Lost Songs: Volume One

Bad Man Blues

Today I want to tell you about an album I recorded that never officially made it out into the world titled Bad Man Blues. It comes from a time in my life I don't talk about often, but I'm starting to write about more now. This will be the first in a series of essays that digs into those moments, and shares the music that accompanies those stories. I’ll be releasing these recordings digitally on my Bandcamp page, which you can purchase today at this link with all the money going directly to me, the artist.

Sixteen years ago, I woke up early to a phone call. It was Jamie from work. He said he’d blown out a tire on his truck and needed a ride. We were supposed to go in early that day to get ahead of a big job, so I said yes. “I’ll be in front of your Mom’s house at 6:45am. Don’t be late,” I told him, not wanting to get scolded by the bosses on his account. He was standing outside when I got there, smoking a cigarette, looking like he hadn’t slept in days. But he often looked like that, so I didn’t think much of it. 

We’d been working side by side at a truss manufacturing shop in Mississippi for months, maybe a year, I can’t remember, and he’d just bought a truck a few weeks back. This was his first job after getting out of jail, where he’d spent half of his life to that point. And this was the first truck he’d ever owned. He was so proud of it. He always kept it clean, drove the speed limit, always parked in the shade. So when he needed a ride that morning, I was a little worried. I was hoping he hadn’t got drunk the night before. I was hoping he hadn’t done something stupid, or even worse, had drugs in his system. But I didn’t think about any of that very much. His luck was always bad.

Jamie had weekly visits with a parole officer, weekly drug tests, and I gave him rides to those places when he needed it, too. He always complained about the system as we drove.

 “When you get out of jail,” he’d say, “they expect you to show up here for this and show up there for that…but how do they expect us to get to all these places without any money or a driver's license or a car?” So when Jamie needed money to buy his first cell phone so he could keep up with the teenage daughter who’d grown up without knowing him, or when he needed a ride to work, or a $100 to pay his bills, or a set of used tires for the truck he’d finally been able to buy, I always gave it to him. 

“You know I’m good for it,” he’d always say, so I did what I could. I don’t know if I always believed him, but I wanted to believe in him. 

A few days before this, Jamie had borrowed $100 from me. “I don’t have enough money to pay my phone bill,” he’d said, “and I need to keep up with my daughter.” So I drove to the bank after work and withdrew the money.

 Later that afternoon, he’d stopped by my house to get the money and I’d invited him inside. When he noticed one of my guitars in the corner of the room, his eyes lit up. I showed him around the house. I had an empty bedroom set up as a studio where I worked on music, and when he asked how everything worked I showed him—microphones, amps, drums, guitars. I played a song for him, one I’d been working on called I’d Do It Again.

“I’m working on an album called Bad Man Blues,” I told him. “It’s about a guy who just can’t get his life together.”

“That’s cool,” he said with a smile. “Can’t wait to hear it.”

I gave him a crisp new $100 bill and walked with him to his truck. Standing at the door, he said, “I’ve got something for you.” He reached across the seat and pulled out an almost new Stetson cowboy hat and handed it to me. It wasn’t really my style, but I appreciated the value of it, and the gesture, so I put it on my head and said Thank You and walked back inside.

The morning I drive him to work, everything seems normal. Then my supervisor walks over and asks if I can talk to him in private. We step outside the building where no one can hear us, acting like we’re doing something related to the job.

He says, “Did you loan Jamie a $100?”

“Yeah, a few days ago,” I say.

“If I was you,” he says, “I’d get that money back. Today!”

“Why’s that?” I ask him.

“Well,” he says, “you didn’t hear this from me, but I saw Jamie late on the side of the road last, driving back from the beer store. His truck was pulled over. He had a blowout and he was stranded, so I asked him if he needed a ride. He said he did, so I drove him to his Mom’s house. But I wish I hadn’t. He was acting really weird. He was shaking like he was on that shit.”

“What shit?”

“Drugs, you peon,” he says. “He was sucking down whole cigarettes in one breath, and his eyes were wild. He didn’t talk the entire drive. He just asked me to take him to his Momma’s house, so I did. It was weird, man. Gave me the creeps.”

I say “Ok,” not thinking much of it. My supervisor was a bit of a gossip. He loved telling these types of stories, passing them on with a little extra flare. But I did wonder if I’d done the right thing, giving up that $100. I tried to focus on Jamie’s daughter getting a call from her dad that night and got back to work.

The day is moving along like any other, until out of nowhere the Sheriff’s cruiser turns into the parking lot of the shop. No lights flashing, no sirens, he just slowly turns in and parks in front like nothing is wrong and we all keep right on working.

The sheriff walks over to where my supervisor is standing and asks him a few questions, but we can't hear what he is saying over the saws and the forklift engine. I look at Jamie. He doesn’t seem nervous at all. He just keeps right on working like nothing is happening.

Then the sheriff walks over to Jamie and says, “Let’s go,” and Jamie lays his tools down and follows the Sheriff to his car without saying a word. The Sheriff doesn’t handcuff him or anything. They just walk side by side to the car and the Sheriff opens the backdoor and Jamie gets in without protest.

I remember my first thought is something like, “Man, the system is all fucked up. What did Jamie do to deserve this? Fail a drug test? Miss a red light?”

The Sheriff talks with my supervisor after that, taking his statement, hashing out the details of the ride home the night before. I remember getting nervous at this point. I can hear them laying out a timeline, and I‘m afraid the Sheriff’s going to talk to me next. After all, it was me who drove Jamie to work this morning. But the Sheriff never asks me about it. He talks to my bosses in private, in the office out back. Then he returns to his car and leaves. That was the last time I ever saw Jamie.

