Abner Jay - The Backbone Of America Is A Mule And Cotton 1976

The self-described 'last working Southern black minstrel', Abner Jay was an itinerant one-man band who traveled across the American South in a converted mobile home that opened up into a portable stage, complete with amplification and home furnishings. Jay finger-picked a bittersweet but heartfelt comic blues on a long-necked, six-string banjo that he said had been made in 1748. It had been passed down to him by his grandfather, Louis W Jay, born a slave and later to teach Abner many of the traditions he made it his mission to keep alive.

He was almost certainly the last living exponent of the 'bones' - a musical tradition that involved playing percussive rhythms using various cow and chicken bones that had been dried out and blanched in the sun. Jay claimed to have a repertoire of over 600 songs, which he sang in a bone-shaking basso profundo voice, the legacy of a battle with throat cancer that almost felled him in his twenties. He would perform field songs, minstrel tunes and Pentecostal hymns interspersed with his own nuggets of homespun philosophy, off-color yarns, and side-splitting one-liners. 'What did Adam and Eve do in the Garden?' runs one. 'Eve wore a fig leaf... and Adam wore a damn hole in it.'

Jay's own compositions were decidedly secular in nature and found him musing on atypical themes such as depression, the Vietnam war, and substance abuse. Titles include 'The Reason Why Young People Use Drugs' and 'The Backbone of America is a Mule and Cotton'. 'I crave cocaine,' he moaned during crowd favorite 'Cocaine Blues', exaggerating his diction for comic effect. 'But I can't find nothing here in Atlanta. Cos those hippies dun used it all up... I want sum'tin to pep me up!' Rather than cocaine, he used to claim that the secret of his eternal youth and vitality was lying on his belly drinking water scooped out of the Suwannee River in his home state of Georgia. And at least two of his albums (privately-pressed and released on his label Brandie, named after his wife) feature a photograph of him doing just that, along with the tracklisting, which he customarily scrawled over it in marker pen.
Jay was himself born near the source of one of the tributaries of the river in Irwin County, Georgia (in 1921). He started performing in medicine shows at the age of 5. In 1932 he moved on, to the Silas Green show, a traveling minstrel show and vaudeville revue that had also once employed Bessie Smith. Aged 14, he became a one-man band.

The scant few facts known about his life were printed on a folded leaflet he used to hand out at shows, entitled 'How Great Thou Art Abner Jay'. He described himself thus: 'World's Champion Cotton Picker and Pea Picker, World's Fastest Tobacco Crapper, World's Greatest Jaw Bone Player, World's Fastest Mule Skinner... "The world's worse business man'.
Even so, Jay certainly got around over the years. He was a confidante to an evangelical preacher called Prophetess Dolly and acted as agent and manager to 'original soul sister' Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the first million-selling gospel star. He managed nightclubs, ran a restaurant and even played the Apollo. He was friendly with Little Richard, Chuck Berry, James Brown and Elvis, and played alongside Muddy Waters. Jazz saxophonist Anthony Braxton described him as 'an American master'. Abner Jay himself was no less modest. 'Forget about your Tchaikovsky,' he said. 'He Russian. I'm your classical American music. Like it or not - I'm it.'  'Hurry up and get your record,' he would urge the audience watching him perform. 'They'll be worth a lot of money when I'm dead.' And he was right. You can expect to pay upwards of $100 for one of his records now. In 2005, Swedish label Subliminal Sounds had the foresight to release a compilation of cuts from his albums called One Man Band. Unfortunately, Abner Jay never saw its release. He died in 1993.

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