OSAGE — Listen to Al Anderson talk, and you’ll hear a whole jukebox in your head.
After the ambient drop of the needle onto the grooves of the 45 – as Al’s cerebral machine plays only real records – here (hear) comes the playlist.
This machine carries stacks of Stax: the color-blind Memphis label that gave us Otis Redding, Albert King, Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the MGs, Carla Thomas – and gee whiz, that was just the opening act.
There are racks of mournful Appalachian ballads and the gut-bucket blues, just to remind you.
Of course, you’ll see among its titles protest songs and union-organizing songs, sonically and socially as one.
Don’t even think about not including Mahalia Jackson, with her soaring, rafter-rattling gospel, followed up by the sweet, under-the-streetlight, doo-wop of Billy Ward and the Dominoes.
And hear that riff? You know, man.
Chuck Berry, the lanky Black dude from St. Louis who could play the guitar like ringing a bell, while duck-walking that hillbilly music all the way to rock ‘n’ roll.
Sunny, three-chord, 12-bar paeans to all things blessedly American, Mr. Berry’s tunes were.
Burgers on the grill, cities on a hill, suburbs down the road, skyscrapers, freeways, buying power, earning power and every other Red, White and Blue yardstick of Making It.
Nevermind that the shadow of Jim Crow made many of those attainments just fall short of the grasp.
Yep, and it’s all carried in Hep Cat-coal camp rasp of the community activist and singer who used to tour nationally.
That’s what you’ll hear when you engage him in conversation.
“I don’t have to tell you how it is, brother,” the 83-year-old said recently, from his shoe shop in Osage.
“I never thought I’d still be saying this. We’re just gonna have to do better. It’s gonna be too late, if we don’t.”
American prayer
It was at the steps of Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on the day Martin Luther King Jr. made legend.
Aug. 28, 1963.
More than 250,000 gathered on the mall in the nation’s capital that afternoon, in front of the marble edifice honoring a president who would die for the cause in trying to mend a torn country.
Just five years later, King would be also be dead from an assassin’s bullet in attempt of the same, but on this day, he was alive, in the moment.
Even if the preacher didn’t quite have that gospel-connect with the congregants – not yet.
Mahalia Jackson’s voice cut the din.
“Tell them about the dream, Martin!” she sang out, from right behind him.
“The dream! Tell ‘em!”
Jackson, whose capacity for social justice was just as abundant as her singing voice, was long baptized in the crusade for civil rights.
She was taken by King in his quieter moments, when he would tell congregants and committee men alike of the gentle image always spied in his mind’s eye.
It was comforting. Little Black kids and little white kids, being just that.
Kids.
Friends.
Playing together, with no reprisals.
Except, this wasn’t a time to be quiet.
Miss Mahalia’s voice pealed like a church bell on Sunday morning, and when he heard, he broke from his words on the prepared page, to largely improvise the rest:
“ … And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream …”
When Dr. King was done, that dream became The Dream.
Anderson was in Washington that day. He was in that teeming multitude.
He heard the applause and maybe a little static from the microphone.
He definitely felt the pulse and could hear his, also.
And with The Dream still echoing, he loosened his necktie and let his breath out in one slow whoosh.
To say one word, in response:
“Man.”
Keeping good company, in company houses
Anderson grew up in Osage, a once-thriving coal camp nestled in a cut-out valley just past Morgantown on W.Va. 7.
Like a lot of Black men of his generation, he had to move away for work.
That didn’t mean he ran away, though.
He enjoyed growing up in an enclave that was a Melting Pot onto itself.
Anderson said the camp had at least “19 nationalities represented,” when the mines were really going.
“Everybody watched like they were your mom and dad,” he said.
“Even if they weren’t.”
Whites across West Virginia and Appalachia lived in those Osage company houses.
Their neighbors were Blacks up from Alabama, Italians over from Calabria and others – Serbians, Poles, Russians – all here to carve a purchase of the American dream.
A kid with a song in his head worked hard, too.
Soul to sole
Anderson came up a shoeshine boy – “boy,” in this case being the accepted term for the job, white or Black, and not a racial pejorative.
The slapping of the rag filled his pockets with dollars and coins, which he promptly handed over to his dad, Bud Anderson, a coal miner who also knew how to cobble shoes.
“It was a way for me to help out with the household expenses,” the dutiful son said.
He was gifted with a singing voice – and a lot people knew it.
A white man got him in the music business.
When one of Charlie Whiston’s sons was getting a band together, the then-Monongalia County sheriff thought of that shoeshine boy who could really sing.
So, he called Bud Anderson.
“You think Al would want to be in a band?”
Would he ever.
“And I wasn’t gonna say no to the sheriff,” the newly minted working musician said.
New gig – New Year’s Eve
It wasn’t long after when that kid from Osage found himself in a California recording studio with the aforementioned Billy Ward and The Dominoes.
That’s him you hear singing lead on “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?,” probably the group’s biggest hit from 1965.
More gigs followed and Anderson worked crowds on bandstands from Hollywood to Hagerstown, Md.
Doo-wop. Sweet ballads. Soul stompers. Rock ‘n’ roll, baby.
He got to Washington before Martin Luther King did. He was managing a retail store, a Black business professional in a whites-only world.
Anderson gave everybody the day off that August afternoon in 1963. They didn’t have to ask.
You never had to ask what he was doing on the weekend.
The bands he fronted after Billy Ward and the Dominoes opened for Bo Diddley, the Isley Brothers and other top touring acts that came D.C. – “We were playing their songs anyway,” he said. “In the same keys they were playing them in.”
At many a gig, he was the only person of color in the room.
“Hey, I did bar mitzvahs,” he said. “People treated me well. Very well.”
Golden rule (in black-and-white)
When Bud fell gravely ill, Anderson came back to Osage to run the shoe shop, where he still puts in days, even in the pandemic.
“I’m watching and being careful,” he said.
“And I’m due for my second vaccine for COVID, so I think we’re gonna be good.”
Being back in the Mountain State, and that coal camp where he first learned right from wrong has been good for him too, he said.
Along the way, he became a community activist – by accident, he said – because he just wants to help and can hardly ever say no if someone asks.
Once the pandemic clears out of town, he’ll start hitting local bandstands again, he said.
“I can still hit the high notes,” he said. “Just like 1959, man.”
Before the coronavirus changed everything last March, he was still out there, playing bars, community events and parties, affixing the Anderson sonic signature on everything from “Mustang Sally” to “Precious Memories.”
One thing that won’t be a precious memory, he said, is this most recent summer of unrest, with a knee on George Floyd’s neck and rioters in the U.S. Capitol building.
“Yeah, that’s what I was saying earlier. We’ve gotta do better. And there are people out there who are.”
People such as Stacey Abrams, the Georgia activist who got the vote out in her politically charged home state in November.
And scores of young people in Florida who survived the horrific Parkland school shooting to become we-can-do-better activists in their own right.
“That’s what gives me hope, brother. All that good work they’re doing.”
While the old soul singer will always lift his voice for February, he’ll offer the same courtesy, by his interpersonal actions, with 11 other months, also.
“Just be yourself and do the right thing,” he said.
“Do right by people. It works. Because it’s not just ‘Black’ history – it’s everybody’s history. Like Osage, man. We all live here.”
TWEET@DominionPostWV
