hanging around with a pack of half-witted, socially misfit punks

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

“He would walk through the rural Southern black ghettos waving an old 78 and yelling, ‘Got any old phonograph records? Buyin’ up old records!’ Occasionally, whether out of discouragement or just ordinary insanity, he really would yell, ‘Got any old arms or legs you’d like to sell? Buyin’ up old arms and legs!’ It’s been suggested that one of the reasons he managed to survive unscathed from being a conspicuously white presence in the rural black South at a time when civil rights workers were being murdered by local police for such audacity, was simply that white racists, if they noticed him at all, probably dismissed him as too crazy to bother with.”
“I was seeking out mean, sadistic, aggressive, hateful, and maybe even dangerous expressions and expressers of music most cruel. The reason I liked Charley Patton and those other Delta singers so much was because they were angry, their music is ominous. Patton had a rheumatic heart and he knew that he was going to die young, which he did. In Son House you hear a lot of fear. In Skip James you hear a lot of sorrow, but also a lot of anger.… I played some of the records to the doctor and he said, ‘These guys are angry as hell.’ ”