West End Oral History Project interview recording, 1993 November 20
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Speaker 1 | —But it's not going to be as tight as we thought it would be. At the end of each presentation, or the end of each session that we're going to have where someone speaks and gives some history of the co-op and this particular community, we will then go into the store and we're going to have some of the organic produce and commercial produce for you to taste if you've not had that chance or that opportunity, Edie Cohn will speech right after I finish giving you this whole litany of things that needs to be said. | 0:07 |
Speaker 1 | We will ring the bell on the inside each time, just like you're at the theater, each time we're ready to begin a new thing, or a new discussion, or a new presentation. | 0:39 |
Speaker 1 | I think that covers just about everything, as she leaves. | 0:51 |
Speaker 1 | Phil Nelson will be here between 1:00 and 1:30 [indistinct 00:01:08] where he's housed right now. Whatever he wants to do as far as talking, we are basically going to wing that. So thanks for your patience, and Edie should be back in approximately one minute with my encouragement. We thank Brother Yusef for coming out. He's always so kind, and he's always so generous to offer his time and this world class talent. I think we're ready to begin now. Ready Edie? | 1:01 |
Edie Cohn | Yeah, I'll try. | 1:42 |
Speaker 1 | All right, let's give her a hand. | 1:43 |
Edie Cohn | My name's Edie Cohn, and I guess you all know I've painted the mural. I want to talk, maybe in two different sections, about the mural and probably do that at different times. | 1:57 |
Edie Cohn | The first part that I'm going to talk about is what brought me to doing the mural from a philosophical view, or from what I felt was important, and then the other part of the talk that I want to do will be showing everybody the whole process I went through in terms of making the mural and painting it and stuff. I had this written out, so bear with me as I talk or say what I'm going to say. Getting up here and giving this talk in front of everyone is not my cup of tea. In fact, those of you who know me personally will be truly amazed that I'm even doing it. But I've been committed to this mural for a long time and I want to see it through to the end. This event, for me, marks the mural's completion. The final ribbon which surrounds a package that I've been working on for over a whole year of my life. | 2:16 |
Edie Cohn | To explain why I did it, I'd like to share a Jewish tale with you. This is a quote I found in the Herald Sun last December, it was from an article written by a man named Joe Moran of the Carolinas Church World Council. The article pertained to American Aid for Starving Children in Africa. I was moved by it and felt it said everything I am trying to accomplish with this mural, with the Homeless People Project I'm working on, and with the oral history program that we have set up for this afternoon. Now, this is a quote that I really like. | 3:23 |
Edie Cohn | "One day, an old rabbi asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and the day had begun. 'Could it be,' asked one of the students, 'When you can see an animal in the distance and tell whether it's a sheep or dog?' 'No.' Answered the rabbi. Another asked, 'Is it when you can look at a tree in the distance and tell whether it's a fake tree or a peach tree?' 'No.' Answered to the rabbi. 'Then when is it?' The pupils demanded. 'It is,' he told them, 'When you can look on the face of any woman or man and see that it is your sister or brother. Because if you cannot see this, then it is still night.'" | 4:09 |
Edie Cohn | If you look at this mural, you must agree that it is truly as bright as the eye can stand. I think when I painted it, I was consciously trying to bring light into this neighborhood, into this southern city, and into this country. The Civil Rights days are 30 years behind us, but where is all the daylight it was supposed to bring? Yes, there is sunlight. The sun is rising in the sky, but why is it not higher? Why is it not brighter? | 5:00 |
Edie Cohn | When I painted this mural, I was trying to push that sun up higher, trying to make this world brighter. I wanted for all of us to look on the face of any woman or man and see that it is our sister or brother. That's what I wanted to share. I guess I could just briefly talk about some of the time stuff that it took me to do the mural. I've been working on this mural for approximately a whole year, as I said earlier. Last fall, Phil Nelson and I went to some different food markets—What's the word that I'm trying to think of? | 5:37 |
Speaker 2 | Farmer's markets. | 6:34 |
