Pop's Overstreet

When the weather was good, you could see him sitting in front of his house, watching the sky, waving to the drivers of the cars as they pass, chatting with the people who passed on foot; a short black man in his early sixties, dressed comfortably, projecting an aura of ease and contentment as he relaxed on the front porch steps of his small white house. Neighborhood kids would try to bum cigarettes off him or offer to run errands for him, hoping to make a little change. Not much of the dough from neighboring River Oaks ever floated over to Gross Street. He was always glad for company. If company brought something to drink or felt like making music, that was even better.

When the weather was less pleasant, or if he wasn't feeling too good, he'd be inside, usually sitting on his bed, watching a small black-and-white TV. The room was dark, the only windows were small, the shades were always drawn. The cheap paneling was dark, unfriendly. Reception on the tube was limited, broken up by ghosts.

A few years ago a writer named Alan Grosvenor put out a book about blues
musicians in Texas, Meeting the Blues, with a picture of him on page 89, but no
mention of him in the text. As far as music history goes, Nathaniel (Pops)
Overstreet is one more nearly anonymous blues man, a figure deserving passing
tribute but no real attention.

Though he hasn't transcended some drastic technical limits, he has a musical gift that has occasionally produced miracles. Music hasn't done Pops much good in the conventional terms of success, but he is a man who has been paying attention and doing his own thinking throughout his life. His observations on the world around him are often startling in their wisdom, sometimes amazing in their naïveté. He is one of the millions who have been dealt a poor hand and he hasn't quit, he hasn't grown bitter, he's stayed true to his own sense of duty, and he is still ready to play when the chance comes up.

My getting to know Pops seemed to have come about by accident. After fifteen years of focusing my energy and attention on a nice, normal, data processing career, I had taken up music. The old acoustic guitar had been dragged from the closet, and I'd been relearning how to play it. I was writing songs, performing them them for open mikes and songwriter's night at some of the bars in town, and trying to hook up with other musicians to form a band that could get some decent jobs.. Quite frankly, I wasn't doing too well. My voice was weak, my guitar playing clumsy, and I was nervous enough as a performer that at least one friend let me know it was a painful thing to watch. My wife and I joked that I was doing middle-age crazy off-kilter. Instead of the sports car and nymphettes, I was doing music.

The only guy I could get to work with me was a kid named Darcy. We jammed a few times and he told me he'd learned to play guitar from an old guy he'd met some years before when they were working as tile and carpet installers for one of the department stores in town. Darcy insisted I should hook up with Pops; that I could learn a lot and that the

two of us would get along well. I had no interest in meeting his Mr. Overstreet. I liked blues well enough, but wasn't interested in dedicating myself to it the way some true believers did. I had seen the movie Crossroads and had no interest in playing out a middle-aged version of this kid-searches-out-the-REAL-thing game. So I kept putting Darcy off about meeting his Mr. Overstreet. But he kept bugging me about it and finally I gave in and called the guy. Pops was as uncertain about me as I was about him, but he gave me directions to his house and we agreed to meet on a Saturday afternoon.

The street where he lived was no more than two blocks from River Oaks. It was barely two lanes wide, no curbs. There were shallow ditches between the street and the houses. In front of each house was a bridge made out of nailed together wood planks spanning the ditch. For one block the left side of the street held four small houses in a row, not more than five feet apart, facing a vacant lot. In the next block, another four houses (Pops' among them) stood on the opposite side of the street, facing mostly vacant lots.

I was awestruck by the sight of one of the largest human beings I'd ever seen. His shirtless bulk seemed to overflow the small porch he occupied as he surveyed the tiny front lawn, itself overflowing with flower pots, a riot of red and yellow blossoms. Across the street from Pops' house was a large metal shed standing empty, with a 'condemned' sign on the door and a cross painted under the roof's peak. The building appeared to have spent some time an and auto repair shop and as a church. There was a gravel parking area in front, and I could leave my car in a spot I could see from inside the house. When I got out of my car I was assaulted by the June Houston humidity, the heavy smell of damp grass and flowering trees, the loud buzz of insects and distant traffic.

There were several locks on Pops' front door. I knocked and heard a dog barking, the chairs scraping and slow steps inside. He shouted for me to wait while he put the dog outside. When he opened the door I saw a small man, maybe 5'6", thin, carrying a bit of extra belly. His hair was cut very short, close enough to look at first glance as if his baldness was complete. Even in the heat he looked cool in khaki bermudas and a neat cotton shirt.

