While I was doing research on Louis Jordan, I found an account from Miles Davis on the significant impact Arkansas had on his own life and music. The first chapter of Miles: An Autobiography tells that both his parents were, in fact, from Arkansas. His grandfather owned five hundred acres of land in the state and was disdained by whites who constantly threatened the family.
However, Miles also remembers Arkansas as a place where “you could walk with your shoes off and you wouldn’t step into no pile of shit and get it all running and sticky and funky all over your feet”(20).
What really blew me away about finding this writing was to discover that Arkansas was a place where he started to figure out what he “wanted [his] music to sound like”(29).
A reoccurring theme in the writings I have done for Zero Mountain has been ghosts. The nameless, lost souls that haunt the lower Ozarks and the west-side of the Delta. You don’t feel them unless you’re here and you either have to tease them out or have them sneak up and grab you by the back of the neck. Miles seems to certainly seems to have been shook.
“But before the lessons, I also remember how the music used to sound down there in Arkansas, when I was visiting my grandfather, especially at the Saturday night church. Man, that shit was a motherfucker. I guess I was about six or seven. We’d be walking on these dark country roads at night and all of a sudden this music would seem to come out of nowhere, out of them spooky-looking trees that everybody said ghosts lived in. Anyway, we’d be on the side of the road — whoever I was with, one of my uncles or my cousin James — and I remember somebody would be playing a guitar the way B˙ B˙ King plays. And I remember a man and a woman singing and talking about getting down! Shit, that music was something, especially that woman singing. But I think that kind of stuff stayed with me, you know what I mean? That kind of sound in music, that blues, church, back-road funk kind of thing, that southern, midwestern, rural sound and rhythm. I think it started getting into my blood on them spook-filled Arkansas back-roads after dark when the owls came out hooting. So when I started taking music lessons I might have already had some idea of what I wanted my music to sound like.
Music is a funny thing when you really come to think about it. Because it’s hard to pinpoint where it all began for me. But I think some of it had to have started on that Arkansas road and some on that “Harlem Rhythms” radio show. When I got into music I went all the way into music; I didn’t have no time after that for nothing else.”-Miles Davis in Miles: An Autobiography
