|
AY
What we used to do in junior high school was we would take history lessons or literature that we were studying and we would make it palatable just by breaking it down into folksy jive talk versions. And we did this just to entertain each other. It was a lot of fun. This was the same era that saw classmates of mine going into Classics Comic books. They'd get a Tale of Two Cities in a Classic comics version and they would actually get B+ papers sometimes. Because they knew how to translate that into term papers that produced good grades. But -
MM
What's an example, do you remember an example?
AY
Ah, an example - an example of it would be say if we were studying some battle in the Revolutionary War, and when we talked about it we wouldn't say that, "Washington defeated the British at such and such." But "Washington whooped up on, you know, the British. And they kicked their ass." And blah, blah, blah, blah, that kind of things. And it was just a way of emphasizing things and making it a lot more fun to remember.
MM
Alright. Well, we're all warmed up. You know, maybe this is - we can just jumped right into this. One of the ideas I had for a question was the idea of, Roger and I were talking about this at lunch today - the idea of the Amos 'n' Andy shows versus what is on television these days. And supposedly depicting black people's lives. I'm - when I see television with predominately black characters these days, except for the - the show - the hospital show - you know that one, it's a - I forget what it's called but it's almost an entire black cast and it's a serious like ER kind of show.
AY
I don't know that show.
MM
Yeah. Oh, well it's nice, I mean it's - you know, it's real drama. But I look and, I don't know the names of these shows - but occasionally I'm flipping through the channels and it'll be a - it'll be a living room full of black kids -
AY
A lot of them on Fox.
MM
On Fox, yeah.
AY
Fox specializes in that stuff.
MM
And it's - it's kind of like - well, I don't know why people are bitching about Amos 'n' Andy -
AY
I know.
MM
These people look like ridiculous.
AY
That's absolutely right.
MM
What is your take on that.
AY
My take is precisely that. That circa 1958 '59, when I was still an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. There were groups, three specific groups active to get particular programs off of television. The NAACP was trying to get "Amos 'n' Andy" off television. The B'nai Brith Antidefamation League was trying to "Molly Goldberg" off the air. And the Italian Antidefamation League was trying to "Life With Luigi" of off the air. With Leo J. Carroll was playing this immigrant guy who would begin his show with a - in broken english with a letter to Mama "Dear Mama." And is letter comprised the episode for that week. "Molly Goldberg", these were all retentions from radio. And everybody forgets how early American humor, 18th century, 19th century and early 20th century humor was deeply rooted in venacular and in immigrant and ethnic speech deviations. Your Irish jokes, your Greek jokes, you Italian jokes and so forth, your Coon jokes and all of this. "Amos 'n' Andy" in particular was - is a phenomena that still intrigues me because it was possibly the most popular program on radio. So famous, in fact, so popular that when George Bernard Shaw visited this country in the 1930s, during The Depression, he made a note in his journals and letter that department stores and other kinds of stores closed down Tuesday nights early so that people could go home and hear "Amos 'n' Andy." Invented by two Louisianans, Freeman Gosland and Charles Corall. White guys who were excellent Vaudevillians and good at dialects. And the were the original Amos and Andy. And had actually hand picked the television characters, the actors that would portray them on television. And enormously popular television show as well. But it was coinciding with the rise of civil rights struggles. And because there was, on American television, nothing to even up the buffoonery of "Amos 'n' Andy" - there were not depictions of black middle class professionals and things like that, it - it was a disadvantage to black images - the image of black people in this country - or "negro" people as they called them then.
MM
Would that because they - they figured that was the only thing that people would see?
AY
That was the only thing -
MM
Now if there had been say a show like Dr. Kildare or something that was a black drama would that - do you think that the issue would have been as volitle or as urgent?
AY
Well, it's almost unthinkable that there would have been such a show at that time. The only place you saw those kinds of depictions were in offbeat or leftwing circles. One of the unstated, controversial threats that Paul Robeson posed was that he would play black people on screen and on stage who did have dignity and did have their self respect and weren't buffoons or clowns. So that this was - this was not good in most peoples eyes - it was uppity, he was getting out of his place.