"Yeah, I'm him. You look all right. Come on in." As he opened the screen door he looked past me to the porch, "Where's your stuff?"

"Still in the car. I didn't want to ..."

"Well go get it," He interrupted before I finished my explanation.

I went back to the car and returned with my new electric guitar, a small amplifier, and a bottle of Jack Daniels I'd brought to pay for my blues lesson. He got some glasses out of his kitchen for the whiskey, and I set up my amp and tuned my guitar. He has a two-channel amp set up with his guitar plugged into one channel and a mike in the other. The amps were facing as we sat on wooden chairs next to one another. (He later advised, "You don't want to sit on metal chairs when you've got electric stuff on.") I turned my amp to what I thought was a moderate volume. He made me turn it up. I asked him about the neighbors, I thought they were pretty close. "Don't worry about them. If we play OK, they like it. If we don't it don't mater how low we play. Anyway, you got to have it loud enough to feel it."

He started the lesson, "There's three thousand chords you can pick out on the guitar, and this is the one I use, it's an E." He was fingering a chord that looked like a standard E, leaving one string open that isn't in the books. When I played an E on my guitar with the standard fingering, he said "No! Do it like this. You may know something about music, but you don't know my blues. You play it like this." So I did. He used thumb and finger picks, played a rhythm pattern that involved a steady thumb on the bottom string. I put down my straight pick and attempted to match his pattern with my fingers. He said; "Don't worry about that right now. You just get the chord and rhythm right with your little pick there, you can learn that other stuff later." So I was strumming along with him, waiting for the chord change. I knew a little about blues, had played dozens of songs that used the standard 12-bar pattern and I knew there were hundreds of other songs that used it. But Pops kept going with the same weird E chord. My fingers were getting cramped. The two small amps were loud in the tiny room. I was sweating through my shirt, despite the fan he'd set up to blow right at me. His eyes were closed and he was smiling as he kept playing. I kept following, trying to strum in time with his picked pattern.

After about five minutes he stopped and said, "This is another chord, an A". He played it laying his third finger across the four highest strings, once again, not quite the same chord that most teachers will show you. We strummed that awhile. We stopped to sip from our glasses.

"OK, now I'll show your my theme song." He started off on the E chord again, and I joined in. After awhile he changed to the A and stayed on it. Back and forth in a pattern that had no regularity I could hear, except for a slight change of emphasis that seemed to foretell the change. Even with that clue, I wasn't always getting it right.

He stopped to take another sip of the whiskey. The ice was melted and the glasses emptied so I got up to refill them. When I got back he started another song. At first I thought it was the same thing we'd been doing, but there was a very slight difference in the rhythm pattern. After a couple of minutes of intro, he started to sing. It was like the voice of God; deep, strong and scary. But I couldn't understand a word. He'd repeat what sounded like the same line three of four times, then repeat another line just as often. All the while he kept strumming that E chord, only moving to an A occasionally between vocal lines, and I struggled to match the rhythm patterns exactly, though they seemed to change.

This went on through the afternoon, the only changes being that some songs were slow, some were fast. Somewhere in the afternoon I remember hearing a version of "Baby, Please Don't Go, and one tune with a pretty picked melody that turned out to be "Every Time it Rains". At some point in the afternoon, he told me to call him Pops, instead of Mr. Overstreet. The noise we were making sounded wonderful to me and Pops seemed to enjoy it too. From time to time, he'd lean back for the mike, close his eyes and make a smile that seemed to stretch literally from ear to ear. Two or three of his neighbors were sitting outside on his porch, not saying much. A young woman he said lived next door came in and listened awhile, flirting with Pops until he refused hr a second glass of whiskey.

I was starting to feel done in from the heat, the noise, and the whiskey. My fingers were cramped from holding the same chord for hours, and there were deep grooves from the strings in my fingers.

He finally stopped, "That's enough playing for today. I worked you pretty hard, don't want to run you off."

I claimed to be ready for more, but was grateful he didn't take me up on it.

As I started packing up my stuff, he asked; " So what do you think of my songs?"

I had enjoyed the playing, but except for one or two little bits, hadn't really understood much of the words. And to call the pieces 'songs' seemed a stretch to me, as accustomed as I was to working within a formal song structure, set up with regular chord changes. But I love the music we'd made, so I told him I thought the songs were great.

He said, "Now I can tell you know a little about music, but you don't know my kind of music. If you want to learn it, I'll teach it to you, but you got to get the feeling yourself. I can't help you with that."

