ledbetter knew in his youth, where he met a coal black piano man named Chee Dee and learned to "boogie the blues."
After he left home, Huddie got a taste of life in the Bottoms, but he also found out that it was a tough place to make a living as a musician. He could still make better money playing at sukey jumps than he could in the saloons of Shreveport, and he never learned how to get on with a traveling minstrel shows. Consequently, when Wes and Sallie suggested he finish building his own house and share the harvest on the home place, he moved back and started to work. Margaret Coleman, in the meantime, had moved to Dallas and taken a job as maid in a white household.
During his late teens, Huddie moved into his own house and helped to run his father's farm. Although raising cotton was labor-intensive, it was not a full time job and he began to go further afield. He discovered that he could pick up a lot of extra money by joining the itinerant cotton-pickers on the big plantations near Dallas, where his uncle Terrill was living. He generally traveled with his cousin George Pugh and his friend Clarence Ruffin, and all three of them made lots of extra money. While he was staying with Terrill and his cousin Percy, he ventured into Dallas and stayed with Margaret Coleman and his baby daughter.
Dallas was a much larger center than Shreveport, but Huddie's visits there were more concerned with family affairs, or with picking cotton, than they were with music. At the corner of Central and Elm, the crossroads of the large black community, workers gathered every morning during the picking season and waited for the white men's wagon to roll up and recruit day laborers for the plantations, and Huddie got in line.
And he could pick! Twelve yards of ducking in his cotton sack - he got it on like suspenders on his back this way. And wore knee pads. And crawled between two rows just like he was in music, you know, to a rhythm. Pick it. (Viola)
All was not totally sunny in the Cotton Kingdom in those days, and the dark cloud on the horizon was a little bug called the Mexican boll weevil. Shortly after the turn of the century, the boll weevil arrived to wreak havoc on the cotton crops. In 1904 the Texas legislature offered a $50,000 reward to anyone who could solve the boll weevil problem which was costing cotton farmers $50 million in that year alone. Mexican boll weevils, by far the most destructive insects to attack cotton plants in the United States, were first found north of the Rio Grande around Brownsville, Texas, in 1892. They made it as far as Caddo Lake in 1904 and kept spreading north and east. They reached the Atlantic coast by 1916.
Many variations of boll weevil ballads spread throughout the cotton kingdom, but all of them featured the farmer tormented by the weevil character. It seems that the farmer was entirely at the mercy of this pest, and the frustration comes out in the song of the little bug who's "just looking for a home:"

The boll weevil is a little bug, come from Mexico, they say,
He come to try this Texas soil, thought he'd better stay.

Farmer took the boll weevil, he put him in the ice
Weevil said to the farmer "It's mighty cool and nice."

Farmer took the boll weevil, buried him in hot sand -
Weevil said to the farmer, "I'll stand it like a man."

Weevil said to the farmer, "You'd better leave me alone,
I ate up all your cotton, now I'm starting on your corn."

On Christmas Eve, 1907, Australia Carr married Allen Davis. The officiating minister was Alonzo Batts, and one of the witnesses was Miss Cora Brown. Huddie played for the wedding celebration and the newlyweds moved into Huddie's house. Soon after Christmas, during the slow season, Huddie and his cousin George went back to their uncle's place in Kaufman County, and shortly after that, they found themselves courting the Henderson sisters, Elethe and Alice.