Edie Cohn | Farmer's markets! That's the word, yeah. We went to several farmer's markets we went to the one in Raleigh, and we went to the one in Carrboro. We took a lot of photographs, and it was through those photographs that I compiled a picture, did a big drawing, and then transferred it to the wall. Anyways, the part of doing the drawing and transferring it onto the wall took five months. It was a really long process over a long period of time. People would ask me how I was doing it, and I'd say, "Well, I'm almost done with the drawing." It didn't seem like much, but it really was a big project, just getting the initial drawing done. | 6:35 |
Edie Cohn | Doing the drawing part was like 50 hours worth of work, and then it took me another 50 hours to turn the drawing into paper that I transferred onto the wall and stuff. When I started painting, it took about 200 hours to work on. It was spread over long period of time because there was only special circumstances in which I could paint. I could only paint in the morning before the sun hit the wall, because the glare was just too bright. I would not have been painting at this time of day unless it was a really cloudy day and not about to rain. | 7:19 |
Edie Cohn | There was so many other things I was doing, so I could only devote maybe one or two mornings a week every week. I guess at this point, I'll stop and we're waiting for Phil Nelson to arrive, but he has, and he's someone who has got me into this job, and who put up the scaffolding, and has done a tremendous amount of work with the co-op. He's not here yet, so if Larissa doesn't mind, would you like to come and say a few words? Now, the rest of this afternoon, there's going to be various speakers here that are going to talk about what this neighborhood has been like in the past, and what it's like now, and what everybody's hopes are for the future. | 7:56 |
Edie Cohn | We have a man here from Documentary Studies, Paul Ortiz, he's going to be recording all of the talks that people give throughout the day because we want to keep for history, our talks, what we say today so that our children, and our children's children will someday know about what things that have happened in this neighborhood and stuff. This is just one little step in that direction. Paul, you might want to speak after Larissa, just to sort of tell people about what you're doing. Is that okay? Let's have Larissa, who's lived in this community for 10 years now. | 8:50 |
Larissa | I wanted to ask all of you to give Edie Cohn a big hand of applause. I think you can see that she is an unusual artist and one who's given very much back to the community and I hope that this mural will last as long as the last one and keep communicating that we are all brothers, White and Black and all colors, all ages and religions. I'm here because I do live in the neighborhood around the food co-op. I also happen to be on city council and I try to represent this community, the West End area as much as I can on city council. And I did start my campaign right here in front of the food co-op about two and a half years ago and I'll be on council for two more years. And I know most of you, but if there's other folks who I don't know, I'd love to meet you. | 9:34 |
Larissa | I'm unusual on city council. I'm the only one who rents my home. I think I'm the only one who lives in an integrated neighborhood. I'm sure I'm the only one who, besides Frank Hyman, who is a member of the food co-op. And so I think I represent an unusual viewpoint. The reason why I'm on city council is because I got started working in this neighborhood to try to develop a neighborhood association. We got a park for children, we got a land trust going, which helps people to buy homes so they can get some ownership in this community and help our children have a good place to grow up and to have some control over where their money goes. And it's those values that I think the co-op also espouses, to have some control over where your money goes and how your community is shaped. | 10:47 |
Larissa | And I want to pay some respects to other people who helped me and still helped me. And that is Juanita McNeil in the West End Community Center has been very important to this community and very important to my being able to get some things done on city council. And I want to talk about how maybe you can get involved a little more. The city and I on city council can only do as much as you all let us do, both because you vote for us and also because you bring forward the ideas and the inspiration for us to do things. And so I'm trying, on city council, to support what the West End Community Center is doing, what the food co-op and other groups are doing in this community. | 11:37 |