"And another thing, some people think this music is a fun thing, just something to do for kicks. Well, it's strong stuff. It's stronger than liquor, it's stronger than dope/ Some nights you're gonna be just lying there in bed with your eyes open, you can't sleep, and your woman will want to bother with you and you'll push her away, just 'cause you can't get the music out of your head. Now you think about that some before you decide you really want to do this."

For the next few months I went to his house nearly every Saturday afternoon, usually bringing a bottle of whiskey. Some Saturdays he'd have a treat for me. once a bottle of moonshine (my first), another time a bottle of cheap red wine, "Now this is some good stuff a fiend of mine been telling me about." We'd spend the days playing his music, and I started catching the words to some of the songs. Some of them became recognizable from the opening melody line or rhythm pattern. The differences between songs were minimal, but they were consistent on the songs we played early in the afternoon. Later in the afternoon things would get hazy.

I started putting an effort into learning something about the blues. I hoped I could find a record of somebody who sounded like Pops did, so I could describe his music to friends and so that I could place it in some sort of context. The closest thing I ever found to Pops' music was when I was listening to an album of some of the first singles John Lee Hooker had made. I learned how to play as many variants of an E chord in as many different positions on the neck as I could find or figure out. I found an old chart outlining the 'blues scale' (minor pentatonic) from one end of the guitar neck to the other, and practiced the scales at home so I could play some lead lines with his chords.

I read all the books I could find about the blues. The more I learned about the African roots of the music, the more sense Pops' music made; the bent notes, the tricky rhythms, the way he had of singing the start of a line and playing the end.

It didn't really matter what information I'd pick up anywhere else. As far as Pops was concerned, what he did was the blues and everything else was just something else. But he loved to talk about those he still thought of as his heroes.

Once I asked him who he'd heard play when he still lived in Mississippi. He gave me a long sting of names, only two of which were familiar, John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson. "They used to have these corn-shucking parties. The boss would put up some moonshine, folks who could play a little would take turns doing it. Sonny Boy never had to work, 'cause he could sing, play guitar and harmonica. The other fellow I followed was Lightnin' Hopkins here in Houston. He was my man. He never let me sit in with him, but I used to go see him whenever I could."

Some people speak of a thing called the blues that exists separately from the music, as if the music were simply a product of a magic energy that manifests in guitars and voices. Pops loves the music he calls "my music" and he swears that it's "good for the soul some way", but to him the blues is no more (and certainly no less) than the music. "There's the Lord's music and there's the devil's music. This here is the devil's music, but I can play the Lord's music too. But bar owners don't want to hear nothing about God in their joints, and the owner's the boss. My father was a preacher and he didn't like those blues, but I loved 'em. See, I know I'm going to hell anyway when I die. I've done some bad things and I ain't sorry, it's how I am. I'm a bad man. This is the wrong road that I'm on. But I can't help it. It's just the road I got to follow."

Late on one of our Saturday afternoons, I asked him where he'd learned his songs. He said; "Some of 'em I make up. Some of 'em I get off the radio. I like that country music. I used to get up early in the morning when I lived in West Virginia. Those old hillbillies'd be there playing their stuff. I'd hang around to listen. Now I like to watch that old boy, Roy Clark, from Hee Haw. That's where I learned that 'Wrong Road' ".

This is a major clue to the sources of Pops' blues. While some number in his repertoire are recognizable blues standards like "Big Boss Man:, or "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl", he does a lot of songs that remind one of some other song, but aren't quite the same thing. "Wrong Road" is a clear example of this. The old country standard "Here I go down that wrong road again" has been done by a lot of people. Pops' song, "Wrong Road", which he pulled from hearing the country song on TV or the radio a couple of times, pulls the basic idea and one or two phrases into a pure Pops song, the narrator both horrified and accepting of the way he's going. There's an inevitably, driven by forces outside and inside himself over which he has no control.

In Pops' blues, a given line may be repeated one, two or ten times before resolving or moving to another verse. The reading of the line may change, or he may simply be responding to what the other musicians are doing. There are songs I've heard nearly a hundred times, and still find some lines a surprise, usually because they'll be new, or pulled in from another song and used to keep a jam going.

Two of his songs bear quoting. The first is one that is played with the same guitar line, "Every time it rains, I think of you/When the rain starts falling, my love comes tumbling down./Tears drop from my eyes." As the verse is repeated, some of the words will be left out of the end of the line, and notes from the guitar line played in their place, a la Mississippi John Hurt and certain West African folk songs.

