“Gee, But It’s Hard To Love Someone When That Someone Don’t Love You”-With Bessie Smith’s Down-Hearted Blues In Mind –Take Two

“Gee, But It’s Hard To Love Someone When That Someone Don’t Love You”-With Bessie Smith’s Down-Hearted Blues In Mind –Take Two  

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Otty Venise (not Otto as a number of people assumed including school teachers who from first grade thought he was just misspelling his own name) to laugh, had to laugh right out loud about his situation. And if you knew Otty you knew that when that young white single man about town, that town having been growing up Carver in Massachusetts about thirty miles south of Boston and now on Beacon Hill in that latter place, laughed out loud which was not frequently, that laugh of his also second-cousin to a sneer, that meant nothing other than that he had woman trouble. Or was about to have woman trouble. This one would be of the latter sort.

See Otty was in the dumps once again about his latest flame, this Laura Perkins, five feet six inches of slender brunette pale blues eyes and heartbreak, who had him jumping through hoops. Nothing new there since Otty had probably jumped through more hoops for more unrequited love women than any seven men around Carver, maybe around Massachusetts but don’t quote me on that, young or old, married or single. And with every single one of them, or at least as far back as he could remember, high school anyway several years before if not earlier, Otty would feel just a little bit better if he listened, endlessly listened as if time did not matter, or if time actually did stand still, when he played his old time collection of four two-pocketed double-sided albums of Miss Bessie Smith put out many years before by Columbia Records (and before that the same configuration by Vanguard Records although the quality was poorer on the latter) and which he had inherited from his uncle when that uncle unexpectedly passed away in 1971.

Here is what didn’t figure, didn’t figure to Otty, and certainly didn’t figure to any of his friends including when he had told perfidious Laura her about his Bessie affliction. Here was a white guy, a guy who before he got out of high school and went to work at a downtown Boston bank in the junior exec program did not know one black person personally and who moreover did not know squat about the roots of black music in slavery times, in Mister James Crow times, in the great migration to the industrial North times but who could only find solace in the raspy-throated voice of a black back forty acres and a mule Southern Delta woman when he was in one of his periodic dumps. And see too if you want to test out some theory of Mister Otty Venise’s love depressions one Miss Billie Holiday, a certified torch singer whom you would think would sent those blues away, did not do so. Did not get him out of his dumps. No, Miss Billie was reserved for when Otty and his latest flame were heating up their affair, when some sweet woman was “curling Otty’s toes” as he always liked to put the matter about his bouts of love-making.  

Of course Otty’s whole thing with Laura read like an adventure not written in the stars. He had run into her at the Surf Ballroom in Hull hard by the Atlantic Ocean. He had gone there with Jimmy Eaton and couple of other guys whom he had known in high school from the days where they had hung out at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Thornton Street over by the Town Hall. He was in need of some distraction after he had broken it off with Jeanie Callahan (no Bessie needed on that one since he knew from the beginning dating the sister of a friend of his, Jack Callahan, as a favor when he had nothing better to do was not made in heaven) to listen to the latest break-out cover group, The Rambling Jets, who played a hard rock and roll sound that despite his Bessie mood thing was his natural musical base. As usual at the Surf the place was filled on a Friday night with clots of single hanging out guys and girls. He had simply asked her to dance, she consented, and that was the start.

Sure there was plenty more to fill in. About how well Otty and Laura got along at first, how she had stayed the night a few times in his Beacon Hill studio apartment to seal the deal, how they had certain plans once she finished school at Bridgewater State in her hometown, and he moved up the bank ladder. Plenty too about the little fights about who he, or who she could and could not see until that time. The usual boy-girl stuff going on since they invented that boy-girl controversy stuff. It had all started when Laura began having second thoughts about her old beau, Bart Webber, just back from a tour of duty in the Army having been stationed in Germany. He had called her and talked to her about getting back together. Otty had said to Laura no dice to them even talking. Somehow Laura and Bart had reconnected as Otty found out the hard way seeing them one Saturday afternoon having lunch together at the Sea and Surf in Hull when he and Laura had a date for the Surf that night. After a couple of weeks of explosions on both sides Laura gave Otty his walking papers.       

So Otty was on the afternoon we are trying to decipher his condition sitting in his small studio apartment a-flush the sides streets of Beacon Hill in Boston wading through the fourth side of the third double-album of Miss Bessie Smith because, well, you know the “because” if you have been reading between the lines here, Ms. Laura Perkins has not only given Otty his walking papers but intentionally made it look like it was all his fault. Has told Otty that she could no longer take his drama every time they have a dispute about the “this and that” of the boy-girl love thing that seems to set Otty off. No mention of course of Bart’s entrance into the equation.  And, no, get this, she said she had not found another guy yet so it was not some two-timing thing. It was quote square on Otty’s shoulders unquote that set Laura and those pale blue eyes away from his path. To put paid to the matter she said “don’t call, I won’t answer, don’t write I will throw the letter in the wastepaper basket, don’t come looking for me at the Surf (or any other place and don’t talk to her if she is any of them alone, or with company). Finis, done she said. And here is the killer for young Otty.  Laura made it clear, and gave a couple of guy’s names if he needed proof, that when she is done with a man, she is done. 

So if you were walking the back streets of Beacon Hill day or night in those days and you hear some bluesy voice yelling out about being down-hearted, down-hearted as a only a woman can be about a no good man, you hear some raspy-voiced “red hot” talking about being down-hearted since her baby doll left her, talking about how her man should come home  (come home not smelling of another woman too), talking about how her no good man has left her high and dry, talking about how she feels all used up (or worse for Otty that her man is all used up), crying to high heaven about the prince of wails, moaning on about moaning on the unkind fate of a hard-pressed woman, maybe about not playing second fiddle to some high yella woman, about how is she going to make it when that no good man who took her dough, took her sex, took her soul and leaves her by the back  door after midnight then you know one Otty Venise is still in high dudgeon. Thanks Bessie.