Larissa | And I think that as a neighborhood resident and if you all can join with me, we can in fact try to develop decent housing for people, try to provide opportunities for our children and ultimately we can help eliminate some of the problems that we see in Durham. But we still have a long ways to go in this community. As I say, it's one of the few integrated communities and I see that throughout Durham we can contribute a lot by saying that Black people and White people can work together successfully. They can build strong neighborhood organizations, they can build strong community centers and they can build strong institutions like the food co-op. | 12:28 |
Larissa | And so that's really the message that I would like to encourage you to help me spread on city council and to encourage you to get involved in this institution, the food co-op and others around the community that are making a difference. I know that I didn't quite do what I was supposed to do in terms of the oral history project, but I think the speakers who come after me will tell a little bit more about the history of this community. I've only lived here 10 years and I feel that's a short time compared to people like Brother Yusef, who you heard from earlier. Thanks very much. | 13:26 |
Paul Ortiz | Hi, as Edie said my name is Paul Ortiz and I come down here from Olympia, Washington and I was a member of our food co-op in Olympia. So it's wonderful to come all the way across the country and find that these type institutions are being sustained and nurtured by communities, because food co-ops I think are the backbone of trying to build a community and trying to create a space where people from all of colors and religions and backgrounds can get together [indistinct 00:14:52] of the day. | 14:23 |
Paul Ortiz | The project that I'm working on right now is at the Center for Documentary Studies and it is a collaborative project working between a number of schools, North Carolina Central, Duke University, Memphis State, other historically Black colleges. And the name of the project is Behind the Veil documentary African American Life during the Jim Crow period. And what we're trying to do is try to get experiences of African American people and trying to get us to tell them their stories about what it was like to live during that period of time. | 14:55 |
Paul Ortiz | And that's one of the reasons that we decided to get the project together because we realized that we need to get these experiences down to make them part of the historical record before we lose what that experience was like. There are so many stories and they're very important for us to get together to document. So what we're doing is we're going around to various towns throughout the south and asking people, "Hey, do you want to share your stories?" And we're trying to do as many interviews, oral history interviews as we possibly can. | 15:33 |
Paul Ortiz | And so what I'm doing today is hoping to make this celebration part of the record and also to invite any of you, if you're interested in contributing to our oral history project to just come over and talk with me and I'd be happy to come out and do an interview with you. And we're just trying to add as much as we can to the record basically. Actually I don't have any planned talking. Edie just said come down and tape this. She didn't tell me how to speak, but thank you very much. (applause) | 16:11 |
Speaker 1 | All right. So what we'll do now is take break, stay outside, you can walk— [INTERRUPTION 00:17:00] | 16:56 |
Speaker 3 | We're going to start talking again a little bit. I thought that it might be interesting for people to know who some of the speakers will be this afternoon. Ernestine Bynum will be here. Let's see, what time will that be? About 1:30. Kenneth Murray Muhammed will be here about 2:15. Billy Stevens will be coming by and Constance Walker was going to be here or she was going to have someone substitute for her. | 17:05 |
Speaker 3 | And we're hoping Brother Yusef will give a bit of a talk too. And around quarter to two and all of our time is sort of messed up here because we're so lazy to starting. But we were going to have some music again in the middle of the afternoon. And then starting around four we would start up with the music again. But this time Billy Stevens would be here and he would be playing with Brother Yusef and the drummer, who's my son Travis. | 17:42 |
Speaker 3 | So I guess Michael you can say what you want to say now. Okay. Michael will say something in a few minutes, he's not quite ready. If there's anybody else who's from the community here or who has been interested in the progress or watching the mural being made, please feel free to offer to come up and talk a little bit about what it's like to live in this neighborhood or just your impressions of the mural or the co-op or whatever you want to talk about. Okay? | 18:11 |
