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LB: You danced in the street for money? PL: Yeah, that was the idea. LB: They still do that. See that guy on Bourbon Street? He's great I don't know his name. QD: They call him "Pork chop." His name. is Isaac Mason. PL: You find your best dancers out there. LB: Somebody told me you played in a minstrel show. PL: Well, I was real small, I wasn't doin' anything then. I was around seven or eight years old, deliverin' papers, and shinin' shoes, and runnin' on errands... I was just tryin' to make a buck, and they'd use me as a kick ... stunt man. Whenever they had some water to pour on somebody or a pie to bat in your face that was my job. (Laughing) LB: Would you go out of town with these people, on the road? PL: No, I never went nowhere. That was the C.J.K. Medicine Show. That was the name of the medicine the cat was sellin'. That was the name of the medicine he said 'would cure anything. It was somethin' like the Hadacol. LB: You got tired of that or you didn't like what they were doin'? PL: Well, Lollypop Jones and Memphis Lewis, they were a team. LB: Lollypop was a great comedian. You must have learned a lot from him. PL: Between him and Redd Foxx...he used to work with us at the Dew Drop. LB: All the great black comedians of the '50s came to the Dew Drop. So you met Lollypop before you were playin' music? PL: Yeah, yeah. way before. I was a small kid... Then in '35, well, I remember then I was startin' to want to play music. Then around '37 I went in the C. C. Camp. They're three C's that's all we called it. At the time it was the C.C.C. Camp. [The C.C.C.-Civilian Conservation Corps was a program administered by the New Deal.] LB: You were working? PL: That was the idea. We did everything: plantin' trees, diggin' spillways, gradin', slopin', buildin' banks. We was cuttin' soil, we was layin' soil, openin' up spillways, gradin' roads, puttin' gravel down. We cut down trees if necessary, cleanin' off land... This was around Shreveport and Ardin(?). LB: With all these people that you worked with, did you travel that much, or did you mostly stay in New Orleans? PL: Well. the C. C. Camp, there's a lot of travelin' in it. You never know where you're goin' till you get there. It's like a road crew. LB: How did those things pay? PL: At that time I was getting $50 a month. But if you had a dependent. well, then they would send your dependent $50 and give you 28 over there where you was. Where you were servin' your time. Outa that you had to pay your laundry bills. Well. you buy a canteen book just like you spend checks and things out here, you bought canteen books in there. It represented money. you know. Some other guys had some other hustles in there besides. LB: Did you play music while you were there to entertain the people? PL: Well. the guy that was in charge of the company found out that I could play and he got a piano from somewhere and put it in the recreation hall for me to entertain the soldiers so the), would have somethin' to do and somewhere to go. Well. we'd knock off, well, I gut so that I didn't have to drill much no more. LB: So you were in the Army? I thought it was some kind of civilian work project. PL: Well, you could consider it the Army. It was under the Army rules and regulations. We soldiered, we drilled, we did everything a soldier would do. Then we had working periods, too. LB: How long did this last? PL: Well, I stayed in there six months. My time was up. This was in '37. QD: Seemed like six years. PL: Really, really. with that work we were doin'. I wasn't expectin' that. Then you had to study, you had to go to school, you had to drill. They had a whole lotta shit. QD: When did you do the field work, picking berries and stuff? PL: That's when I was about six or seven, eight. nine years old ...All through Hammond, Independence, Ponchatoula, Albany, Amite, Sorrento, Velma(?), Shiloh(?) ... You were just workin' for people, whoever owned the farm. They'd pay you by how much you pick. LB: How would you get Out there? PL: They'd send trucks to pick you up. How many hands they would need they would come here and set on the corner and ask for hands... Well, you never know where the truck drivers come from, either. I mean they was out to make a buck too. All they did was haul you there. after that you may not sec him no more. Their job was to get you to your destination. LB: Now after the C.C.C. Camp, you must have started to play music again. PL: Yeah. I did. I came back out here. But most of the time I was gamblin'. I made more money gamblin' then. LB: What was your favorite game? PL: My favorite game was Coon-Can. Well, you heard of pinochle? Pitty Pat. Blackjack. You heard of Kotch? Skin? Pitty Pat is a short way for pronouncing Coon-Can. The thing if you're