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A Juvenile Delinquent & the Blues

It is, hopefully, clear by now that the presence of chickens in my father-in-law's barn was not my idea. Which is not to say that I'm opposed to the eating of their flesh, nor the frying of their eggs. But my knowledge of animal husbandry is suburban and limited to the calling of cats and dogs, and some residual instinct for the caring of tropical fish. Even that didn't serve Maggie's birthday goldfish, one of which leapt to its death its first night here, while the cats -- too busy watching -- missed the fun.

And yet Dan has gone fishing and so it falls to your newly unemployed scribe to go feed the chickens. And make sure they're warm enough, since we have 24 that are less than a month old, all roosters, most of whom are doomed to the pot; it's worth noting that roosters are much cheaper to buy (less than half price, in fact), though I haven't enough feminist theory to go further with that thought. Another dozen juvenile hens (we like eggs), and a half-dozen adults (one rooster, Survivor #1, and five steady but indifferent layers), round out the flock each population housed in separate chicken condominiums. When Dan gets back, we will have to build a new condo for the growing roosters, who are now housed in a wooden box smaller than most televisions.

Midafternoon, having finally opened a batch of mail, I loaded a somewhat randomly chosen CD into the little red truck and headed out. It's a long enough drive that I can get most of an album heard coming and going (at least the old 34-minute album, or enough of a new one to know), though it's not a place, once one arrives, that calls for music. I had plucked up the debut CD by a Tupelo, Mississippi blues trio called the Homemade Jamz Blues Band whose oldest member is 16. They play guitars made out of gas tanks, at least some of the time (the YouTube videos I scanned involved more traditional guitars), which sounds more rural than the pictures within the package suggests. They replaced a Jimmy Reed reissue (the curious 1961 Jimmy Reed At Carnegie Hall, influential in England but not recorded at Carnegie Hall) that had been spinning a few days, and the Homemade Jamz sound nothing like him. A nine year old girl, Miss Taya Perry, plays drums. The 16 year-old singing and playing lead, Mr. Ryan Perry, sounds like a man, but it's hard to imagine that he has lived enough to mean the words his father, Renaud, who apparently goes just by Perry, has written. Songs like "Right Thang Wrong Woman." Mr. Kyle Perry, at 13, handles the bass. A classic power trio. (Oddly, Steve Winwood's newest album was in the day's mail haul, but, as much as I loved the Spencer Davis Group and half of the Blind Faith album, I hadn't the heart for it.)

I was listening to the Jamz' album, titled Pay Me No Mind and to be released June 10 on NorthernBlues, because it came in today's mail, and because a fellow named Roger Stolle wrote some liners to it. Roger was a marketing executive in St. Louis who became friends with Art Chantry, the designer, which meant we met up in Nashville once. Stolle and his wife quit the straight life to open Cat Head Gallery in Clarksdale (my folk art weakness once again) and, I gather booking Ground Zero Blues Club down there. Or maybe he's started another business, I dunno. Maybe they're the same thing.

Anyhow, Roger has put out a couple Big George Brock albums on his own Cat Head imprint that I've listened to but never found any words to write about. But his name was enough to get me to listen to these kids play the blues.

Even if it's a little cold right now to get into the rhythm of that Mississippi thing. It's been unseasonably cold here (this morning, as I rewrite a tiny bit, it's about to get unseasonably hot), and so we were worried yesterday when both lightbulbs heating the roosters were out. We scurried to Southern States and bought more lights and they were fine, but hungry. And, being incredibly stupid animals, thirsty, as they'd knocked their remaining water container over. Incredibly stupid animals, let me underline that.

Oh, and being called chicken? It's way more of an insult than you thought in the schoolyard. In junior high there was a wandering substitute language teacher who promulgated the notion that "unanisumbua" was the worst word you could say in Swahili. It means, he said, "you bug me." Which seems tame, until you consider the size and disposition of insects in Africa. (I have no idea if that was true, nor if I've remembered it exactly right. Nor does it matter.) So trust me when I tell you that chicken are chicken.

