Well I came by the language in association with the beauty of the American Beauty Negro and the sacred association with the field of music and it’s growing volume which has had a fantastic renaissance here in the United States during the years. In association with these people and, in their seeming rush, there isn’t enough time—never enough time. They got themself a zig-zag way of talking and I think eventually became the intimate social language of the American Beauty Negro. It has a fantastic sense of renewal that’ll take any old and revered movement and swing it right up to the pounce of the now and the meaning and it is sparkled with the magical beauty of the American Negro for which the United States should be tremendously grateful for many many other things: the brotherhood of the Negro race. Because, going up against the granite walls of stupidity, they have, as a consequence, at the other end of the pendulum, have dug out their wells of humor to such a point that it turned into a spring. It spread by a spring that is so deep because they had many many times to laugh at a number of things that weren’t funny. But if they wanted to laugh, they selected some things that weren’t funny and laughed at them anyway. And, as a consequence, in the law of conversation, they wound up with a very very deep sparkling humorous well of beauty.

After we met and married in 1946, I immediately began to notice that when Lord Buckley worked clubs, the last set of the evening, when the place was pretty much empty except for the jazz musicians and hard-core fans, he was always much more adventurous than earlier in the evening when there were lots of customers. And since we were always lovingly competitive, I challenged him to begin using this more "artistic" and socially conscious material in the earlier sets. I suggested he tell some of the stories he told backstage when he was in front of the audience. And he did. And I think that was perhaps my major contribution to the Royal Court.

"The Nazz," "Jonah and the Whale," and all the Shakespeare stuff were full-blown bits of material by the time I first saw Buckley in ’46. He may have added on each show. He might do something or add something a little bit different to it.

Around that time he went to Chicago and played the room in the Sherman Hotel. He did his "Amos ‘n’ Andy" bit, and he kind of died with it. And we talked until three o’clock in the morning about the future of his act and the content of his material. Just prior to his trip he had written "Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger-Poppin’ Daddies" and "To Swing or Not to Swing" for the entertainment of his friends.

I told him, "Well, if you’re going to go down, go down in a flame and do that routine."

And he did the routine the next night and he did go down in a flame. When he came back, however, he was so enchanted with the form that we began to write together.

For instance, I have explained the three miracles I have on Our Savior, from the life of Jesus. The preachers tell me they’re bringing hot-rodders into church with it, ya see. This work has been read by high ecclesiastical figures and they say that this unquestionably, absolutely and positively is a religious psalm. And, of course, it is.

Nazz never did nothing simple. When he laid it, he laid it!

There was a musician in a band I managed named Turk Murphy. And Turk came up from Los Angeles with some seventy-eight ten-inch records with titles written on the label in pencil. It was Lord Buckley. We were mad for the records and we tried to find out more about him. Turk didn’t know anything about him. Later we heard all sorts of stories that he was from Jamaica and that he was black or wasn’t black.

Later Buckley made some records with Turk, barroom ballads and things like Robert Service poems set to music. I don’t think they were very interesting...they were pretty static. The material wasn’t that interesting and I don’t think ever commercially available.

I am the only comic who brings the word of Christ into the nightclubs. And the more people who are exposed to that Message, no matter where they are, the better.

Puppeteer, performance artist, star of the popular children’s television show Beekman’s World, and early member of Peter Shuman’s Bread and Puppet Theater, Paul Zaloom is a not-so-secret Lord Buckley admirer.

I believe that Lord Buckley was one of the great American philosophers. I’ve always called him a theologian. His whole rap about people worshipping people would seem to put him in that category more than just about anything else.

He understood the idea of Jesus Christ probably better than any other human being that’s ever lived. He’s the best last hope for God that there ever was as far as I’m concerned.

You find the same amalgam of the fairy tale, the religious parable and the animated cartoon (with Dixieland soundtrack) in all of Lord Buckley’s famous routines. In "The Nazz," he takes three miracles from the gospel and dips them in tar. Out comes a Jesus that is just as sweet and gentle and generous as the Hip Gahn, but who meets the challenges of the road—the encounter with the little cat who has a "bent frame," the storm on the Sea of Galilee, the demand for loaves and fish or at the wedding of Cana—with sublime power, with the thunder and the lightning and stentorian command to the cowering disciples: "DIG INFINITY!!!"

We had several paintings on the walls of the Castle. One was of Jesus Christ...autographed. "To Lord Buckley from your buddy cat, J.C." He had the painter autograph it because he said, "He would have been my buddy."

Joseph Jablonski’s introduction to the City Lights edition of Hiparama of the Classics was one of the first appraisals of Lord Buckley’s artistic, social, cultural, and political depth. Excerpted here, the piece captures much of the energy of the sixties generation’s rediscovery of His Lordship.

Lord Buckley’s entire career was a continuing tribute to an exalted gift which, if it is not the same thing as the poetic marvelous sought by surrealism, is certainly a close cousin to it.