playin' Pitty Pat you use one card against the other. Coon-Can you have to use two against one. To use this one queen you have to have two queens in your hand. LB: Could you do any card tricks? PL: I was a professional card player, you can judge from that. QD: During like 10 to 15 years in the '50s and all when he wasn't playin' much music, before I met him in ‘70, whenever it was, he supported himself, went back to playin' cards, all during that period. LB: So you were that good at it to support yourself. PL: I'm good enough not to lose. It isn't everybody that knowed me play with me. Just the guys that's daring, don't believe. That's the only guys I could you know…, ah ... I had a lot of challengers. All I had to do was have a bankroll. If you could get a bankroll, you really had it made. Anybody that knew me would put up a bankroll. I wasn't worried about the money, startin'. LB: Where'd you find these people? What club? PL: They'd find me. I was the champion. If you're lookin' for a fight and the champion had the belt, should he look for you or should you look for him? LB: Right. But where were some good places to play at? I know there were a few professional gambling houses. The Big 25 always had something illegal goin' on. There was one uptown. There was a place on Oak Street, I think. PL: Well. I wouldn't call the names away. I don't know it would be wise to call their names. LB: So after the C.C.C. Camp you went back to playing music? PL: Well, I came out here, and I didn't go right into playin' music. I went in with a guy, not a partnership, but I went in with a piece of the share you'd call it. He needed someone to work bad and wasn't able to pay 'em. So if he'd a got someone to be as interested in what he was tryin' to do, as he was. He figured he could make, some money and he would be willin' to share the profits with whoever it would be. And this was a cookin' situation. He needed a cook, he couldn't cook. I could cook, my mother taught me to cook you know, when I was growin' up. And some of the things he had specified on his menu, I had to get a-book to learn how to cook it. But I was successful at it. LB: That kind of stuff did he have on the C.C.C. PL: Well, it was hot dogs and hamburgers and chicken, fish. Then we left from there and went into greens and stew, and beans, and cornbread. Other little things like desserts and things that we know we could make. you know. LB: Where was the restaurant:' PL: The restaurant was at ... Little Jane's, we all called it Jimmy Hike's (?) Barbecue Pit. That was located on Rampart between Julia and Howard Avenue. It's right where the Plaza Tower is right now. LB: All that whole street was clubs, from Canal Street up to Howard. PL: On the every extreme corner you had a liquor bar. Next to the liquor bar was a motel, was Patterson's Hotel. Next to the hotel was a barber shop. After the barber shop came a clothin' store. Next to the clothin' store was Little Jane's Barbecue Pit. I named the pit after his little girl that was named Jane. But they all didn't pay no attention-they would call it Jimmy Hike's Barbecue Pit 'cause they all knew him. Well, really, I established the place. He was sellin' orange juice when I first met him, he was sellin' Sunrise orange juice in the little short bottles. Well. I don't want to talk about his business, but I laughed, you know. LB: He wasn’t doing very well? PL: Really. He was gettin' back more than he was sellin'! Because he was pickin' up stuff he had left the day before that didn't sell. I laughed and he got angry about it. He said. "That's the trouble with some people, people try to make a livin' and some people take it for clownin'." I said, "No, I'm just that way, if I hurt myself I laugh if it ain't too bad. It's just a habit, laughin' when somethin' go bad. I take the bad with the sweet." I say, "But I don't see why you're tryin' to sell that stuff for," you know. See you can sell somethin' people really need and want. So he said that if I was so smart, how come I wasn't sellin' what the people really need and wanted? Well I said, "I don't have any money to establish myself in the business." So this run on for about a few days, and one day he decided to sit down. He says, "You ain't mad?" I says, "No, if you ain't. I ain't!" He says, "I'd like to talk to you." I says, "I'm always obliged to talk to people that wanta talk to me." He says, "What did you mean the other day when you said I wasn't sellin' the right thing that people wanted?" I said, "Well, people wanta eat, you know. hot dogs and hamburgers." Coffee would more better to sell than that orange juice. And he thought about it, you know. Well, I had recently gotten married in that time too. LB: Who’d you marry? PL: Oh, I don't know. I had got all ... I was drunk when it all