DeFord Bailey

The Blues
"The blues is a sad music. It ain't nothing but you're hard up and can't do nothing for yourself. Like when you're way away from home and try to make it home and can't. Or got children and they're sick and you can't feed 'em and feel bad. Almost a church song. Real serious. Like your're sick and don't know what to do for your family. You go to singing. Calling on the Lord to help. We call it 'the blues'."

His Music
"Music like a disease. You either got it or you don't."

"I don't get tired playing. I make them songs go as I breathe. It's just like a fish in water, and water runs through its gills."

"I'm just like a microphone. I pick up everything I hear around me."

"My condition (he had polio as a child) made me develop my talent rather than wasting my time playing ball like more healthy children would have done."

"You know, there's some music in everything. If we couldn't find nothing else, we could always blow in a jug or beat on some skillets and pans."

" A harp ought to talk just like you and me. All the time I'm playing, I'm talking, but most people don't understand it. In blowing a harp, it's just like going to school to learn foreign languages. You got to learn how to make it talk in all sorts of ways. I can make it say whatever I want to."

"Dr. (Humphrey) Bate had me open my mouth one time to see how I played like I do. All he found was some old crooked teeth."

"If I don't blow my harp, I hurt. God put that on me to make me play. He wanted me to use my talent. He made me want water. I'd drink water. That wouldn't satisfy it, though. But I'd play the harp and that feeling would go away. That's the way God would tell me to play my harp. That happened every day. All my life. I had to keep playing the harp, just like I had to keep drinking water. If I was in a place where I couldn't play, He showed me how to stop the pain by moving my mouth like I was playing."

"I'm an old man now. But they never will get out of a harp what I can. They're just wasting their time trying to beat me on a harp. Ain't nobody ever set me down with no harp. Trying to beat me blowing is like trying to outrun a Greyhound bus! I got notes harder than Mohammed Ali can throw. I could throw some notes on him that would fair paralyze him!"

"I learn something new about a harp every day or two. You never learn everything about one. It's just like growing....I still hit new notes. One'll pop up every now and then. There are so many sounds that come out of this harp. Every day I'm alive, I hear a different sound. I'll be playing along and a note'll rise up, and stay with me for a while, then die down. I just happens. I don't do it intentionally."

"Music is like dope. I get just like a dope addict on music. I'm telling you the truth. But you can put them in an asylum and get it out of them. You can't get it out of me. I'm just as full of it as I can be. I can't help it. I can go to bed not thinking about music, and I'll wake up just full of it."

"You can't x-ray it or do blueprints like a doctor or engineer to understand it. It's just in me. I can't help it. I don't ask nobody to help me or show me how to do it. I just do it."

"You hear something all the time with my music. Other people's music is good, but it's missing something, I think. I add time to vacant space."

"Most people play in one gear - up and down. That's like driving all the way to Franklin (about thirteen miles from Nashville) in first gear. I'll be blowing one minute in one gear and the next minute in another gear. Nobody will ever catch up with my music because I don't stay nowhere long with my music. I change. It's like sickness. It changes from a cold to pneumonia, and if not cured, goes to TB, and you may be long gone - but anyway, it changes. It don't stay the same."

"My timing is different from theirs. I play double. I got a double sound. I can't play single. It doesn't sound good to me."

"Some people can play the train, but they can't make it move like I do. Most of theirs sound like they're running, but the sound is standing in one place too long. You can tell my train is moving. Every time I blow, you can tell I'm getting further. It's moving out of sight as I blow. The sound of their train is moving, but staying in sight too long. I'm always reaching out. When I get about 115 miles an hour, I can feel it. My normal speed is 95 miles an hour. That don't feel like I'm doing nothing, but my train sure enough moves along."

Life and God
"We need to ask God to help us through our troubles. You know, prayer is one telephone that will always work."

"It ain't me, It's God in me. His strength is too powerful for me to explain it."

"If we all loved one another like Bermuda grass sticks to the ground, we'd all go to the Kingdom of Heaven. You know how it holds in there and comes up thicker every year. It grows everywhere."

"You've heard it thunder. You ain't never heard of thunder hurting nobody, have you? You've seen it lightning? That's what can hurt you. What somebody calls you ain't going to hurt you. Don't nothing hurt you but a lick. As long as nobody ain't hittin' on you, just go right on. When they go to hittin' on you, do the best you can for yourself."

"We all need to have the right kind of values in our heart. Keep a clean heart for yourself and when you got a clean heart for yourself, you got a clean heart for everybody else."

"Everything has sense to it if we can just figure it out. God didn't put everything in the Bible. He expected us to figure some of it out by ourselves."

"Money and clothes won't take you to heaven. It's what's under them clothes that matters."

"I take the bitter with the sweet. Every day is Sunday with me. I'm happy go lucky."

Other performers
"Dr (Humphrey)Bate wouldn't take no for an answer....They had a hard time getting me to go down there (to perform on WSM). I was ashamed with my little cheap harp and them with all them fine, expensive guitars, fiddles, and banjoes up there. But Dr. Bate told me that 'we're going to take you with us, if we have to tote you.' So I went."

"I enjoyed going with them (the Delmore Brothers), because they'd stick by me through thick and thin. They was 100 percent. They watched out for me. 'If you can't feed little DeFord, we can't eat here either', I remember them saying a many a time. I usually had to eat in the kitchen, but at least they saw to it that I got to come inside to eat, and not have to set out in the car. If the place wouldn't let me come in at all, then they'd drive on down the road fifty miles or more to find another place they would. Most of the other performers would get me a sandwich and bring it to me to eat in the car, but not them boys."