MM
Yeah.
AY
So people have always loved this black venacular banter. Now, my theory, which I share with Ismael Reed, my friend and the novelist and poet, is this: That one of the reasons white Americans or non-black Americans have always liked African American buffoonery or depictions of African Americans as cartoon characters or as dismissible clowns is that they represent the whole society really. In "Amos 'n' Andy", even though you've got George "Kingfish" Stevens and you've got Andy and you've got -
MM
Calhoun.
AY
Calhoun, Algonquin J. Calhoun, and Mama and Sapphire and that whole cast, is that, in microcosm that's - that's the whole United - that's the United State culture in blackface. And it all goes back to minstrelsy. And in minstrelsy you have, I think, the roots for everything we are talking about today. Talented slaves were brought from the fields to entertain the people in the big house. Dance, sing, crack jokes, that kind of thing. People in the big house liked it so much that after a couple of generations they said, "We don't need you anymore. We can do this." The burnt cork, the big lips, the gloves and the whole thing. They did the dances, they did the dialects and so forth. Then when black people got into minstrelsy, in the late 19th century, because they were barred from those stages. They had to put on the burnt cork and the big lips and the whole thing. So you get a pattern that persists right down through American civilization from the beginning. White imitating blacks, blacks imitation whites imitating blacks and so forth. If you look at a group like the 5th Dimension, for example, that's another example of what I'm talking about or there's a channel like my audio channel on my satellite dish called "Channel X". And it's right next the rap station. On "Channel X" you get mainly white people, white groups, imitating inner city gangsta rap performers. But you get some black groups that fit better at the Channel X than they do in rap. Because they are not quite the same as Snoop Dog and somebody. But there's a place for them. And I'm fascinated by this. That - that the ways in which people feed off each other culturally.
MM
Yeah, and the - I mean, it's certainly seems now that, like, you know, white youth certainly is enraptured with black, black rap culture.
AY
Always has been. It's loathed and despised - a lot of things about black culture - at the same time it's ennobling because there's something genuine about it that a lot of people who are in rebellion in American society they immediately take on a black, either a black accent or they attach themselves to something that's black American to show that they are real, that kind of thing. So it's a real paradox.
MM
Could you say that again?
AY
It's a total paradox that non-black Americans that want to assert their own validity or their hipness or the fact that they're for real, will adopt some black characteristic. Sometimes speech, sometimes movement, sometimes it's an appreciation for certain things that black people have produced: jazz, rap -
MM
Dance?
AY
Dance, ways of dressing. George Carlin I thought did a very good job of this by his early comedy. He would actually talk about it sometimes. That black walk and all that kind of stuff. And was good at it.
MM
Hang on a second. Hey, Roger [break in taping] Well, maybe this is a good time to talk about the idea of, you know, Buckley and his - the white negro or something.
AY
Yeah, that was a good bit to open up with because it leads right into it.
MM
Yeah. What is your take on - I mean, people have accused him of, you know, ripping off black language, of mocking black culture. They've taken a number of sort of hits at him. They - they try to create shame because he did an Amos 'n' Andy sort of thing on The Ed Sullivan Show and then his act. I know that's a big order to say what's your idea of it but -
AY
Not a big order at all. Culture goes places where people won't or cant' go in the same way that music travels, art travels and so forth. There are African Americans, many of them friends of mine, who would not have anyone but African Americans depicting African American life in film, in literature, in music, in dance, all of this. It's got to be done by an African American or it's not legitimate. These or the same people who will go down and buy a Brooks Brothers suit or go buy a Motorola cellular phone or will get a pair of shoes from Italy and wear it proudly or drive a Japanese car. And it gets to be very confusing there. Now there is malevolent depiction that I'm against too of any group misrepresenting another group of people or another subculture. But if white people, or non-blacks, are not to depict aspects of African American culture then by the same token African Americans should be forbidden to speak standard English or to do things that are not traditionally associated with African Americans. It gets real pernicious of this thing.
MM
You mean like wear Italian shoes?
