Looking for My Grandfather in "Empty Bed Blues"

Does the Bessie Smith 45 I found in my grandfather's box of old love letters mean anything?

Many years ago, I wrote a book called “Old Records Never Die,” about my attempts to track down all the vinyl records I’d given away in the ‘90s. Not similar records, the exact copies I once owned. The Bon Jovi record with my high school girlfriend’s phone number written on the cover. My beloved copy of The Replacements’ Let It Be that I’m pretty sure still smells like weed.

My first draft was very, very long, and we ended up cutting a lot of it. The following is an excerpt from one of those lost chapters. It includes details of my visit to southern Florida, to visit my grandmother’s house and dig through her storage. I ended up uncovering a box of love letters, all written to my late grandfather by a woman named “Betty.” (Spoiler alert: My grandmother’s name is not “Betty.”) In the same box, I found a 45 of the Bessie Smith song “Empty Bed Blues.”

The story begins as I’m about to listen to the record for the first time, on my grandparents’ dusty record player, along with my Uncle Bob, an unemployed “lawn care specialist” who lives with his mom and chain-smokes cigarettes.

* * *

I slid the heavy 45 from its sleeve and onto the turntable mat, faded black and wrinkled. I twisted and pulled at knobs that looked important until something rumbled inside the old beast. It woke up angrily, not with a lazy yawn but a growl, like a bear that'd been poked in the stomach with a stick when it was just trying to get some goddamn sleep. The platter started to turn, slowly at first, then gradually gaining speed, purring happily as it realized that, fuck yeah, it could still do this. It still had moves, baby!

I picked up the tonearm and placed it down on the spinning black orb. The needle and the groove took a moment to get reacquainted. It was an uneasy reunion. The needle hissed and the record hesitated. There was a push and pull that could have gone either way. But then they reached a temporary truce—it wasn't love, just a willingness to try this one more time and see what happened, see if there was something between them worth salvaging.

The music burst out of the built-in speakers with startling clarity. Bessie’s voice felt more present and alive than my own.

I woke up this morning with a awful aching head

I woke up this morning with a awful aching head

My new man had left me, just a room and a empty bed

It was way too loud for the middle of the night, but I didn't turn it down. Mostly because I didn’t have a clue which of these knobs controlled the volume. But also, I was transfixed by it. The music did something to the house. All the shades of brown seemed suddenly vibrant, shaken awake by a noise it hadn’t heard in years. It was like a restored photograph from the 20s, where even though everything is still in black and white, you're seeing shades and details you never noticed before.

He's a deep sea diver with a stroke that can't go wrong

He's a deep sea diver with a stroke that can't go wrong

He can stay at the bottom and his wind holds out so long

This was not the song I’d been hoping for.

In my head, it was about a long-distance relationship, and how you can miss somebody so much that it physically hurts, and it doesn’t matter how much you talk to them on the phone or reassure each other that you’re still in love and everything’s going to be okay, at the end of the day, you sit in that bed and your body just throbs from missing them.

I remember sitting alone in an apartment and listening to Carol King's “So Far Away” and feeling like it was written specifically for me and my incredibly unique situation that was entirely unfair to me. I don’t even remember her name anymore. But I remember the beautiful self-pity of singing along to a line like “Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore,” and feeling justified that I was correct in being indignant that she was in a different city.

But “Empty Bed Blues” wasn’t the poetic melancholy of “So Far Away.” The empty bed in the title wasn’t a place to reflect on your feelings of emotional abandonment. It was mostly Bessie feeling sad that she wasn’t being fucked as regularly as she would have preferred.

He came home one evening with his beret way up high

He came home one evening with his beret way up high

What he had to give me, make me wring my hands and cry

“Man, this is great. I haven’t heard this in years.”

I turned to Bob. He was smiling and tapping along in perfect time with a blue diabetic foot.

“Where’d you find this?” he asked. “Was it with the letters?”

I nodded. “You’ve heard it before?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Dad played this all the time. Whenever he and Ma got into it.”

Bob burst into cacophonic laughter, like a garbage disposal after something metal had been dropped into it.

The song ended, and for a moment there was silence again. It seemed eerie this time, unwelcoming. I could hear Bob’s labored breath as he glared impatiently at me.

“Well, play it again. dammit,” he said. 

I dropped the stylus back at the record’s beginning, and there was less fighting this time. The needle and vinyl had found their rhythm.

He came home one evening with his beret way up high

He came home one evening with his beret way up high

What he had to give me, make me wring my hands and cry

Bob’s whole body was moving this time, undulating in ways that shouldn’t be possible for a man of his girth. And that smile, I hadn’t seen him smile like that since I was a preteen and he was telling me how “A Whiter Shade of Pale” had far too many layers of meaning and intellectual complexity for my unsophisticated mind to grasp so there was no point in him explaining it, but I should trust him, that shit was deep.

“You know what we should do?” he said, turning to me with a start. “We should drive to Michigan right now, and we should find Dad’s grave, and bury this record with him. What do you say?”

“He poured my first cabbage and he made it awful hot,” Bessie sang, somehow managing to be the least weird thing uttered aloud in that room.

“I don't think that’s something we’re allowed to do,” I said.

“Sure it is,” he said, gruffly. “It’s my dad’s grave. It’s your grandfather’s. What are they gonna say?”

