Geva taking Son House's heroic life to the stage

Rochester is not through with Son House.

We allowed the old man to live anonymously in our midst for decades, hiding from his demons (and perhaps the country's demons), disowning his legacy, quietly tending to his alcoholism on the front porch of his Corn Hill home. Working as a railroad porter, but going nowhere in particular himself.

But on a Sunday night early last November — a quarter-century after his death and nearly five decades after a trio of young, white roots-music archaeologists rediscovered this Rosetta Stone of the blues — Son House had drawn nearly a full house once again. The gathering amounted to a storytelling session, part of the research for a Geva Theatre Center project in development. Rochesterians at the theater at Geva's NextStage listened patiently as five guests, seated on stools onstage, discussed this enigma of a man and artist.

"It's like a bundle of lies that surrounds something that has some truth to it," said Geva artistic director Skip Greer.

"I would say he was possessed," said Brian Williams, one of the most active musicians on the local scene. The upright bassist was among those young musicians of the 1960s who were seeking The Real Thing. Williams found him in New York City's Greenwich Village: Son House, working off the rust of two decades in clubs like The Gaslight. A well-dressed old man, Williams recalls. When he sang, Williams adds, "His eyes rolled back in his sockets, like he was going somewhere."

Where was Son House going? That became the question of the night. The question that Keith Glover hopes to answer.

The Los Angeles playwright has been commissioned by Geva Theatre Center to write a play about Son House — an as-yet untitled work that Geva will introduce in August with its four-day celebration, "A Journey to the Son."

The project kicked around the Geva offices for years, until the $100,000 "Cultural Creative Collision" grant from The Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation made it a reality. Sound Exchange, Baobab Cultural Center, Garth Fagan Dance and Friends of Ganondagan were awarded similar grants. (See accompanying stories.)

Geva is angling for a big name or two in the music business to help launch its play. Like, anyone out there got Eric Clapton's phone number?

The story of Son House is a ripe landscape for a writer.

"He is the perfect person, in the body of work and where he came from," Glover says. House was a Mississippi farmer and preacher who despised the blues as the devil's music, until he followed alcohol and women to the juke joints. He played with Charley Patton and inspired Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. He killed two men, allegedly in self-defense. And there is the unexplained self-exile in Rochester, his rediscovery in 1964 and return to the stage as an icon of the blues-folk revival.

So there are plenty of places Son House could have gone as those eyes rolled back in his sockets. And much territory to be explored by Glover. That November night at Geva, he heard not only ideas from the panel members, but a few people in the audience as well. Carvin Eison's idea for a destination was not the setting for an upbeat musical.

"America was not a nice place with regard to people of color," said Eison, a local filmmaker. "There was extraordinary hatred. The idea of being strung up — that will take you to a different planet."

'The music of my uncles'

Glover appears to be the right man for the job of bringing Son House back to life. As an actor, he has appeared in August Wilson plays (Fences), movies with Robert De Niro (Jackknife) and television. That included the soap As the World Turns. "I was a Ken doll, I had batteries in my back," he says. "I hated the guy — he was so plastic."

But it is Glover's work as a playwright that resonates here. He has written a handful of well-received works, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated In Walks Ed, a comic thriller set to jazz and R&B in a Harlem bar. And even more relevant, his Thunder Knocking on the Door, a fable of a near-mystical bluesman for which the Grammy-winning Keb' Mo' wrote the music.

There's also that intangible factor of roots. Glover grew up in Bessemer, Alabama. Bo Jackson lived down the street, in a small, predominantly black town that seems to have produced an unusual number of pro football players. For the first few years of his life, Glover and his family lived in a house on stilts, out of the reach of floods. The bathroom was an outhouse. His grandmother worked in a chicken warehouse, and most of the men were employed by the steel mills.

"At the end of the week," Glover says, "they drank and played music."

Son House was raised amid the cotton fields of Mississippi, among people who understood hard labor and playing hard. The details may have been different from what Glover grew up with, but both southern lands resonated with the same kind of music.