AY
Yeah, that's right. Or speak proper English. And the whole thing is based on a myth anyway. It's really just a distortion. So that this hip talk of Lord Buckley's was really fairly common. It was a common way of speaking among people who had adopted black subcultural forms for their own lifestyles. There's this whole, weird interaction in jazz music for example. It goes all the way back to the beginning. Which historians would track to maybe 1917 when the original Dixieland jazz band made the first jazz recording. Interestingly, they couldn't get an black musicians to record because they didn't want their stuff to be on a disc because they were afraid that people would copy it and they'd be out of a job. So the first jazz band that records is the, now called the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, all white guys, you know, who sort of set the pattern for all that. But growing out of that you have this jazz tradition, and everyone knew that there was black tradition, which usually innovated things and everybody looked to the black musicians for the next clue as to where to go: "Where do we go from here?" and wonderful black performers and white performers, in separate bands, because of segregation. In the 1940s you started to get a phenomenon that was - even in the '30s - Charlie Barnett, who was a rich - he had means - he was rich. He would get Billie Holiday, you know, come and sing in his band. Or he'd get a guest black soloist to come and perform with the band. Then you had black bands doing the same. They'd have a white guy. One white guy to come and do a thing. And I'm fascinated by all this. But the parlance, the way of speaking, quite often was, in the black and white bands, tended to be more black than anything else. So that became hip talk and the basis for the hipster parlance or lingo of the 1940s and '50s, grew out of African American life and culture. But it was shared by more than just African Americans. And I think that's the true test of culture is that is goes beyond the group that generates it. Now what a lot of - what a lot of my friends, who object to whites talking like black people or trying to play music like black people or whatever they're doing that's like black people, is that in our capitalist society, capitalistic and racist society, when a white person brings it off, that person is going to get more attention and more credit and more money than the black people ever got.
MM
Sort of the Pat Boone thing.
AY
Yeah, yeah. You saw "Hail, Hail Rock 'n' Roll"?
MM
Right, yeah.
AY
Where Little Richard has that little malevolent sequence where he says, "Man, Pat Boone talking about those alleys and all that. He'd never even been in one of those alleys. I wanted to catch him and put a hurting on him." and stuff like that. Which I thought really brought it home.
MM
Oh, god, yes. Hey, let's wipe your face again.
AY
Oh, OK. Do you remember that sequence when they were sitting there?
MM
Oh, I do.
AY
Chuck Berry, Little Richard and - who was the other one? Bo Diddley, all talking about their recording careers. And I thought that was really an incredible scene. [quoting Chuck Berry] "I know who wrote Mabelline because I was the only one in the room. Well, when the record came out there were three or four names on there." At which point he says, "And I don't know how these guys wanted to get their names - thought their names should be on there." Little Richard, who had converted at that time, I don't know if you're aware of it but he had converted to Judism?
MM
Oh, no.
AY
He says, in the film, "Now, wait a minute, you'all getting ready to talk about my people now and I ain't going to stand for this." I thought, wow - that's precisely what I'm talking about.
MM
That's wonderful.
AY
It's OK for Little Richard to adopt Judism, you know -
MM
Yeah. Well, how about Lord Buckley in this whole fray? I mean, here's a white guy from California, who effects the posture and the presence of an Englishman and suddenly he's talking as - like he was a black jazz musician.
