the life and death of DB Daniels

Dumb Boy Daniels was born (tongueless but otherwise perfectly healthy) in 1911, in a small Texas town built between creek and railroad on land black with oil waste. The town was dominated by an ugly brick church, where every Sunday DB's family would dress up smart as their means allowed and join the congregation.

The Daniels were a musical family and proud of it. DB's uncle played piano in church and his brothers and sisters voices could always be heard strong and clear rising above the rest of the congregation. But when the family stood at the start of each hymn, DB's mama would press her hand firmly down on her son's shoulder so that he knew he had to stay sitting. The only time DB was really allowed to join in with the service was when the congregation bowed their heads and kneeled to pray in silence.

DB's family were a stiff-backed, virtuous, hard working unit who always walked with their heads a little higher than anyone else. The reason they acted so proud was to hide the shame inflicted upon them by DB's father. He was a womanising, alcoholic bootlegger who had died doing hard labour in a Texas prison camp (although DB never found this out).

DB remembered his father as a dishevelled violent visitor who would endlessly curse and belittle his mother, as he knocked her round the room, and who would stoop to whisper gruffly in DB's ear that, "those who spoke most had least to say."

DB never played with the other children, who crossed the creek on stepping stones, and spied on their older brothers and sisters courting amidst tall, secret-whispering grass. Instead, DB would go down to the railroad and stand alone for hours between the tracks, staring into the distance. Whenever a steam locomotive came hoot-hooting along, he would stand to one side and carefully scrutinise each truck, each carriage that clattered past, and watch wistfully the caboose at the back get smaller and smaller, the guard smiling and waving his flag, until it disappeared.

In the summer evenings the family would gather round the porch of their home and listen to DB's uncle play the guitar he'd made out of apple boxes and chicken wire. And boy could he play.

He would push the string up a couple of steps and make the guitar wail like a hungry dog or add vibrato by moving the tip of his finger back and forth on the string and make it sing out loud. He would dampen the strings with the side of his hand as he struck a note, so that the notes sounded all dry and snappy. And, depending how hard he struck the string, the tune could sound dainty as a spider dancing or angry as a drunk man knocking on a locked door.

Sometimes he would hammer his finger onto the string after he had struck the note like the guitar was saying, 'Oh yea, oh yea, oh yea.' Or he would pull his finger off the string repeatedly after he had struck the note. And that was like the guitar was saying, 'No-oh, no-oh, no-oh.' Sometimes he would play like the guitar was whispering and sometimes just being conversational and other times like it was hollering.

DB's uncle could make the guitar talk so well, that if you listened carefully you could near enough make out the actual words that the guitar was supposed to be saying. Often he would shut his eyes and pull all kinds of expressions like he was in great pain and sorrow, and you could guess what the guitar was saying just from looking at his face.

When his uncle played guitar, DB would sit and watch him and copy the faces that he pulled and thump his fists on his thighs in such a way that all his family smiled, except his mother who would get all sour-faced and angry and tell him to stop playing the fool and listen to his uncle. Then everyone else would stop smiling and pretend to concentrate on the music so as not to annoy her.

One day, when DB was about ten years old, his uncle came home from his work out in the fields and heard the sound of guitar playing coming from behind the house. The way that guitar was being played he knew it couldn't be anyone who lived locally. There were only two other men in the area he knew of who owned proper guitars and neither of them could play like whoever it was he was hearing.

He guessed that some guitarist passing through had been directed by neighbours to the Daniel's farmhouse, them being the most musical family in town and he, of course, being the town's foremost guitar player. Before DB's uncle went round to the backyard, he wiped his dusty hands on his britches and straightened the collar of his work shirt. He checked his reflection in a puddle, to make sure he didn't appear too clay-shoed, then he went round to the backyard all ready to greet this guitar playing stranger. But when he went round the back of the house to his surprise he found no stranger. Instead, there amidst the chickens pecking in the dirt was Dumb Boy Daniels, just ten years of age, eyes closed, playing his heart out.

Now DB's uncle should have been mad at DB for taking his guitar without asking, but he was so surprised at the way that this boy (who had never spoken a word in his life and who had never been taught a single note), could play the guitar, he completely forgot to be angry. He just stood there mouth gaping and thought, 'Praise the Lord - it's a miracle!' He wasn't truly surprised at the miracle. For if a miracle were to be visited upon any family in their small town then surely it should be the Daniels, for after all they were the heart and soul of the church.