"When I heard it, it wasn't strange, it wasn't foreign," Glover says of the sound of the Delta bluesmen. The blues, he says, "was the music of my uncles."

'He sang the blues like a preacher'

Glover's resources for his exploration of Son House includes Preaching the Blues: The Life & Times of Son House, by the University of Rochester professor Dan Beaumont, and firsthand accounts from people who knew House after his rediscovery. One of those people is bluesman John Mooney, who grew up in Mendon. Mooney has absorbed his lessons well, with an understanding of the dramatic soft-to-loud dynamics that characterized the music of Son House.

And Glover has the songs that House left behind. The right to use them has yet to be nailed down; that has to go through lawyers and House's estate. "Nothing corrupts like the idea of this huge amount of money and exploitation," Glover says. "But being an artist myself, I know karma is real. I see nothing but blue skies ahead."

Scholars, firsthand accounts, songs. House's history is already well-documented, gaps in the story notwithstanding. But those gaps are a playwright's playground.

At that November gathering at Geva, kind of a Son House Town Hall, Glover was searching for insight and scraps to broaden the life. Doug Curry, host of Blacks and Blues, the Friday-night show on WRUR-FM (88.5), raised his hand in the audience and suggested that House "sang the blues like a preacher." Armand Schaubroeck, co-founder of the House of Guitars, recalled how he and his brother Bruce would book the bluesman at their coffeehouse. "He'd tell us, 'I'm not gonna play a goddam thing until you get me a drink,' " Schaubroeck said.

"He'd hock his guitar for booze money. One night we made a mistake and paid him before the show. He didn't show up at the club. We had a full house and no Son House. We went out looking for him. He'd gone out barhopping."

Admirers propped up the errant, reluctant bluesman. As House was about to be reintroduced to the world, Alan Wilson of the band Canned Heat was brought in to teach House his own songs; he'd forgotten how to play them. Williams recalled how, when he and Mooney would visit House, "We had to help him tune his guitar." House's wife, Evie, would be watching, a scowl on her face. "She knew nothing good was going to come of it," Williams says.

Sin and redemption, that's a central theme of the Son House story: "his lifelong struggle with God and misbehaving," Williams says. "He called it, 'Doing wrong.' Then he'd point to his crotch."

It's hard to tell what Glover will make of some of the anecdotes he heard that night. Williams recalled another visit with House, later in his life, when he'd moved to an apartment on West Avenue. Evie invited the young blues acolytes inside. They found House in the bathroom, his entire face covered in shaving cream. He was shaving. Even his eyebrows.

'A big, heroic life'

The sharecroppers of Mississippi are gone, as are the steel mills of Bessemer. In sitting down to write this play, Glover is gathering ghosts. "It wasn't that the story wasn't here," he says. "It was. I wasn't ready."

He completed his first draft on Oct. 19. The anniversary of Son House's death. It is, Glover admits, "The draft you will never see." As with many writers, writing is rewriting, and where Son House was going when his eyes rolled into the back of his head could change with each version. "I may have a different answer a week from now," Glover says.

It may not be Carvin Eison's harrowing vision, a threatening world for black men that many still see today in Ferguson, Missouri, and on the chokehold streets of Staten Island. "Spiritual songs are full of hope," Glover says. "They transcend rage."

"It was a music that served the community," Glover adds. And music that was inspired by what was a part of the community. That blues shuffle, he points out: Doesn't that sound like an old washing machine?

"Storytelling, that's the thing that gave Son House his power," Glover says. "The ways of the flesh, and the search for the higher power. And he was not afraid to show he failed."

Glover describes House's story as "a personal place," like Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. He sees House's existence as a theme drawn from the writer-philosopher Joseph Campbell: "Living is a heroic act."

True, Son House is "a person who doesn't reveal himself," Glover says. Yet, "It's a big, heroic life. Because he never gave up."

JSPEVAK@DemocratandChronicle.com

Twitter.com/jeffspevak1