Another of my favorites is "if I had wings like a beautiful dove/I'd fly away in some distant land./And I would build my nest in some pretty girl's hair./All I want is two little old wings, like a beautiful dove."

Late one night as we were driving home from a playing job, I suggested he let me teach him a couple more chords; so we could play in another key or even just some variety to the endless E boogie we were always playing. I think it was partly the hour and the whiskey, but the thought brought him to the verge of tears. He said, "Please, please don't make me change my blues. This is my kind of music and I don't want to change it." He couldn't see any change to the music as anything but a threat to the blues he'd been doing. He started to learn as a young boy, and had to leave his home when he was only 15. If he'd stayed in Mississippi, and hung around the folks who taught him how to play, he probably could have learned a lot more about other kinds of blues, and developed his playing further. But living far from home, he held only to what he had known before he left there. He carried the immigrant's urge to stay true to what he had left. Because of this, his music gives us an accurate picture of how blues sounded in a specific place and time; (eastern Mississippi in the late 1930's).

When I told him I was surprised he'd left home so young instead of staying in school, he said, "Kids are smarter now. When I was a kid, it didn't matter if I got to school more than two or three times a week. My dad'd say, 'They're never going to teach you nothing, nohow.' All folks wanted from the kids was to get their sack and start working."

When he first left Mississippi, he moved to Michigan. "They took a bunch of us and we cut trees in the woods, all the loggers were in the army. When the war was over and all the lumberjacks came home, they gave the jobs back to the white men and we were cut loose. I moved to Detroit then. I was in Detroit when Roosevelt died.

That was when my wife left. I married her in Detroit. She wanted to go back to her folks, they were from West Virginia. But I told her I liked the city. I knew a lot of folks in Detroit. I worked in a steel mill there. Those guys were always pulling my leg about something. When I first went to work there they sent me off to find a 'pipe lengthener'. I went all over that mill, everybody sent me somewhere else till I got mad and gave it up."

On the walls of his house were several large picture frames, each holding 10 to 20 snapshots. Most of the pictures show Pops and some of the people he's played with over the last few years. He also keeps several shoeboxes which are filled with other photographs. For years he carried an old Polaroid camera with him every time he went out to play, and had pictures taken with him and band members, or people from the audience. He was sorting through all these pictures for me one day, pointing out clubs as "that place up on Waugh" or "the joint on Telephone Road by the Shell station." He didn't seem to know any of the names of the people, but identified musicians by their instrument or the time period he played with them. The time periods were identified by which guitar Pops was playing at the time, "That was back when I had that big Fender with the holes. Man, that was a sweet guitar. Damn near quit when that got stole."

As for remembering names, he told me "It's too much bother t try to learn everybody's name. So I call 'em 'Buddy', or 'Sis', or 'Baby'. That keeps a load off the mind. All these people in the pictures are my family now. I paid a detective to find my brothers once, but I never heard a thing. I raised my family here and they're all gone now."

One day he got to talking about marriage and women. He told a friend who had been spending a lot of his energy on drinking and running around. One night when this friend of his came in late and fell asleep, his wife poured boiling water on him. Pops went to visit him in the hospital, "He was hurting something awful." Pops told him, "That woman's going to do it again, you know? You got toe either act like she wants or leave her. That's a mean woman."

The friend told Pops, "You just don't understand love." Six months later, the woman did it again, and killed him.

Another time, he explained to me about the differences in relationships. "A girlfriend and a ladyfriend are different things.

A ladyfriend's when you sit down and share each other's burden. A girlfriend's when you get a piece of meat now and then and you share what you have with them and they share what they have with you. That's a help to the mind. I did that when I was married. When my old lady was down I'd come home and say something that'd help her (that I got from a ladyfriend) and she'd say 'how'd you get so smart?' and I'd say 'I just feel good today'. She'd say 'I wish you felt that good every day."

Finally he decided I was ready to go along with him on a job. The first club we went to was called Garcia's on the North Side. He said "It's not the kind of club you're used to, but this is an OK place. I wouldn't take you to no one-door joints."

"That's a place ain't got but the one way out. If a fight or some kind of trouble starts, there's no way to leave. But don't worry about it, I'd never take you with me to that kind of place."

Months later, we were heading home after a bad night at one of the local clubs. I was upset and pissed off over something; either the lack of money or audience or just pissed off, talking about the injustice and frustration of everything. He said, "You're too moody. The music hasn't taken hold of you yet. You like to hear it, you like to play it, but it hasn't got hold of you yet. Else you wouldn't get so disgusted. You got too much disgust. The world is ruled by faith."