Speaker 4 | Well first of all Phil, I'd just like to tell you that I really do appreciate you coming. I know that for me, when I first came to the co-op, I didn't have a real clear idea about what it was and what it meant. I mean, I could definitely intellectualize it and find a place where I thought I could fit in. And you were one of the first faces that I could truly say that I found that I wanted just to mess with. Every time that you came in the store, it was just my job to try to get your attention and to say something cynical. And I still want to do that, even no matter where I end up in life because I know I found someone that I respect and I love. I recently attended a co-op conference in West Virginia and that turned out to be a life-changing experience, not life-threatening, as I was going to say. | 19:24 |
Speaker 4 | I learned that this movement is very much a collective and there are so many different types. I mean, I think you'd be shocked to know that they're bankers, they're Republicans, which I'm thinking about and just a number of things that taught me that human beings are as diverse as they always will be. And I'm going to do a quick sort of verse of a song that I learned a long time ago. And it represents, for me, it represents life, it represents death, it represents all the movements somehow or whatever some of the movements are that we go through in life. Everything must change. And the presentation is a t-shirt which Catherine is wearing and she'll just walk out right quick so you can get a real quick view of it. Okay, well she's going to bring you one. Well, let's try this song right quick. It's going to be quick and it's going to be easy. I haven't entertained for anybody in years so I guess I don't expect any money. So it's cool. (applause) [INTERRUPTION 00:23:44] | 20:16 |
Speaker 1 | —Was when were we going to choose the mural. And you had a very important part of that. You've had a very important part of my life and I know that I'll have to buy one of these or steal them just because it's very much—And I hope, I told Catherine today that maybe we should frame this for you, but I don't know, what do you think? It's kind of stupid but with all the heartfelt wishes and best wishes for you, all of us here care very much for you and we don't have a choice. There's nowhere we can turn without something that you've touched. And I once again, thank you for touching my life and the life of everyone here. Thank you. (applause) | 23:45 |
Speaker 5 | And then I went to the food and that's the two things that have been really important to me in Durham. And I know for a fact that over those 10 years that Phil Nelson was such an important part of the co-op and is an important part of the co-op, this building would not be here. This food co-op would not be here. We would not be here gathered together if it were not for Phil Nelson and the many other people who volunteered and put in so much time into the co-op. So I just wanted to pay a personal tribute and give you my thanks. | 24:20 |
Speaker 6 | I could do nothing more than agree with that. And Phil's always been critical. I've been kind of in and out so I feel a little funny being here. But I joined the co-op when there wasn't really a co-op, it was a the buying club over on East campus and I was a produce buyer for about six, eight months I think. And people met for a couple hours once or twice a week. I guess I'm really kind of fuzzy on it. It was about 16 years ago and picked up organic flowers and different things and produce. | 25:16 |
Speaker 6 | And then we moved into the building on Broad Street and I remember Michael and I'm sure he's involved with this building, filling up the floors and some of the old buildings that they pulled down over off Pettigrew Street and off east off West Main Street, some of those old mansions. And Michael putting the floor down in the new food co-op over on Broad Street and I know [indistinct 00:26:21]. Thank you for all your hard work. | 25:50 |
Edie Cohn | Started out. We have a guest with us today. This is Ernestine Bynum. And Ernestine has lived in this neighborhood all of her life. And she and I were talking one day as I was working on the mural about the history of this building that I was painting on. And she told me a lot of really interesting, fascinating thinking things that I found that way. And today I'd like her to just talk about her experiences of growing up in this neighborhood and I will probably ask her a lot more questions than she wants to deal with because I'm really fascinated with it. So let's start out with Ernestine talking. | 26:34 |
Ernestine Bynum | Good afternoon. As far as I can remember, this building goes back to 1925. My mother started working in 1926 and I'm 48 years old. So she worked here, worked up here till early part of the seventies. This building was at that particular time was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Blalock. Okay. Mr. Blalock has passed on but his wife is still living. I talked with her this morning and she wanted to come, but she's been little under the weather. | 27:21 |
