Traveling Soul by Todd Mayfield Page B

us, and the boyfriends and husbands of these women wanting to kick our asses.”
    It is no secret that many insecure people find themselves drawn to the stage. The attention, spotlight, and applause help ease the pain of their insecurity and replace it with an often-fleeting sense of self-worth. My father was one such person. He knew a few things about how women treated performers, but the crowd’s reaction in Detroit was something else. Standing on that stage, he felt powerful and confident, maybe for the first time in his life.
    The stage offered him more than just sex and self-worth, though. As the crowd went wild in Detroit, he saw a way out of the constant hardship that had plagued him and his family throughout his life. The stage legitimized him. It raised his social status. It gave him the power to do what his father couldn’t or wouldn’t do—take care of his mother and siblings.
    It did another thing as well. As a loner, he had few close friends. The stage provided him support, adulation, and maybe even love. At the same time, it let him control those things. He could protect his insecurities by choosing how close he let others get. This didn’t always work in his favor when it came to personal relationships, especially romantic ones. But in that moment, it all seemed too good to be true. Until the end of the night.
    Coming down from the performance high, the Impressions realized that Dixon had disappeared with the $3,000 made at the door without offering them a cent—he “didn’t even buy us a hamburger,” Jerry said. Worse yet, when they slunk back to Chicago, a furious Abner chewed them out for missing
Bandstand Matinee
. They tried to explain, but Abner didn’t want to hear it. Of course he never authorized their extended stay in Detroit. They’d been duped, exploited, and taught a hard lesson aboutshow business. My father catalogued these disappointments. He hated someone taking advantage of him, and he studied ways to make sure it didn’t happen again.

    Back in Chicago before the next tour began, the Impressions played several of Herb Kent’s sock hops. “Curtis was so broke in those days, his guitar didn’t even have a back,” Kent said. “Whenever you saw him, he was always facing you, because he didn’t want people to see the back of that guitar.”
    Curtis might have been broke, but it didn’t break him down. He spent most nights on the run, crashing either with friends or at Annie Bell’s. Staying with Annie Bell, however, meant submerging deeper into Spiritualist traditions. Before the Impressions left for Philadelphia, Annie Bell asked them to see a healer named Mrs. Washington and receive her blessing. “Mrs. Washington was a very hip old lady and we did it more out of respect for her than from the belief that it would do any good,” Jerry said.
    The little old lady prayed with the group, blessed some water in the name of God, and sprinkled it on Sam, Arthur, and Richard. Something changed when she got to my father and Jerry. She flung the rest of the water in their faces, ending the spectacle by throwing the cup at Jerry’s face. On the way out, my father muttered, “She sure did bless the hell out of us, didn’t she, man?” For all his soft-spoken seriousness, Dad always had a cutting, wry sense of humor.
    With Mrs. Washington’s odd blessing, and three St. Christopher medals hung around their necks to ward off evil spirits, the Impressions prepared for their longest promotional tour yet. They piled into their green Mercury station wagon—a gift from Vee-Jay—and set off to perform for the famous Philadelphia DJ Georgie Woods.
    Woods had a special power to break records. He served as Dick Clark’s inside man, alerting Clark to Negro music worth featuring on
American Bandstand
. In such a way, Woods formed a link between race records and the mainstream pop market. Impressing him