DB's uncle could barely conceal his excitement as he called the boy's older brothers in from the fields and his sisters and younger brothers from down by the creek. Then he told them of the miracle and they all gathered on the porch to hear DB play. Well DB was a shy boy and not used to being the centre of so much attention and excitement, so he started his performance rather nervously, not playing nearly as well as he'd played to the chickens in the back yard. However, the whole family were amazed. Their eyes were wide with disbelief and their lips moved in silent prayer, as they watched him squeeze all that emotion from that guitar (all of them, that was, except his mother who pursed her lips as if she were tasting vinegar).

When DB had finished, the whole family clapped and cheered. But his mother just crossed her arms and grumbled that she had cooking to finish. Undeterred, DB's older brothers lifted him onto their shoulders and carried him round the yard followed by his sisters and cousins. Then they set him back down on the porch to play another tune.

However, this time, instead of playing a tune, DB played a little phrase of three or four notes. He repeated it a couple of times and then stopped and stared round at his family. They looked at him confused. But, stubbornly, DB played the same phrase again and once more looked up at them, his deep brown eyes full of expectation. His uncle frowned and said, "Come on DB stop this nonsense, play us another tune." But again and again, DB played the same phrase, stopping and starting and stopping and starting.

DB's uncle looked embarrassed. His mother muttered to herself and went back into the house, whilst one of the younger brothers ran into the yard scattering chickens. Reluctantly the rest of the family got up to go, sad that the miracle was over, supposing that their imaginations must have been playing some trick on them and that DB couldn't really play that well at all. But, suddenly Ruth, the brightest of DB's sisters, yelled out, "Stop, look, look he's saying something. He's trying to say something." And DB nodded and smiled.

They all sat back down, more excited than ever now and listened carefully to that little phrase he was playing on the guitar. And Ruth said, "I know what he's trying to say - my name is Daniels. My name is Daniels. No, it's my name is DB. That's it. My name is DB." And DB smiled fit to split his face and nodded his head and started to play another phrase.

Soon after that, DB's uncle came home with another guitar. It was only three-quarter size, but much finer made than his own. He would never say where he had got it from, though wherever it was he'd been, it was rumoured he'd taken his marked playing cards and his gun with him.

Every night that summer, the family (and many of the neighbours) would gather around the porch to listen to DB and his uncle play. And every day DB would take the guitar with him wherever he went. After a while, he became quite a celebrity. People would stop him in the street and have a conversation with his guitar and be rewarded with an enormous smile and frantic nodding when they worked out what he was trying to say. And little by little, certain people learned to understand DB's music so well they were able to chat quite freely with him.

Although, previously, DB had been considered to be simple, if not a bit peculiar, he soon gained the respect of everyone - everyone, that is, except his mother. The vinegar taste in her mouth seemed to just get sourer and sourer.

DB's mother had never liked the guitar. She didn't like the way the body was shaped like a buxom young lady, or the way the neck sprouted from it like some huge, wooden phallus. As far as she was concerned, guitars were the instruments of the devil.

It was rumoured that the DB's uncle had won his nephew's guitar in a game of polka with a man who wrestled in a travelling fair. It was also rumoured that the wrestler used to organise boxing contests between blind men and commit acts of bestiality with pigs and goats for an audience paying a nickel a time. Proof if any were needed, that the guitar was truly tainted by evil.

DB's mother considered the path to heaven was righteousness (in her case self-righteousness) and hard work. In order to curb his guitar playing, DB's mother would give him endless chores to do around the house. Whilst the other children were allowed to run off to the creek, he would still be there scrubbing the floor or cleaning out the chicken shed. But despite this hardship, about which he made no protest, his mother still wasn't satisfied.

For medicinal purposes, his mother kept in the kitchen a jar of tonic, which was almost pure alcohol (and particularly popular with the most pious of her church cronies). From time to time the level of tonic in the jar fell. Now, she knew this was because DB's uncle liked to occasionally sneak a secret swig of the syrupy mixture, when he fell short of moonshine. But she persisted in blaming DB, each time the tonic disappeared.