Ernestine Bynum | As I can remember as a little girl when I first started coming up here, believe it or not, Whites came in on the front. The Blacks had to come in through the side door on Carol Street and they used to see some of the best hotdogs in town, some of the best food in town at that particular time Forest Grill is right here for you all are sitting now. A lot of Duke students used to come over here and eat. Everybody thinks Duke is kind of quiet, but they used to fight and raise little hall, excuse me, right out here on Chapel Hill Street back during that time. | 27:55 |
Ernestine Bynum | This has been a wonderful community to live in. We've had a lot of problems over the years with drugs coming to the community, but we are trying real hard to get this community back to what it used to be. We used to have some of the most beautiful homes on these streets over here. As you go through, you look at them now, you would not believe it. But I remember as a little girl coming up how the rent people used to keep the houses up. The neighbors kept the houses up, the children couldn't play, their mother could leave you at home and go to work and wouldn't have to worry about you. Believe it not, this is way back then because my mother left us at home many a days in the neighbors watch us while she came here to work. | 28:36 |
Ernestine Bynum | I've had many meals here. My mother met a lot of people here, professional lawyers, doctors, all of used to come right here. And after they integrated the place, Black still prefer coming in the back and wouldn't come in the front. My mother was very well liked. She was one of the best cooks you could find back during that time. You wouldn't believe it. Best cook. Her sister started working here first and then she started working here. | 29:18 |
Ernestine Bynum | The people that she worked for, they were very nice people. They've done a lot of wonderful things for my family and just a lot and I was so glad to see when I saw her doing the painting, I just stopped one day, started talking to her, didn't even ask her her name. I was just surprised because this place has a lot of good memories of my mother working here. This is the way she made her living. My father died when I was in the ninth grade and this is how my mother kept food on the table and took care of us. | 29:46 |
Ernestine Bynum | And it was six girls. Six girls and no father in the home. My father died when I was in the ninth grade and I'm 48 years old right now. He was burnt to death about a couple of weeks before Christmas. I'll never forget. It was December the 18th. It was cold. Very, very cold. And the people here, the people that own the place, the people [indistinct 00:30:38] was very good to us.I'll never be able to forget this place. Never. It brings back a lot of good memories. And if my mother was living today, baby come up here and see this, she would be very proud. She would be very proud. And the questions you want to ask us, did I mess up? | 30:15 |
Edie Cohn | So you're saying that this building from when you first remember it was a restaurant and what was it called? | 31:03 |
Ernestine Bynum | It was called Johnny's Cafe. | 31:08 |
Edie Cohn | Johnny's Cafe. Okay. | 31:09 |
Ernestine Bynum | Used to have little jukebox, you come in and sit down and have draft beer. Hot meals, everything. And it's just well known the community and the people owned the building just like they were part of the community. And I found out that this morning, this place used to be a grocery store back in 1925 or before then. And I didn't even know that until today. | 31:14 |
Edie Cohn | So you were born probably in the late forties? | 31:39 |
Ernestine Bynum | I was born in 1945. | 31:39 |
Edie Cohn | Oh, middle forties. Okay. | 31:39 |
Ernestine Bynum | 1945. | 31:39 |
Edie Cohn | So you're saying in the twenties? | 31:39 |
Ernestine Bynum | Yes. This used to be a grocery store. And after that, around 1926 or somewhat like that, that's when the Blalocks started here, running this cafe. | 31:48 |
Edie Cohn | And that time was this [indistinct 00:32:04] in the twenties, do you think? | 31:59 |
Ernestine Bynum | No, it was not. Not that I can remember. | 32:05 |
Edie Cohn | So as far as you remember, it was always a Black community? | 32:06 |
Ernestine Bynum | Yeah, that's right. Except for I think where I live now, I lived in 700 block or south of Buchanan and in the 600 block in—When you got to 700 block where I live now on up was White. Our neighborhood was totally White. So it's a lot more mixed now than it used to be. And all back through here used to be White. Because I used to walk from Lyon Park School all the way across and I lived over in where Duke Laundry is right now. I lived in that area at one time and we used to have to walk from Lyon Park through this area. | 32:08 |