AY
It's an incredible thing. I've done a lot of thinking about that. You know, the linguistic samplings that they've done. We've got recordings of American speech going all the way back to the last century. In fact, I wrote the notes for a four CD set that Rhino put out called "In Their Own Voices - a Century of Recorded Poetry", that begins with a sometimes disputed recording of Walt Whitman, which he had made for Edison, who was his New Jersey neighbor, the one in Menlo Park and the other over in Camden. And they take these recordings and they do projections back into the past, you know, "What was the American speech like? Even a hundred years before that?" And one of the conclusions that they have arrived at, contemporary linguists anyway, is that what we think of as being an English accent now was not the English accent of two hundred years ago. But there are retentions of the English accent of two hundred years ago in the American South. In Virginia and the Carolinas - this is were you get an idea - and in Georgia - get an idea of what the English might have sounded like. Because they know that in England the northern accent drifted into London over the last two hundred years and changed it, changed things. So that it's very interesting that English actors and actresses love doing southern American - they love doing "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and these Tennessee William's plays, things like this. Because they can do that accent. They have not trouble affecting a southern American accent because it's not that far away from what they do. Now most of the English that the early slaves learned was taught to them by Scots-Irish masters who weren't that swift, you know, in grammer and they had that old - they had a lot of those Elizabethan retentions. A lot of the things that thought of as being black speech or black speak, "I be doin' this and I be doin' that." That was perfectly normal Elizabethan usage. There was nothing unusual about that. But what makes it strange is that it got isolated to those particular cultural/sub-cultural groups, you know, and everybody else stopped saying it and they kept on saying it because of their separation from the mainstream of American society. Years ago I studied a guy named Kenneth Johnson, who's that African American psycholinguist. And I learned an awful lot about African retentions and African American speech and the stuff that came about in the interaction with the Scots-Irish. You know that pigeonization and creolization. So that you have language in a time warp, as it were. You go into Appalachia, you - people - I've been there recently and you can still people - hear older people say things like, "Oh, you must go and visit that place it's a princely setting." Or something like that.
MM
Really?
AY
Or, "Princely house." Well, you don't hear "princely" in every day American speech.
MM
That's not Homer and Jethro is it.
AY
No, but you hear a lot of that kind of stuff in Appalachia among the older people. It's because they've been isolated and they still have these old, these old forms. OK, to get to Buckley.
MM
That's vestigial really.
AY
Vestigial exactly. So you get to someone like Buckley who knows exactly what he's doing. He consciously is adopting a black stance but, more importantly, a hip way of speaking. And at the same that Buckley was coming in to vogue, you have someone like Mose Allison, who's from Rolling Forks, Mississippi. I've been down there and met people that grew up with him. Mose has an M.A. from Ol' Miss in American Literature, English and American Literature. When he started singing he loved black music so much that he wanted a certain sound. It's not that he tried to sing black. He just sang the way the way that he spoke. He had a southern Mississippi accent. But he happened to be a white guy who was - you know, was in there too. But most people thought that he was black. I know any number of people who went to see Mose, after they had heard his records and when he started playing clubs. He really begins as a pianist. He was Stan Getz's pianist in New York and he started singing as a fluke and was like Nat Cole, who's a great pianist until Louis Jordan told him he should sing. And everybody forgot about the pianist. And people went to see Mose Allison said, "Wow, man, you fooled me. I thought you were black." That kind of thing. It wasn't that Mose was trying to fool anybody but he sang the way he felt comfortable speaking. I think the same was probably true of Buckley, who inhabited a subculture in which that was a way of speaking. Any number of white jazz musicians and blues musicians and folk musicians who spoke that way. It was just that relaxed, underground hip American vernacular.
MM
He talked with Studs Terkel back in 1958 about just being, basically, just in love with that language. When you listen to his recordings does that seem evident.
AY
Yep. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean he's an artist with - for his purposes - there's another interview that, I've never forgotten it, Studs conducted and it's not only memorable but it's highly retrievable because it was recorded on a Folkways LP. Which now you can get from the Smithsonian on a CD. But it's Studs interviewing Big - the late Big Bill Broonzy, the blues singer. And at one point Studs says, "Ah, Big Bill, what do you think about white people singing the blues now and taking a lot of this material and performing it. And Broonzy, who was very shrewd and savvy diplomatic guy, says, "Well, you know, Studs, I've been watching this all my life." And he says, "You can't take nothing from nobody." He said, "You can borrow it and do what you're going to do with it. But -" he says, "You ain't taking nothing from nobody." And he says, "That's the way I see that. They take and do what they going to do with it. But it's a different thing. That kind of - " He says, "It's like a knife, you take a knife, you can slice an apple with it, you can peel something with it, you can dig a splinter out, and you can stab somebody." And I thought, wow. I never forgot that. "Because people that the same thing and do different things with it, see what I'm saying, Studs?" OK.
MM
Well, you think that applies to Buckley now?