“You want to just shove it in the ground a little, cover it with dirt, or...?”

“No, we’ll bring shovels."

The song ended and I kept out of my seat, happy for any distraction. I took my time with it, carefully reapplying the needle like I was making a surgical incision. The song started again, but I just stood there, watching the vinyl turn, studying it like I was waiting for something that would require my immediate attention.

“I don’t think I can do that,” I said, not looking up. “I’m sorry.”

There was no way I was traveling 1200 miles with my uncle to dig up my grandfather's grave so we could be sure he was buried with the record that reminded him of the girl whose cabbage he used to pour.

I looked back at Bob, and he was pouting. His arms were crossed, and the lack of any sexy undulating from his seat was a not-so-subtle form of protest.

“There’s nothing illegal about it,” he spat. “We’re not grave robbing or anything. It's only grave robbing if you take something. We’re not grave robbing, we’re grave leaving.”

He grumbled quietly to himself, and I kept playing and replaying the song, which did not prove to be especially revelatory. “Empty Bed Blues,” a classic of American blues though it may be, does not hold up to three dozen repeat listens while you listen quietly in a dark, humid living room that smells like wet dog and you watch a scowling old guy with jaundiced fingers chain smoke.

It's not that I wanted to hear the song again. But I kept waiting for something to happen, for it to spark something in Bob or me. I know it's possible. I've witnessed it firsthand. You put on a record, and by the end of side one, you’re telling secrets you’d never thought you’d share.

I wanted to talk about why my grandfather held onto this record for so many years. Even after his relationship with Betty fell apart and he moved on and married somebody else, there was something about “Empty Bed Blues” that resonated. Was it just one of those songs that happened to be on the radio at the right time, and you hear it at that perfect moment when your heart is breaking, and you think, This song understands me in ways I didn't know it was possible to be understood, but then you hear it again 20 years later, and you’re like, “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I ever thought Billy Vera wasn’t crap?”

This record was important enough that my grandfather held onto it. He kept it with him, hidden in his home, through marriage and several kids and a dozen grandkids, just in case he needed to be reminded of what it felt like to have his heart cave in. Or watch somebody else’s heart cave in and know you were responsible. Or whatever actually happened between him and Betty.

I wanted to dissect “Empty Bed Blues” like it was scripture, giving it the lyrical complexity of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” I was convinced it was one of the greatest and saddest love songs ever written, just by being in the same shoebox as a bunch of love letters to my grandfather.

I hoped that Bob and I would talk like we used to talk. Or even better, like two adults this time. When I was a kid, I'd bonded with Bob over music like I'd never been able to bond with other adults—certainly none of the other adults in my family.

He once told me that the backup singer on “Gimme Shelter,” the one who sang about it being “just a shot away,” was pregnant when she walked into the studio. But while singing those lyrics, she’d had a miscarriage.

“A dead baby just plopped out of her, right on the studio floor,” Bob told me, blowing my 10-year-old mind. “You could see it clear as day.”

I had no reason to doubt him. When somebody older than you, ostensibly wiser than you, who’s smoking Winston Unfilters like somebody who has lived life in ways you can't imagine, you just assume everything coming out of his mouth is true.

“That’s it right there,” he said as we listened, punching the air with a pudgy finger. “That’s the note when it probably happened.”

So I thought maybe, when I got a little older, this would evolve into us becoming musical peers. Instead of him lecturing me about what the songs meant, we could talk about what they meant to both of us. 

Maybe if we listened to “Empty Bed Blues” enough times, I thought, it’d make us cross over into some new level of intimacy that'd always been out of reach. We would talk about his father, my grandfather, and what a miserable bastard he was, but also how we both missed him, sometimes achingly so, and we’d tell stories about our private moments with him—they’d just come flooding out, from deep recesses in our brain that we didn’t realize were holding onto these old stories—and we’d talk about how little we actually knew about him, and we’d talk about how fucking weird it was that he’d held on to a record that reminded him of an ex-girlfriend from almost 100 years ago. Maybe we’d dissect the lyrics, looking for meaning in every stanza, every sexual double-entendre, but nothing would come of it—other than us coming out the other end feeling a little closer, a little more connected than we did before staying up too late to listen to old records.

Amazing things can happen when you're stuck in a room with a record player and somebody you barely recognize anymore.

But it didn’t happen that way. 

“I don’t know why he saved all that crap,” Bob sniffed, lighting another cigarette.

“Maybe he was just nostalgic,” I offered.

“Not me,” he barked. “The past is the past. Let it go, that’s what I say. You’re not getting it back, so what’s the point?”

He reached towards an end table and flicked on a small electric fan. It purred noisily to life, kicking up dust like a fog machine at the saddest glam rock concert ever.

We sat in the dark and said nothing. But it wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable or weird as it had been over the last few days. We just didn’t feel the need anymore to fill the silence with pointless chatter. We’d said everything that needed to be said. 

He give me a lesson that I never had before

He give me a lesson that I never had before

When he got to teachin' me, from my elbow down was sore

“You should visit more often, Ear-Ache,” Bob finally managed.

“Oh yeah,” I agreed. “Of course. I definitely will.”

We watched the lie float over us, like the marine layer drifting across Lake Michigan.