"It's true anyway. I told you this music wasn't easy. What goes through your head isn't easy. You got to work out your own salvation."

I tried to salvage some self-respect by saying that I was frustrated over the lack of rewards he was getting for the music he was playing. It didn't seem fair that he wasn't making any money. He said, "When I was able to work (his knees had been injured while he was on the carpet installer job), I was always thinking about what I wanted and worrying about how to get it. Now that I can't work and there's no way I can get anything I just have to relax my mind about it and I'm happier."

One night we'd landed a job playing outside on the balcony at the disco Power Tools. We were working with a good rhythm section and my guitar playing got off the ground for the first time. We took the music out a bit farther than I'd been used to. We stayed with the same simple chords but when I did a changeup on the rhythm pattern, Keith and John'd come with me. We found ends of phrases together and on occasion I took extended solos. A couple of times Pops stopped playing and just sang. Once or twice he gave us the hand wave to shut us down and we kept going. I felt like a kid dancing in church; not certain the time and place was right, not even knowing if I was playing all that well, but the guys kept urging me to go for it, and the audience seemed to be into it.

By the end of showtime that night, Pops was dragging, looking tired and depressed. As we tore down, he sat to the side visiting with some of the kids there. He was quiet as I drove him home till just before we got to his house, and he said "You know, tonight's the first time the music whipped me."

The best job Pops and I had together was a few months we played every Friday at Club Proteus. This was a dance club, with several rooms, one featuring live music. One night one of Pops's songs seemed to be using a Bo Diddley-style beat. The rhythm section and I caught it and worked with it. Then Pops quit playing and leaned into the mike. He grabbed it with his hand, raised the other, index finger up and repeated "I ain't Bo Diddley. I ain't Bo Diddley." I was preoccupied with playing and didn't catch what he was saying till I realized he'd been repeating it for some time. The crowd loved it.

One night as we were setting up to play at Proteus I got curious about something in one of his songs, so I asked him "What's a mojo hand?" I'd just read something about it one of the blues books, and was curious about the writer's accuracy.

"It's just a lucky charm, nothing like a monkey paw. Some women in Louisiana sold 'em when I was a boy. A good one costs five or six hundred dollars. If I'd had six hundred dollars, that's all the mojo I'd need. Anyway, the mojo wears off after a while. Only kind that lasts is what you're born with."

I hadn't played with Pops for almost 10 months. I had been stopping by his house every two or three weeks to check on him, but was overdue on that when I saw a listing in the paper for "Pops Overstreet & Friends" at Mickey's Mardi Gras on a Saturday night. I went down to see the show. Pops was on stage alone, a drum set behind him and in the corner a bass missing a string. There were two people in the audience, one of them a man who used to come see us play at Pearl's Cotton Club on Sunday afternoons years ago. Pops saw me and hollered, "Hey man, where's your box?"

He started to strum, the theme song rhythm, nothing special, and he didn't sing. He'd stop and start again suddenly. I went to the car for my gear. Pops took a break while I set up. Then Pops and I cranked it up. He started with 'Going to Louisiana' which was usually a good solid piece. Pop's time was unsteady coming in and I had to fumble around for the riff. When I had it, he'd fall out. We struggled for about 5 minutes before he gave it up. I asked him to try a slow one and he did the song about the "Lonely Boy". That went somewhat better till I started having equipment trouble. It had been too long since I'd played with him, he sounded like he hadn't been playing much himself either.

Later Pops and I did another long set, still playing badly, till there was absolutely no one left in the place. Even the owner went out to get a hamburger. When she got back, we played a game of pool while Pops fell asleep in his chair onstage. Sandy said she'd just as soon close it up. She offered to take Pops home so I loaded up and left. As I was driving away, I saw a large crowd enter the joint. Another Pops motto, "When the timing's off, nothing works right."

There's no neat ending to this story. Right now Pops is living in an apartment house for old folks in the Heights. He's saving up for a new guitar and amp. There's a compilation CD out on Home Cooking records called Back Against the Wall which includes one cut of Pops playing "DownTown Boogie" with a pickup band. There are some other tapes floating around that may see commercial release someday. A couple people have been talking about getting him to a studio to get his music recorded "before it's too late" but that project's not near the top of anybody's priority list. He shows up at jam nights around town when he can get a ride. He's still looking for chances to play his blues.