During break, we always played a few hands of spades with an old deck of cards, limp from years of vigorous shuffles under the cracked and splintered hands of woodworkers. My boss bids nil like he always does, trying to escape each hand without acquiring anything, shedding the bad hand he was dealt one card at a time.

Holding his deck against his belly, he tells what happened with Jamie. “Jamie killed a guy last night,” he says, laying down his last spade, an 8 under my 9. “It was his cousin. Stabbed him in the neck with his own knife and left him to bleed to death. Jamie broke into his house to steal his guns. The cousin returned home and Jamie was there. A fight broke out. The cousin pulled a knife and Jamie took it from him and killed him with it. Then he took the guns and left in his truck in a hurry.”

He goes on to tell us how the cousin’s house is out in the country, where the roads aren’t good. How Jamie was driving so fast around the curves that he blew out three tires. The tires I’d given him. He drove on the rims for a mile or so, leaving a twisted trail of what had happened, before abandoning the truck and hiding the guns in the ditch next to the road.

“The Sheriff found the guns and the truck this morning and put it all together,” he says. “He said if his tires hadn’t blown out, they may have never caught him.” 

I played the last card in my hand, but it wasn’t enough. I lost my bid. Goddamn, I think. No good deed goes unpunished.

Jamie sings at the station. He confesses everything in exchange for a life in prison rather than the death penalty. 

But my boss had one part wrong when he told us what had happened. Jamie’s cousin had been at home when Jamie went to see him. Apparently Jamie had gone to his house to borrow money, but his cousin wasn’t having it. When he refused, Jamie told him, “Alright then, I’ll be taking these guns.” He could sell them for what he needed, so he starts walking out with the guns, and that’s when the fighting starts, when the knife comes out. The rest of the story was correct.

I often wonder what might have happened to me had I not given Jamie that $100. Thinking back, I see the way he was looking at my guitars and the other things in my house that day a little differently now. Was he scouting my place? Was I the backup plan, or maybe even the original plan? Did my kindness get to him, leaving me safe from what could have been? Or was it simply that my house was too exposed, and he decided to go elsewhere? Why did he give me his hat? Did he know something was about to happen? Why did he want me to have it?

I pondered these questions for some time, for months and months, until one day my wife came home from work. She told me she’d seen Jamie’s mother at work. She’d talked to her about Jamie, offered her sympathies. Jamie’s mother stopped her, taking the time to tell her how Jamie had thought the world of me. She said he was always grateful that I’d tried to help him out so many times, and she apologized to us.

Jamie’s mother didn’t owe me an apology. I wasn’t a victim. As far as I was concerned, that was the best $100 I’d ever spent. I was grateful to know that my empathy for a man who seemed to never have a chance in life was the thing that saved my ass. And I’ve always tried to remember that. I live by that rule as much as I can now. There ain’t no amount of money or trouble worth getting stabbed in the neck.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that this story still haunts me. To this day, I struggle to understand why some people, no matter how much kindness they receive, or how many rides or loans or jobs they receive, seem bound to fail. I do know this: the systems that are supposed to rehabilitate convicted felons back into society do not work. Whether state mandated laws or religion, none of it works like we think it does. I was a witness to this endless cycle, year after year, during my twenties. This is just one of the many stories I have from working with men who carried their rap sheet everywhere with them. There was Quinton who got arrested at work for stripping and stealing copper wire from old homes and churches. There was Brandon drinking gallon jugs of water mixed with lemon juice and hand soap to flush the drugs out of his system before his piss test every week. There were ziploc bags full of Oxy and Lortab being passed around so everyone could make it through another day of grueling work, DUI’s on the weekends, possession of marijuana, gun charges. Half of the workforce was “good Christians” and the other half was “sinners.” Good vs Evil. Each needing the other to exist. Each needing the other to tell us who we are and where we belong. But when I ask myself where I fit into this dichotomy, the answer is always the same: I don’t know. I hold my cards close to my chest until I can get the fuck out.

Until next time,
A.B.

Bad Man Blues was recorded in the months that followed this story. It was recorded by Bobby Lirette at his home studio in Oxford, MS in 2006 and mastered in Chicago, IL by Carl Saff. I was hoping to release it officially on CD in 2007, but by the time it was finished, I had already moved on to the next thing, and I was too broke and too tired to make it happen. I was playing a lot of shows back then, touring regularly, promoting my previous album The Magnolia State, so a handful of you long time faithful fans and friends will undoubtedly remember some of these songs. I was playing them live a lot around this time. I even sold a handful of handmade CDs at my shows, so I know these songs are floating around somewhere. But it’s so minimal that at this point it’s almost like the album doesn’t exist at all. For me, this is a way of resurrecting these songs, as flawed and young as they may be, before they fade even more into obscurity.

Production Credits:

*All songs written by Andrew Bryant © Magnolia State Music 2007
*Produced by Andrew Bryant

*Recorded and engineered by Bobby Lirette in Oxford, MS except for trumpet and violin, recorded by Matt Arbogast in Chicago, IL.

*Musicians - Andrew Bryant: Vocals, Guitars, Banjo, Mandolin, Bass, Drums, Percussion, Organ, Harmonica, Glockenspiel || Ben Grigg: Trumpet || Kara Eubanks: Violin
*Mixed by Andrew Bryant in Bruce, MS

*Mastered by Carl Saff in Chicago, IL