Celebrity exposure stuns us
Published Friday 19 August 2022 11:17 am
My career has brought me into direct contact with more than a few famous people, but one in particular seemed real.
I won’t drop the name. There are a few presidents on the list, but the one who made me feel like he was interested in a real conversation was BB King. Maybe it was the topic.
The music he made was second to none. I had heard all of this for years, but we didn’t talk about “Lucille” or “The Thrill Is Gone”. Our minds were on cotton picking and playing music bars in Arkansas and Mississippi.
For almost an hour in the back of his bus we talked about how we both grew up poor and how much we hated picking cotton. Both motivated us to see if we could find something better. Something better than ripping cotton out of an open bollard so quickly that the sharp ends pierced our fingers until they bled.
For me it was the writing; for him to make an electric guitar howl and moan while he sang the blues. Obviously he was way better at what he did than I was at what I did.
Few people reading this have ever picked cotton or know what a juke joint is.
In the 1960’s the wages for picking cotton by hand ranged from 2 to 4 cents per pound. A cloth bag, of course cotton, was supplied with a strap which the picker looped over his head and allowed to rest on his shoulder. The strap went across your chest like a seat belt does today, and so you pulled the bag, which was between 6 and 8 feet long, through the middles of dirt between the rows of cotton.
They plucked as quickly as possible to fill the bag and paused to tuck it away. When another handful couldn’t fit, they were dragged to the end of the line, where a worker pulled the strap up to the scale and lifted the back end of the bag to the same spot. He slipped a counterweight over the arm of the scale until it was balanced, then told you the weight and wrote it down next to your name.
I think I picked 100 pounds at most at about 3 cents a pound. You can count.
More memorable for him were music bars, little towns on the side of the road or across the street where guitars were strummed and cotton forgotten on Saturday nights. In small huts full of laughter and stories, the blues was played, alcohol was consumed and their feet danced.
When I told BB about the small Delta town in Arkansas where I grew up, his eyes sparkled. He said he knew them well, then heard the names of nearly a dozen other towns nearby, some not even big enough to have anything more than a weather-beaten country shop and a drab music bar with a toilet in the background.
He’d played in all those little country towns and not made a sackful of money, but made more than he made picking a sackful of cotton.
When I read or hear about Tom Brady receiving pandemic funds, or professional golfers taking money from Saudi Arabian killers, or reality TV shows, and TikTok making some rich for no other reason than people watching and advertisers want those eyeballs, will Realizing that America is dealing with celebs has stunned us. It changed our values and dulled our senses.
We don’t seem to know the value of dragging a sack to the end of the line and weighing it to see what we get. To see what the work brought us. what we deserve
Larry McDermott is a retired local farmer/journalist. Reach him at [email protected]
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