![]() ![]() This is the ground bass of the memory, but the picture of the blind guitarist and the boy has overtones which are both mysterious and comic. I felt very good and I picked a beautiful rose I saw growing wild that I thought would please my grandmother.” Johnson’s music and picking the full ripe berries. He said ‘Oh, I don’t know I’m just wandering over the chords, just as if the wind was moving my fingers.’ It was fine listening to Mr. Johnson what was the music he was playing. The music was strange to me and not like the church hymns, or the blues, or any of the popular songs that I knew. Johnson sat on an old tree stump and began to play his guitar. I went with my pail to pick the berries and Mr. After I had left the last cake and started back, I saw a good clump of blackberries a little ways off the road. Johnson held my free hand and strummed chords on the guitar with his right hand. Johnson gave the boy a pail, telling him that if he picked some blackberries on the way home, she would bake him a nice pie. When the two started out this Saturday, Mrs. He always had his guitar, Bearden recalls “Sometimes he’d go along with me just for a walk and hold on to me or to the wagon and he’d be walking down the country roads.” told Romare that he would go along as the boy delivered the watermelon cakes in a little wagon. Johnson, was a locally famous blind guitar player, a folk singer like Blind Lemon Jefferson. Each Saturday morning that summer, Bearden delivered the cakes for Mrs. This Southern piece de resistance was in great demand among the rich white folk who lived or vacationed in Lutherville’s fine old houses. ![]() She placed “seeds” of chocolate hardened in an icy stream in a red batter, painted the crust with melon stripes, and added a transparent sugar icing as the final touch. Johnson’s culinary specialty, passed down the generations, was a watermelon cake fashioned so expertly that it was difficult to tell from the real thing. Johnson, whose grandmother had been born into slavery, and whose baking tins had been made by a slave blacksmith. One “old old July” in the mid 1920s, when Bearden was 10 or 11, he visited his grandmother Cattie in Lutherville, Maryland, a rural town near Baltimore. The memory recreated there is a window on Bearden’s formidable art. IN ONE OF ROMARE BEARDEN’S collages, a blind guitar player is led by a little boy holding a rose. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |