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Places like New York
City. Sometime around his 16th birthday, he had heard the Rev. Gary Davis'
Harlem Street Singer, still one of the finest albums of indigenous American
spiritual music ever recorded. Davis' guitar playing on the record is sublime,
wildly intricate, and masterly almost to the point of absurdity. His accompanying
vocals are huge, booming, all pervading, intended to cut like a glistening,
sharpened sickle through the everyday din of traffic and human activity
that colored the tumultuous streets of Harlem. Ernie was emotionally and
intellectually poleaxed by the album, stunned into an epiphanous realization
that he must leave Pittsburgh for a rendezvous with Davis in New York at
the earliest opportunity. In one of those random occurrences that often
appear as divine intervention in hindsight, Ernie subsequently met a fellow
passing through Pittsburgh who told him Davis was amenable to the idea of
giving guitar lessons right out of his living room to interested and dedicated
students. As soon as possible, Ernie was packed and en route to the Big
Apple. He worked for a spell in Pittsburgh after graduating from Allderdice,
saving the necessary funds for an extended stay in New York. He eventually
made the move in late 1965 without knowing whether or not Davis would take
him on as a student. "I got a job at $52.50 a week, midtown," he says. "I
got a room from a card at the Y with a 96-year-old optometrist on 98th Street.
He was a cool guy. He knew Hubert Humphrey. So I called Gary Davis up, couldn't
understand what he was saying. He had sort of an accent and he was kind
of mumbling on the phone. Finally, he put Annie on and she told me how to
get there. You had to take the subway and elevated train and the Q42 bus."
When Ernie arrived, Davis was sleeping. Ernie approached, touched him. Davis
awoke with a start. "I mean he thought he was being robbed!" Ernie recalls
with a maniacal little grin. "He didn't know what the hell was going on.
He made like a little noise and I went right back out again because I didn't
know what the hell was going on either. I ran back out on the street waited
for him. I'm saying, 'It's okay. It's me. I called.' So then it was fine."
"I knew a Davis song, one of my very favorites called 'Oh Glory, How Happy
I Am.' A friend of mine passing through taught me the song. It had never
been recorded, but I knew this song and Davis knew it hadn't been recorded.
I sat down and played it for him and I think that he really appreciated
that. So we hit it off really well. I asked him for the words, he gave me
the words. I had never heard anybody sing it. I asked him to sing it for
me and he sang it. We both played it and really had a nice time. We started
out in a very beautiful way." Davis was not the first blues musician that
Hawkins had ever heard or deeply admired. As the sounds of the old blues
gained widespread, newfound popularity in the early '60's, it had only been
natural for Ernie to leap atop the bandwagon. Mississippi Fred McDowell,
Son House, Skip James, Charlie Patton, Bukka White, Tommy Johnson, Blind
Willie Johnson - Ernie was familiar with them all. So far as he could tell
from the music they made, they were like-minded individuals, men who seemed
innately able to understand and articulate in the most utterly seductive
way what was real in life and what was jive. But Gary Davis blew them all
out of the swamp. There was really no one to compare him to and there still
isn't. He was an original, a genius, to use a couple words that no longer
convey much meaning. It is to Hawkins' continued amazement that he once
dwelled in this man's presence for a year or so back in the mid-1960s, taking
informal lessons for $5 per unlimited session and running the blind old
reverend and his ever-gracious wife around on errands. Speaking with Hawkins
in his unkempt Regent Square studio, among his guitars, hundreds of scattered
tapes and CDs and vast collection of photos and mementos, the conversation
keeps winding back to Davis. Over the years, Hawkins has acquired a bachelor's
degree in philosophy and a Ph.D. in psychology, yet still it is always a
struggle for Ernie to put Gary Davis and his continuing influence into mere
words. "Gary Davis to me was like a blind seer, like Homer," he says with
quiet, halting reverence. "He was a storyteller. He was a singer of hymns,
ya know, like the Homeric hymns. He was a poet, a wandering minstrel-type
person who made his living telling stories, singing songs and hymns. Just
being there with Gary Davis was like being with a Homer-type person. He
was a walking, singing tradition." It is a tradition that Ernie Hawkins
has worked tirelessly to maintain over the past three decades. By now, he
has been playing and performing old,  largely
forgotten music for so long that he has nearly become a relic himself. His
virtuosity on an acoustic guitar has enthralled and educated audiences form
San Francisco in the late '60s to Austin, Texas, in the early '80's, from
the International Guitar Festival in Ponferrada, Spain last May to the Frick
Fine Arts Building in Oakland last month. To his inestimable pleasure, he
has had numerous opportunities to trade licks and laughs with some of the
finest acoustic blues players to ever grace the planet. Today, his formerly
dark hair has gone almost completely gray and his bad back only grows worse.
He has even begun to appear stony, as if carved from weathered granite.
"One thing I always thought," he recalls, "particularly when I was a kid,
was that this is something I would be really good at when I grew old. I
just sort of imagined what it would be like if I was old, which is now.
old. Ya know, when I was 20, 50 was fuckin' old. But I just thought, "That's
when you'll really be yourself,' or something like that." He leans back
in his chair, content for the moment with a cigarette and a few capfuls
of bourbon. "It's hard to explain . I just thought if I stayed with it,
someday maybe I'd be able to do it, to be good at it. I never wanted to
be a dilettante in anything. I guess that's part of my problem because I
couldn't just sort of do it half-assed." He laughs, sips his bourbon, and
considers this last remark, "Hell, maybe I am doing it half-assed, but at
least it's whole-hearted." Meanwhile, the acoustic blues crowd has thinned
substantially over the years. Many of the diehards from the folk revival
days of the 1950s and '60s have, in fact, died - or moved along to other
interests. "As far as the tradition," Ernie says, "it's perilously close
to becoming like one of those languages that only one person speaks.Well,
that's not exactly true. That's just Pittsburgh. I mean there are magazines
and places all over the country where there are people who are still passionate
about this stuff." There are perhaps a dozen known guitarists of Ernie's
caliber still playing the music of the original Piedmont masters. In terms
of visibility, they are well beyond mere punkers, petty thieves and advocates
of political anarchy, all of whom circulate openly among us everyday. Mostly
they are loners, folks like Ernie who insistently dwell in largely forsaken
historical landscapes, out on some remote, psychic plane with the wolves,
gypsies and Innuit whale-bone carvers. Next month, Ernie Hawkins will record
his third full-length release, tentatively titled Bones and Rags. As with
Blues Advice and his resplendent, out-of-print Ragtime Signatures album,
it will most likely be praised by critics as a brilliant act of cultural
reclamation, while few in the general public will ever know of its existence.
Acute disregard for his years of dedicated labor is part of the price that
Ernie has ultimately paid for hanging out too long in the forgotten past.
"The weird part about it," he figures, "is that maybe I haven't gotten anywhere
in the business but I'm grateful to have gotten this far, still surviving
as a guitar player. That, ya know, is really everything."
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