AY
Yeah, I think Buckley had a genuine affection for, for that idiom. And it worked his imagination and I find it interesting that all these things are happening almost at the same time. Andy Griffith's early monologues too. Which I think are brilliant. They come out of that same impulse except he leaned more towards the southern white vernacular. But he achieved the same effect. You take familiar material and stories and you clothe in language that is fresh because it's so unusual to the average - the average ear. And you come up with something entirely new.
MM
Somewhat - somewhat the way you talked about the way you and your buddies did in school.
AY
Yeah. Yeah, we kind of knew what we were doing because we consider ourselves hip.
MM
Now, as a writer - I don't know if you ever - have you ever sat down with a transcript of a Buckley piece?
AY
Yeah. Yeah, there used to be a little book that I have somewhere in a book in a garage -
MM
Hiparama?
AY
Hiparama. Hiparama that's right. And we would look at those things and play the records and -
MM
How about the - I mean, as a writer how do those pieces strike you?
AY
Well, if you know my work you that in several of my novels I use black vernacular quite extensively. Most notably in "Sitting Pretty." And it annoyed some people. In fact, I'm writing a sequel to that book and one of the things I'm doing now is playing that down because vernacular is not tolerated very much now in, in the book trade and particularly among African Americans, you know, literate types who feel that it's a slap in the face again. Everything - all these things turn around. So my device in the book is that I have the main character, Sydney J. Prettyman, make a statement at the beginning. The conceit is that he's tape recording these things and Al Young is transcribing them. He said, "I asked Mr. Young not to make me look too ignorant because since that last storybook we put out I've taken a lot of community college courses and read quite a few books and I told him I said, 'Don't make me look dumb. You know, write that stuff up.'"
MM
That was very good.
AY
I thought that was a clever to try to get around it.
MM
A nice transition too because it's plausible.
AY
Yeah, yeah. That was the idea. But I too am aware of the vitality of this kind of language. And that it's being lost to us. It's disappearing from out national cultural life, except in the form of buffoonery. Television script writers before the Fox type sitcoms, with the young kids sitting around the living room that you were describing. This is not an improvement or Amos 'n' Andy as far as I'm concerned. And most of the writers are not black who are writing this stuff. And they introduce a lot of pernicious and unbelievable motifs that I find objectionable. For example, in the 1980s the term "Jive turkey" was pretty much restricted to sitcoms that involved black characters because black people that didn't say that, "You, jive turkey." Nobody said that in real life. That was born and it died on TV. You know, it was somebody's idea of how black people talked.
MM
And it's also - I mean, it's still in the culture.
AY
Yeah.
MM
You'll hear people say that now.
AY
But get it strictly from television.
MM
Yeah.
AY
They don't get it from a living source. So I would say that mass media increasingly generates our slang and our non-standard phrases.
MM
Did you - do you remember your - about the first time you heard Buckley.
AY
I can remember that. I first heard Buckley in the early 1950s. And I was one of those kids with the little Arvin radio under the blanket when the parents went to bed. You know, you're there listening. And I used to just scan the AM dial, it was pretty much all you had in those days. And, in those days, you could still get these stations that would fade in and out. This was in Detroit. And you would get stations in Cleveland and Chicago. Sometimes you were lucky enough to hit on a clear channel station which meant that it - the volume would stay steady for a while but most of the time it was fading. And I heard him in a broadcast, I believe from Chicago. And it was Gene Shepard. Do you remember Jean Shepherd?
MM
No.
AY
Jean Shepard. J-E-A-N, even though he was a man, spelled J-E-A-N. S-H-E-P-H-E-R-D. Jean Shepherd was a radio talk guy who, I realize what I just did.
MM
Yeah, that's alright. We'll just do it again.
AY
Alright.
MM
That's the pro in you.
AY
OK. Jean Shepherd was a radio talk host who did, not only monologues, but philosophy. His way of being on the radio involved a whole - total immergence - a way of life. Stories that went from night to night and year to year. It was almost like psycho therapy. And he variously broadcast from Cleveland, Chicago, later went up to New York got on WOR and was there for years. And then he stopped broadcasting. He started writing for Playboy and putting books and all that. Very cantankerous. Left of center kind of guy. Permanent bohemian type. At any rate, he played weird things and he played, not only music but he played, in those days what was rare and that was standup type stuff. And Mort Sahl had put out an album his early stuff was out. And he had this Lord Buckley thing which he put on for a while. And that's when I first heard him.
MM
Do you remember your impressions?
AY
Yeah, I was blown away. I just couldn't believe it. I didn't know what he was. You know, I didn't -
MM
How old were you?
AY
I would have been around twelve or thirteen, somewhere in there.
MM
Do you remember the pieces at all?
AY
As I recall the first thing I heard was "The Nazz". I think that was the one - some aspect of that. I don't know the source of these recordings or anything. Because Shepherd would bring in tape that was - hadn't been officially produced yet. He brought on - he'd go around just getting things. And I don't think people were as concerned in those days about nailing things down for copyright and all of that. You were just glad to be on the air. I can remember Djs used to bring Wollensack tape recordings of events they were at: Woody Herman Band or something and play it on their show and have Woody on there with them. You know, sanctioning this because it's air exposure or something like that.
MM
Do you - do you think, like in terms of Buckley, that he's - that it's a dying act or do you see the evidence of someone like a Buckley in - [part of interview excised]
AY
Yeah. And I think that when you get to something like "The Nazz" that's what Buckley is really embracing. He's getting into the big stories, you know, in our civilzation. How do you retell those so that - black preachers do it every, every Sunday. You know, I was looking at a guy on one of the channels the night before last and he was explaining about God going to Moses saying, "Give me your rod." And he was saying, "Now, what you gotta understand is when a shepard, in those days, handed you the rod, his rod, he was handing you everything. Because, say he caught a fish. Put a little notch on his rod about that. Say he got married it'd be another notch that kind a way. Say he had some kind of illness put another little strange notch on there. So, when he hands you that rod he handing you everything ever happened to him. That's what Moses gave to God." You know, that kind of thing.
MM
Right.
AY
I thought, "Wow. OK."
MM
Yeah.
AY
I never thought of that before.
MM
But that - in - I guess you were kind of really talking about the message that Buckley was trying to promote.
AY
Yeah. Buckley was talking about love really. He was talking about - Buckley was also, I think, a political - he had a certain political and social awareness and most of the hip culture in that - of that time was really aiming for something like that. Tearing down borders and, and doors and bringing people more together than the society was allowing people to be.
MM
How about the - in "The Nazz", which is one of my favorites as well, or I'm assuming it's one of your favorites.
AY
Yeah.
MM
Do you think there's some - I mean, he specifically chose a black vernacular for that. I mean, Jesus seems black in that, the disciples seem black in that. Do you see any - I mean, can you imagine what he was thinking to make those decisions?
AY
I can only imagine that - he was looking at that whole, the depiction of that whole period of time as something that took place in another place in another culture and - you're aware that among many African Americans the image of Jesus as this blonde, blue eyed mesomorph is laughable. That, you know, a lot of people will just tell you straight out that Jesus was a black man, you know, that kind of thing. I think Buckley was aware of Jesus as some kind of "other" and the best way to express that would be in black vernacular. I'm sure he had listened to a lot of black preachers as well or southern preachers. I was looking at "The Apostle" the other night for - I was late seeing it and I was just absolutely blown away by Robert Duvall and his -
MM
Yeah, yeah, that's a beautiful film.
AY
Yeah.
MM
My own little pet theory, in Buckley, is his choice of the black vernacular, besides just the melodic quality and the tremendous musical qualities are that - to me I think he chose it because it, it much better depicted the concept of Everyman.
AY
Oh, yeah.