happened. I never really understood it ...t woke up and found my wife. I didn't know we was gettin' married. I didn't have nothin' to get married with. I just recently got a divorce. So he (Jimmy Hike) hired her to work, to run the place, but she didn't have the knowledge I had So I had to give her a hand 'cause he wasn't able to hire me in order for her to have a job to kind of help me along with the bills. So finally we built the business up, and then he gave me a job managin' the place. And then later he sent for his daddy to come down and manage the place because I had made enough money from him to establish a place in his place for myself. I had a little punchboard operation, you know. You win cigarettes or eyeglasses, fountain pens or whatever. I was makin' more money than him because I had the system to work with. So he bought me out, because he didn't sec where it was necessary for him to rent him a spot in his place that he could use himself. I had to move my business somewheres else. I says you not greedy, you don't want all the money. LB: Were you still playing music, at night or something? PL: Well, this is what I'm comin' to now. After he found out that I could play music, his daddy's wife at that time, she died, he sent for his wife to come down to give him a band. When she came down she enticed them to buy a piano because she was really interested in hymns. I felt like the lady was tryin' to make up my mind to go on the other side, the Christianity side. There was somethin' botherin' her and she wanted to relax ...so he did. When he bought the piano and when I didn't have nothin' to do no more, we just play when I felt like. Whenever the house would get slim and nobody was in the place, well, I'd play. Soon as it would get packed I'd split. LB: About what year was this? Before the war? PL: This was before the war. Around '39, '38. LB: Now you were through playing guitar at this time? PL: No, the guitar was way back. That was even before I started playin' professional music. LB: Quint said you played drums at one time? PL: Well, I was playin' the trunks. I played on the trunks with forks. These was just Dixieland numbers or somethin' my mother would play all the time. She would be playin' the guitar and I'd be beatin' on the trunk. See, I got married around '46 or '47. Now, the time you talkin' about now is way back in there. I was a little bitty ole kid. LB: So you never played any real drums? PL: No, the first drums that I considered havin' was my own that I was able to have was a trap drum. We used to get soapboxes and springs and leather, tin cans. Reels like these (pointing to the plastic tape reels). Tin (boxes), we make a snare drum outa one and a cymbal out' the other. LB: So after the restaurant you said you were playin' hymns and spirituals in this club. What songs were you playin' about that time? Stuff you'd written or...? PL: No, I was learnin'. See I was still learnin' then, in 1939. I was learnin' a lot of things. I wasn't really playin' professional then at all. You catch guys sittin' around playin' around... LB: Would play a hymn or a pop song on the piano, or were you just feelin' your way around? PL: Yeah, that's what I was doin', feelin' my way around the piano. See at that time it was Stormy Weather, Rock Sullivan and (Robert) Bertrand. LB: Those were the big pianists in your neighborhood? PL: Yeah, the type of pianist that I liked. I liked the barrelhouse, funk music, swing. LB: Now these people like Rocky Sullivan and Stormy Weather and Robert Bertrand and Tuts (Isidore Washington), now where would they be playing? I know Tuts was very popular. PL: Well. they would be playin' all over. Tuts play anywhere he wants. Ever since I knew him he was playin' professional. But there was no professional places to play in then, what I'm tryin' to say. It was honkytonks and dives, barrooms with sawdust on the floor, no tables... The Palace Theater was a biggest, or the Dew Drop; all that come later, way back in the game. LB: Would you go try to talk to these people and ask them to show you something? PL: Sullivan Rock and Tuts and all them? All thems was part of my teachers. They didn't mind showing me anything. LB: Which one showed you the most? PL: Well, I say they all helped me a lot. My mother started it and Sullivan. I got more Sullivan in me than I have any of 'em, but I got a lot of Stormy in me too. I got a lot of Tuts in me too. LB: Would they show you specific songs? PL: They would show me specific movements. Movements, if you can't control your hands with your thinkin', the movements is not goin' to correspond. LB: Did you develop a friendship with all of them? PL: They all loved me, and I loved them. LB: How did you develop that calypso beat?
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