Furry...

5/19/77: "Furry Lewis Finds Blues About Same" Memphis, Tenn. (UPI) - For Furry Lewis, writing the blues these days is about the same as when he did it on Beale Street in the 1920s.
"You just have to be sad," the 84-year old bluesman said sadly. That's all it takes. A lot of people has the blues and they don't know it."

For the man whose blues sound once haunted the saloons and theaters of Beale, the sorrows of old age are now mixed with brief moments of natiomal attention.

His vision blurred, his hearing faded, Lewis spends most of his days half lying, half sitting in the double bed which takes up most of the front room of his shotgun duplex.

The monotony is broken by a television set which drones on continously in the background and the calls of neighbors from the street as they walk by.

But occasionally, Lewis is whisked into a make-believe world. Recently he was flown to California for an appearance on the Mac Davis show where he was put up in a "fine hotel and given some nice-looking clothes."

He watched himself on the television special in his 12-footsquare room which is decorated with momentos of his past.

"It don't bother me a bit," Lewis said, talking about his varying life styles. "I guess I ain't like a whole lot of people. Everywhere I go I make friends; stay until my time is up. But when I come back, I'm just the same old Furry."

"Old Furry" is the one known to blues enthusiasts across the country. The last surviving member of W.C. Handy's band, the master of the bottleneck guitar lived and wrote his first tunes in an era that birthed the blues along a street immortalized in song.

"Sitting and drinking a little beer and whisky, that's all we did," Lewis reminisced. "Them days were real hard times, but the music helped a whole lot."

Born on a Greenwood, Miss., plantation in 1893, Lewis spent 44 years as a city street cleaner-a daytime job taken to supplement his nighttime music making.

All the while he was writing the blues-Beale Street style.

"I never knowed any of these songwriters or musicians from around in here to take lessons," he said. "They just played it in their head."

"Nobody ever learned me nothing," the fifth-grade dropout said. "I don't know how to read music."

Lewis said his writing style has not changed since he wrote his first song at the age of 15.

"You have to put it in verses, just straight up verses," he said. "And get them all to rhyme. That's the way I got my start."

And that's the way he will continue to do it.

"I ain't lost nothing," he said. "It's been a long time since I've written, but I'm going to get started again. It won't be hard once I make up my mind."

The next blues tune Lewis plans will be one with the most modern kind of sadness.

"I'm going to put out a song next about the price of coffee," he grinned. "I'll make up some verses, write it and it'll sound good, too."