She would pick him up by the straps of her dungarees and sniff his breath. And though she never once smelled the merest whiff of alcohol, she would always silently lead him to the big chair in the kitchen where he would dutifully kneel over. She would get out her stick, thick as a child's arm and covered in knots, and he would allow himself to be beaten about the back of his legs and his scrawny rump and back. Often, she would beat him so hard he had to lie on his side in the bed he shared with his brothers so that the weals and cuts on each side of his frail body were able to scab over and heal.

Despite the pain and injustice of these beatings, he appeared happy and never once complained (maybe having learned all those tongueless years to suffer in silence). But one morning, shortly after DB's twelfth birthday, the family woke up to discover that he was gone. He had taken his guitar and jumped aboard a train and ridden away.

Although, the family pretended to be puzzled by DB's sudden disappearance they all knew that his mother's stick had finally snapped in two across his back. She never mentioned his leaving. She just burned the pieces of the stick in the stove and scattered the ashes among the chickens in the backyard, like they were his mortal remains.

After that, Dumb Boy Daniels became something of a legend. Throughout the Mississippi, people would tell stories of a boy who played the guitar like an angel. Some say they heard him play with Robert Johnson in a juke at the back of a store in a sharecropper settlement. Others say they saw him play with Blind Lemon Jefferson in a Chicago whorehouse.

According to legend, the whores would sit DB on their laps and mother him and he would fall asleep in their arms clutching his guitar. And even though, when he was older, the woman offered him other more earthly comforts, he declined them as he declined moonshine, and it is said he remained a virgin teetotaller until his premature demise.

Paramount released three records of DB playing. The sleeve notes of the first record described him as fourteen years of age, the boy with the talking guitar, a guitar which tells the sorrowful stories of his homeland, stories of pain and suffering relieved by the joy of this weird and haunting music (all this written by a white accountant who had never set foot outside Chicago).

For weeks on end DB's uncle would go off in search of him. Wherever he went he heard people chattering about the miraculous DB Daniels with the talking guitar who had played there a month back or not two nights before. But, although he sometimes got close to DB, he never somehow quite managed to catch up with him, always arriving at the station as the train on which DB was travelling was steaming away down the railroad to somewhere new.

During the winter of 1928, shortly after DB had turned seventeen, he returned to Chicago to make his final recording for Paramount. A few days later he was found dead by the railroad, his guitar frozen to his hand. Some say he was struck by a freight train, after falling asleep on the track. Others say that someone had deliberately laced DB's drink with strychnine and then dumped his body there (although no motive for why anyone should want to poison him was ever suggested). However, whichever way he died, it is known that he and his guitar were buried with little ceremony in a paupers' grave nearby.

On his final recording for Paramount, the same guitar phrase is repeated again and again in what was widely accepted to be a suicide note. Some say that the guitar was surely wailing 'Forgiveness is all I ask of you,' or 'Mama forgive me I love you' or' Ma did you have to be so cruel?' Others insisted that the guitar was definitely crying 'Father why could I never find you?' But most people who put forward these theories had never properly listened to the record and some had never heard it at all.

Every now and again, some little-known Professor of Linguistics in some minor college somewhere will claim to have produced the definitive translation of what DB's guitar was really trying to say. The Professor (or more usually one of his or her research assistants) will produce megabytes of computer-generated oscilloscope patterns derived from re-mastered versions of DB's original recordings. They will then compare these with the speech patterns of geriatric residents of DB's home town who were alive when DB and his family had lived there (or, at least, for a few dollars, will claim to have lived in the town at that time)! Having done months of research, the Professor (and/or his able assistants) will eventually produce two lines of verse that purport to be DB's exact final words.

However, despite the confident claims of the academics, there was only one person who could ever be certain she understood what DB's guitar was really saying on that last recording, and that was DB's sister, Ruth. She only ever listened to DB's third record once, but she immediately understood what he had said and smiled and cried and kept the secret of his partings words to herself to the grave...."

Well, you listen to a story like that and you think that nobody's life could ever be so dramatic these days. And, certainly, in the tale I have to tell, no-one is born without a tongue, and no-one ends up freezing to death on a railway line. However, the story does have its ups and downs and its weird and crazy moments, so it's probably worth telling.

I suppose the story really starts the day I brought that Little Red Rooster magazine with the story of DB Daniels in it. But, so that everything fits into place, I need to go back a bit before that and tell you how I met the Kid (before he even was the Kid), and how we started to play guitar together in the first place.