"I seen a many a person who could beat Uncle Dave (playing his banjo). I had some uncles who could beat him playing a banjo, but they didn't have what the old fellow said, 'the dressing' and the sweets and stuff to go with it like Uncle Dave. Uncle Dave had the pepper sauce and barbeque and everything else with his. He'd just sweeten his stuff up, if you know what I mean .... He'd sing and hollar and just cut up ... He was funny with it .... He was a comedian and a show .... Everybody loved to hear him and when the crowds clapped and cheered, he'd tell them, 'I know I'm good.' Then he'd laugh and everybody would just fall out. He had his (music) all sweetened up you know, and nobody else couldn't catch Uncle Dave, I don't care which a way they played. You wouldn't have nothing on him, no kind of way."

"Clayton McMichen had a good band. I worked with him for a long time. We went up to Chicago, Gary, and all kinds of places.... He was a little short man, like me. Had a round face. He was a real good fellow, too. I got my money from him. Whatever I wanted. It looked like he didn't care if we made any money or not. 'We're all here together; we're going to eat,' he'd say. Everybody was one; we was all together."

"He (Clayton McMichen) was a good fiddle player, maybe even a little better than Mr. Roy (Acuff). He could draw that bow and make that fiddle talk. When he went before me, it'd raise my spirits and I'd make that harp talk. He'd stir us all. I'd get a spell on me and feel like really doing something."

"He (Arthur Smith) played nearly every Saturday night for years. He was just a terrible good fiddler. I'd pay more attention to him than any of the others. It looked like all of his spirit was in the fiddle. He beat everything I've ever seen. It's like a preacher. You know, some of them can keep your attention, but some of them can move you. He could move you."

"I stayed with him (Bill Monroe) for quite a while. We played in Kentucky, Virginia, and all kinds of places. He was a good fellow to work with and a good musician. He'd treat you right. It didn't matter what I wanted to eat, he'd get it for me. He'd see I'd eat. What he promised to pay, you'd get it. He paid me seven dollars and a half a day, I think. He was as good a mandolin player as I ever heard."

"None of them walked along, but Bill Monroe was the fastest, though .... He would often drive at ninety or ninety-five miles an hour down country roads at night. I looked down on ninety-five many a time with Bill Monroe and him still mashing down on the gas - and it raining. Once he ran off the shoulder of the road, and I got him to slow down a little for the rest of the trip."

"I used to have them dying laughing. I'd get sleepy. Robert Lunn, you know, and me, we'd be setting in the back seat all the time. He'd fall on me and go to sleep, and I'd fall on him and go to sleep. I said, 'Just fall over here. I ain't going to fade on you, .... I done faded.' I'd have more fun than a little bit with them."

"One time I was in Myrtle Beach, playing with Roy Acuff and his band. They all was out there in the ocean swimming. That was the first time I'd saw the Atlantic Ocean. Just to say I've been in it, I rolled my britches legs up and walked out in it. When I walked out, a policeman came up to me. He said, 'John Henry, colored folks go swimming about eighteen miles up.' I said, 'Anybody fool enough to go in that ocean, you ought to let them go in any place they want.' Everybody laughed."

"She (Bessie Smith) came through (Nashville) with her show and they had me play down there (at the Bijou Theatre) before she came on. That woman could really sing. She had a good band, too .... When I done my part, I went home so I could turn my radio on and hear her and see how she sounded. I wasn't interested in listening at her there on the stage. I was interested in listening at her on the air. She could sing, too. Regular old blues. 'Gulf Coast Blues,' 'Rattlesnake Blues,' all them blues .... Just open her mouth and let it come."

Race
"I've been studying people, two sets of people (blacks and whites), since I was eleven years old. I remember setting on a fence watching the stock in the field. They didn't seem to notice no difference in the color of the other cows and horses. I wondered why it was different with people. That's when I first started trying to figure out people."

"White people would stop and say 'DeFord, can we get shined in your shop?' I'd say 'Yeah, anywhere I got something to sell, I'm selling to everybody. If I can't sell to you, I don't want to be here.' And they'd laugh."

"I didn't have you sit here and I sit here .... Back in '33, I had them together ... White man walk in, seat; another walk in, seat; black man walk in, seat; and went on. Come in and come on back .... We'd knock them on out and that's it. I don't care who you was ... I just shined shoes and didn't make me no difference. Everybody went."

"A white barber asked me one time how I could mix them up in my shoeshine shop and using the same seat. He said they'd run him out of town if he did that. Well I said, 'They all know me and all want to hear the same tune.'

"Now the black is got to fight for the white and the white got to fight for the black. They got to learn to understand that. You and me might be dead and gone, but we black people got to fight for your son someday, if he lives long enough. He may have a family and all that. We may have to fight for him someday. We got to learn to stick to each other. So this other way we been living is wrong....."

"We need to look at the future, not the past. .... You can't blame somebody now for what their grandpa did .... We all need to work together, not against each other."

"This is a great big world, but, you know, I ain't never been free. Even now, I can't go in a restaurant without worrying about whether I should go in or not. I been to places with Honey Wilds where they would not sell him a sandwich for me. I didn't suffer, but I was handicapped. I been penned up all my life. You got to know how to take it and go on. That's gone now, but I still can't feel welcome in restaurants, if I don't see no black folks in there. I'm not against white folks. It's just the way I had to live for so long."