A final point about Lord Buckley concerns the question of sources. The humorist’s affinity with Afro-America (which he himself acknowledged) is enormous. It is one that he developed on the entertainment and jazz circuits, as well as in his private experiences through association with blacks and exposure to their influence. It is palpable not only in his rhythmic oral style and street lingo; it is deeper than that, in the spirit of his work which shares the enthusiasm and aggressively impossibilist orientation of Afro-American art, culture and mythology.

It was the most ebullient vein of black existence mined for moral gold, so that his magic was directly inspired by the poetic values of that tradition. On this plane the question of a rip-off does not arise; for Buckley himself not only would acknowledge his debt but would actually proclaim it. To see his work side by side with its primary sources is to enjoy the signal illumination produced by the symbiosis.

Al Young is the award-winning author of several screenplays and more than fifteen books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Mingus/Mingus, a memoir of the American composer and bassist coauthored with Janet Coleman is an important, collaborative effort. Mr. Young’s impressions of Lord Buckley were collected by California writer Douglas Cruickshank.

Buckley didn’t rip anybody off. I remember something I once heard the late blues singer Big Bill Broonzy tell Studs Terkel. Broonzy said, "You can’t steal something from somebody else. What you do is you take it and you do with it what you’re going to do with it. But it’s not the same." I think that’s the process of making art. I’m not saying that, in the marketplace, people don’t maliciously exploit such cullings or borrowings. I’m just saying that the spirit of Lord Buckley was not malicious, hostile or in any way exploitive. That was the language that was around in the world that he inhabited. Everybody talked like that. We talked like that when I was growing up in Detroit in the 1950s. We would study for a history test in those terms. We’d say, "George Washington went in and kicked the British’s ass." It was a way of vividly reinterpreting the story so it seemed real. The old language just didn’t say anything to us.

Of course Buckley was a storyteller. In that respect what he did was very close to black sermonizing—preaching—when you retell a chapter of the Bible in vernacular. But he was also a poet. His language was poetic, and the effects he achieved were poetic effects. And he had a sense of rhythmic development that not all monologists have. He also had the ear of a musician. He knew how to use repetition, he knew how to build a crescendo, he had a musical sense of dynamics. He was in the tradition of the folk storyteller that has been a part of America since the early nineteenth century. He did not do anything substantially different from what Mark Twain did. Lord Buckley was from that grassroots, populist, anarchist American tradition that was a force for so long in this country and, for a while there, made it great. Buckley reinforced my own inclinations as a writer. The vitality in the heart of storytelling and poetry resides in the spoken idiom, the vernacular. All the old guys knew that. Shakespeare knew that. You take the spoken word and you transform it.

I remember buying some real dirty record by some black comedian that was recorded in the sixties and it was filthy—filthy, filthy, filthy. The shtick was called "The Signifying Monkey" but it sounded like a Buckley piece in a lot of ways, it was very much in that mode.

Obviously there’s a black tradition of storytelling that Buckley was sort of copping from. I don’t think that it was only that he was appropriating the hipster language at the time, but a certain oral tradition as well.

It’s like you see an artist like Little Richard and you say, "God, the guy is so original." And then you see pictures of Billy Wright—the guy who Richard copped his stuff from—and you realize that nobody’s original and that everybody draws from those different sources.

Is it politically correct to appropriate from other cultures? People have a hard time with Vanilla Ice and yet Buckley obviously took the English thing, he took the beat/hip thing, he took the black thing, and he took a lot of different sensibilities, combined it with his beautiful philosophy and his great ear. So I don’t think it’s fair to lay the politically incorrect thing on him. Nobody is saying a white guy can’t draw on the black tradition. But what they may say is that here’s another example of a white man ripping off black culture which has happened in the past.

There are a couple of other reasons why Buckley may, mistakenly, be considered politically incorrect. He appropriated Black culture and that’s a very much-discredited thing today. There’s a lot of black resentment against the fact that that’s been done. The argument that if Wynton Marsalis can play Bach why can’t someone like Buckley celebrate the black storytelling idiom is countered by the argument that it’s not like Black people glommed onto something that a peripheral group of white people were nurturing and then propelled it into great popularity and generated a lot of money vis-à-vis Pat Boone’s usurpation of Little Richard. I think that black people have a legitimate beef in this thing in terms of having their culture constantly ripped off.

What about Paul Butterfield? I’ve been listening to Butterfield lately. I remember listening to Butter over and over and over again as a kid. But then I heard Little Walter do "Yonder’s Wall," I thought to myself, "Holy shit! What the fuck was I doing? What happened here?"

The other argument is that people like Butterfield were a doorway for people like me to check the deeper levels of this stuff out. Maybe we wouldn’t have been as open to the deep blues had we not passed through him in the first place.

And then you have to take it beyond that which is to say, "Forget what Butter did about opening doors. What was it about his art that was interesting and compelling?" And the Butterfield Blues Band with Mike Bloomfield and those guys were a great band.