MM
Than a white voice ever could. It was a much more emotional voice, it could - it had this tremendous - I mean the language itself was more colorful. Would you - I mean is that -
AY
Yes, well, there was a certain moral authority that came with black vernacular. And, I don't know how much this has been discussed in writing. I don't think very much. But when you think about someone like Joel Chandler Harris, who, you know, the journalist in Atlanta, who took the - listened to the slaves and the ex-slaves of that, of his time and took those stories and transcribed them into, sometimes, fairly readable English. I mean, I used to really get annoyed with, with the apostrophes and the "Iz gwan to de big ribba boat in hebbin'" with three apostrophes where all of these things are missing. Which is a kind of cultural imperialism. But the stories themselves, like Aesop's Fables, and I find it interesting that Aesop was a slave, had morals that were irrefutable and there was something - there was a power that came out of that kind of suffering that disarmed people. They listened. When old black people spoke they listened. When old black people spoke they got everybody's attention. Because they had been through some stuff. So, very quietly, it's always had a kind of authority that the literary powers that be have not accorded full measure. They come in through the back door. Why is the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and important book? I think it's because Twain took this language, and they now from contemporary Twain studies, that there was an actual black man, that sparked this whole thing, in Samuel Clemens background. It's because the language was different and the language was closer to the salt of American speech than the kind of thing they had been doing in their pail imitation of British literature, which so predominated American English departments that it was only in the middle of the twentieth century American literature started to get it's due. Because, you know, we are still a colonially minded nation. So the vitality was there with the humblest population in the society. And I think that', that's - you could probably run some kind of a mathematical projection.
MM
Yeah, probably.
AY
Yeah.
MM
You probably could.
AY
But I think that always, when people wanted to communicate, in the twentieth century, they had to use language that was something like that for getting to masses of people. I think of someone like Huey Long. You know, down in Louisiana. And people get on him because he was, and rightfully, because he was, you know, sort of a dictator. But if you check Huey Long's record never anything against black people. They loved him. He was the kind of a guy that would get those turkeys out at Thanksgiving and go out and basket, you know, and make sure everybody was taken care of and all this. And if you listen to him you couldn't tell Huey Long from a black person speaking. Very interesting the power of his stuff.
MM
Do you think he might have done that on purpose? Or that was just a -
AY
I think that was just - that was his way of -
MM
That was his way.
AY
In the Penguin Book of Insults there's a memorable Huey Long insult in which he's - it's directed at Frank D. Roosevelt. And in it he says something like, he says, "Now, the hoot owl just bust right into the hen house, knocks the hen clean off, you know, and catches her as she falls. And that's that. But," he said, "Now, you got the scrooch owl. The Scrooch Owl eases into the, into the chicken roost. And he talk real soft and charming. And all the hens just naturally fall in love with him. And the next thing you know ain't no hens!" That was his way to talk about Roosevelt. Even though I'm on Roosevelt's side I had to admit the briliiance of that.
MM
Yeah, yeah. Well that - I mean - when you talking like that it echoes I - you know, it echoes Buckley's kind of - it's really seductive language.
AY
That's right. You listen to it because it's got, it's got some twists and you don't know where it's going.
MM
Yeah.
AY
It's not formulaic. It can become formulaic and, you know, unskilled hands, but you never knew where those things was going.
MM
Yeah. I only got a couple of minutes of tape left. You got some things that come up for you that you wanted to -
AY
Well, I think that the - the thing I love the most about Buckley was that he was fun. And you got to see some things - and the things that I remember are lines like this. When he's talking about Willie the Half Sprung Shake he says, "Now, the great thing about that boy is that you just give him a nickel's worth of ink and a couple of sheets of paper and a pen and he sit down and write stuff so good." I thought, wow, that's another way of looking at that whole process. And, by extension, what you're saying about contemporary people with all their computers and their palm pilots and all this crap, you know, we surround ourselves with to write a few lines.
MM
Right.
AY
That, you know, something's wrong somewhere. You don't need all that.
MM
You don't at all.
AY
Yeah, so there are lessons that are implicit in all of his monologues that, that I think are philosophical and I think he was really a philosopher. That was - he's an entertainer but he was really a philosopher. And it didn't surprise me to hear stories about him lining his kids up every night - I think I mention to you - this before. But it was Bob Louis that told me that he would line all the kids up every night, at bedtime, and they would have salute him and kiss him and say, "Goodnight, Lord Buckley"
MM
Ooh. Roger?
RM
I just feel like we've had a really fine, full meal here.
MM
Well, then I will thank you, Al.
AY
Well, thank you. I'm glad we finally did this. |
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