Dumb and stupid.

This morning there was a woman in front of me at the gas station, waiting to use the pump. Smoking, with her door open and the car running. Finally she got up, went in, paid for her gas and came back with a Mountain Dew. Turned off the car, at last, and put $4 worth of gas in it.

Anyhow. Out at the farm one of the lights over the juveniles was out, and I tried to replace it. Unsuccessfully, I might add. Halfway in their end of the big chicken coop, when one of the little hens jumped over my leg and fluttered to the ground. Flailed, actually.

This is a problem.

I know how to catch a cat. In fact, if these were cats, we'd be friends by now and it wouldn't have happened. I have a fair idea how to catch a dog. But I've never picked up a chicken, much less caught one on the fly. Er...scurry, for it made straight for the dirt beneath the henhouse.

Noises are being made above it, clucking disapproval, I imagine. Hope. Lessons being learned, perhaps. (No, Grant, these are chickens. They learn nothing.)

This is all a problem, and I am darn lucky that the farm dog is more interested in the city garbage I dumped on the compost heap than in fresh meat on unsure feet. She's a c-minus dog anyhow, and sweet, and hasn't yet connected live chicken with feathers to the bones she gnaws. (And we know you're not supposed to feed dogs chicken; she's a farm dog, get over it.) But I have to keep one eye open for Annie the dog, just in case.

I call my wife to ask how to catch a chicken, but fortunately her phone's not working.

And then it flutters to the air and I make a grab that almost works, but it is immeasurably smaller than I imagine it to be it is when I get my hands on it, and so I let go quickly, afraid to crush the poor bird, which is nothing more than feathers yet, not one of the ten-pound monsters still languishing in our freezer.

So we chase each other around the barn for another couple minutes until it gets tired and even more stupid and traps itself in a corner and I pick it up. If it were a smarter animal, I'd assume it took pity on me. But it's not smart, or I'd not have caught it. Sort of. It's a tiny thing, under all those feathers, and clearly scared. Thankfully not scared shitless.

Back into the coop, and none too politely.

These are the things I now do to feed my family!

By which point, in any event, the hens are in fine feather. They have left us four eggs, which is nice, except they won't lay in the box where they're supposed to, they lay in the far corner of the coop, which means I have to crawl mostly inside the thing if I want breakfast. This is not a clean business. Chickens are not clean, and the bottom of their coop hasn't been cleaned since Dan left. (Happily I have not been trained in this chore yet.) Leaving my behind exposed, but, fortunately, they're chicken and don't take to pecking.

Probably I should have fussed with the lightbulb more, but I'm not going back without backup.

None of which explains the bird I saw on the way home, down the road where goats used to graze. It was songbird-sized, and the color of a newly minted Mary Kay Cadillac. I do not make these things up, nor have I an explanation, though mamaw posited the possibility of an albino cardinal, and then we both laughed.

The Jamz' record outlasted the trip there and back again, but they ain't no damn chickens, that's for sure. They can play. They can sing. And they might grow into something; they might not. It's hard to tell with kids. But they seem to have an instinct for the thing, and to take a joy in playing it. And it's nice to hear somebody living (and scheduled to be living through the next decade) playing the blues.

All of which reminds me that one of the bands Jimmy Reed may or may not have influenced in England was called Chicken Shack, and that once upon a long time ago my friend Cheeseman played their version of Tim Hardin's "If I Were A Carpenter" for me, and it will help to remember that Christine Perfect McVie was singing. Never have found that record. Nor have I figured out why the Legendary Christine Perfect Album (McVie's solo outing between Chicken Shack and Fleetwood Mac) wasn't offered in the glorious reissue frenzy of the last decade.

Posted by grant on April 29, 2008 4:36 PM | Permalink

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