RL's Dream

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RL wasn’t no real man. A real man gits born, does what li’l he can, and then he dies. That’s it! You could remember a real man and say how he lived an’ how he died. But RL fooled you. He played the guitar when he shouldn’t’a been able to, an’ nobody knows how he died. Maybe it was the pneumonia, maybe a jealous man. Satan coulda come an’ made him bark like a dog ’fore takin’ him home.

But us po’ fools lookin’ fo’ his story is lost ’fore we begin. ’Cause Robert Johnson wasn’t never born an’ couldn’t die. He was Delta blue from the bottom of his soul. He was the blues; he is today. Ain’t no start to his misery. An’ death could not never ease his kinda pain.

Soupspoon Wise

Back Road to the Blues (1986)

Transcribed by Gerald Pickford

Pain moved up the old man’s hipbone like a plow breaking through hard sod. So much pain he could barely think. He shit himself on the long walk from the shelter toward home and fell in the street more than once. No one moved to help him — passersby steered a wide path to get away from the smell. Soupspoon Wise staggered up Bowery toward the East Village imagining being home again, away from the dormitory of disheveled men. Those gibbering and farting men calling out to people who weren’t there.

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