On one instance somewhere in the fifties I went to a club with him in New York for what I think was some sort of benefit. The audience was, to a significant extent, black. But I remember he got in trouble because of that fact. In performing he did some portion of the classic stories from the New Testament in hip talk. When he referred to Jesus Christ as "The Nazz" people were not laughing and were saying "What’s this man talking about?" I don’t know if it was they thought he was putting on blacks’ speech or what because jazz talk is originally black.

Oddly enough I never ran into that kind of trouble. He and I apparently independently arrived at that same gimmick but we used it in very different ways. One of his ways was to just tell any given story in hip musicians’ slang lingo. I got the idea, to do what we called "Bop Fables," from a child. One day Ernie Caceres, the guitar player from my show on CBS, was up at the house rehearsing something with me and he mentioned that the day before he had asked his son the eternal question that fathers often put to their children: "What did you study in school today, honey?" And the kid, not trying to be funny or hip at all, but just speaking the way his father and his father’s friends spoke in his presence, said: "Oh, they taught us about some cat named George Washington."

Some of the hip phrases are still with us but there’s new stuff that comes in every so often. It all gets mixed together now. There’s a big media mix monster that mashes it all together. There’s high school talk and "Valley" talk and it all gets mixed up with hip talk. It’s just a dopey American way of communicating now. But there’s a baseness and a desophistication to this approach now that does not necessarily elevate the mind.

The translation came through...It was first brought up out of the void of nonmoving things to me by my application of the zig-zag talk that originates of course, from our beautiful Negro brothers and sisters. The zig-zag talk. And I found out that many times when I, in Chicago before, that I’d been living such a hectic life that I found many times that it was impossible to explain or project myself from my normal sense of projection. So I would slip out of that into the hip and say, "Well Jack, to hip you, to tell you the truth I, ya know that I’m not very cool today. I’m a little on the down and I’d like to get right and tight but I think I need a little more sleep. Dig?" So I would fall back to that particular type and kind of expression and it seemed to refresh me and then I would return to my normal vernacular. Soon I’m parlaying it and giving it flexibility and the use of it came to me that perhaps I could apply it to the classics such as Poe, Shakespeare, Our Savior, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln. And people who think that the "Gettysburg Address" to be...it would be satirical to employ this semantic against this revered work of Lincoln but it happened to the contrary. It even comes out stronger. For instance, allow me to address a little bit as "Solid sent upon the ace lick that all cats and kitties red, white or blue are created level in front," which means, in essence, that it was so before it was contended. That’s some of the strange powers of the semantic.

I think what Lord Buckley did was to see the poetry and genius and the majesty and the humor and the pathos of the African-American ethos and he used it combining Shakespeare and the Bible. This was also done by black preachers whose eloquence mesmerized everyone who heard them including Lord Buckley.

Lord Buckley was the consummate performer, having total command of his instrument, which was his voice and his ability to be all the various people that inhabited the world he created for his memorable performances. He was one of the first to combine Shakespeare, the Bible and the poetry of the streets.

A few years went by during which our paths didn’t cross. Then, one day when I was waiting to cross Sixth Avenue at West Third Street, along came Lord Buckley.

"Ah, Sir Crow!" he cried, and clasped my hand warmly. His clothes looked a little seedier than when I’d seen him last, but his regal bearing was intact. He beamed with enthusiasm.

"I’ve been on the West Coast, and I’ve developed a new routine that’s going to knock everyone’s arse off! Have you a moment to spare?"

"Come on up to my place and tell me about it. I’ll make us some lunch." I had my own Village cold-water flat by then.

Buckley’s new routine was the story of Jesus of Nazareth told in the argot of a hipster. He called it "The Nazz" and eventually recorded it. It was funny, and at the time (pre–Lenny Bruce), quite outrageous. I couldn’t imagine where he’d be able to perform it without either puzzling or offending his audience, but I knew he’d break up the band. He gave me samples of other routines that he was developing in the same vein: a hipster’s version of Shakespeare and of Roman history. We spent a pleasant afternoon lunching and laughing, and I noticed when he said good-bye that I had received a promotion. He shook my hand and said, "Farewell, Prince Crow."

The zig-zag semantic was contrived by the slaves many years ago when they wished to discuss things they didn’t want the "Master" to get hip to. That’s why it was called "hip talk."

We should like to use this delicious semantic which has two fantastic powers: it’ll take anything from as far back as you can reach and—brrrrmmph!—bring it up to the fence of the now and over the fence of now along to the advanced, newest meaning in the volume of sound.

My Lords and My Ladies, then, too, it is insured and divinated by the flexibility and the beauty of the American Beauty Negro humor. For the Negroes there are many banks. And one of the great banks is the bank of condensation and the divine, beautiful, warm, sweet, swinging American Beauty Negroes had to laugh at so many things for so long that were not funny.

As a consequence, they deepened the wells of their humor until it sparkles with a beauty that makes it endless in its depth and sacred. And when this particular type of semantic is applied through this fancy and it is done in truth, properly applied, some strange and wonderful things happen.

© 2002, The WELL
The WELL is a registered trademark of Salon Media Group, Inc.,
and a Salon.com Community