Edie Cohn | When the restaurant, Johnny's restaurant, is that what you're calling it? And you're saying that this building was big enough to serve two different areas. One for Black and one for White? | 32:47 |
Ernestine Bynum | That's right. | 32:59 |
Edie Cohn | Was it about equal size? The two areas? | 33:01 |
Ernestine Bynum | Yeah, but, well, not really. We only had booths on the Black side, on the White side they did have a few tables and on the Black side we didn't have that. We didn't have that at all. | 33:03 |
Edie Cohn | You didn't have a bar? | 33:14 |
Ernestine Bynum | Nuh-uh. We only had about a few booths and that was it. When we walked up to the place to order the food, you had to stand up. | 33:15 |
Edie Cohn | So at that time, were there waitresses and they wouldn't wait on you guys? | 33:21 |
Ernestine Bynum | Only thing was my mother was the cook and the waitress. | 33:26 |
Edie Cohn | She did it all. | 33:29 |
Ernestine Bynum | She did it all. She did it all. | 33:30 |
Edie Cohn | So when did integration come? Was that in the early sixties? | 33:36 |
Ernestine Bynum | Yeah, right in the early sixties. But we really never had any problems. We were [indistinct 00:33:53] the place stayed on about 10 o'clock, 11, 12 o'clock at night because my mother used to work the evening shift. She would come in at four and work from four to 12. So sit on at 12 o'clock at night and it wasn't any problem. She could walk, leave him, walk down the street from home. Didn't worry about anybody bother at all. But you can't do that today around here. | 33:42 |
Edie Cohn | So there wasn't any problem with crime during that time? | 34:11 |
Ernestine Bynum | No, it was not. Well really the West End basically start having a lot of crime back in—I think in the late eighties basically, when we started having a lot of crime because basically everybody over here knew each other. Like I said, you could play outside, your mother could go to work and leave you at home for the next day for the neighbor to watch you and you didn't have kids getting hurt or kids fighting them among themselves a lot. We just looked at each other over here. We really did. | 34:22 |
Edie Cohn | So the late eighties was that just general drugs that started coming into Durham? | 34:42 |
Ernestine Bynum | We really didn't have drugs in our area until, like I said, about 19, I guess 87, 88 or 89 or 90. That's when it got worse. For other drug houses that we have now. We didn't have them. And basically the problem is right now the drug house that we do have, these people is not even from over here. They're from other parts of town. | 34:50 |
Edie Cohn | Other parts of town? | 35:11 |
Ernestine Bynum | To come over here and sell their drugs. That is a reason about a year or so ago, we took it upon ourselves on Buchanan to get a drug thing started. We started out with about three people and we used to meet at—Can't remember the restaurant we used to meet at. And so we started, because it got to the point my grandson could not play out in the yard. So I said, well this got to go. So we formed our own little committee within three, two and a half months pretty much time we had cleaned up the South Buchanan of the drug area. We cleaned it up. | 35:12 |
Edie Cohn | What do you mean clean it up? | 35:43 |
Ernestine Bynum | We got the drug dealers off the streets. We got them out of the houses. We start talking with land trust about buying houses. We were getting on the rent, people out fixing up the houses. So it's pretty quiet over there now. It's a nice street to live on. It's like it used to be. | 35:45 |
Edie Cohn | How do you get a drug dealer on the house? | 35:56 |
Ernestine Bynum | What I did was basically I used to, every time I saw somebody on the street selling drugs, I would call the police. And that's what I did. I was going to say I'm on disability and I was at home every day. So what I would see, I would describe the clothes they have on, which house they would go to, what type of cars they were driving. I take down the license plates number and do stuff like that. Then we got together with the rest of community because we had to come together to get it done because we wanted our street back and we took it back. | 35:56 |
Edie Cohn | Wasn't it kind of scary? I mean weren't worried about getting tossed off or something? | 36:29 |
Ernestine Bynum | Well, my son was worried about me. Because I just went to the door one day and I told one person, I said, "If I catch you selling drugs in front of my house again, I'm going to kill you." And I used to walk out and speak to them. I had a lot of people that didn't speak to me, but that was fine. And then I was pretty well liked too in the community. Because my family's been over here, but quite some time my family's well known. So a lot of time I got information from people just like me.And I would pass the information to Lieutenant Martin Eddie Hunter. Sure, and they worked real well with us. I think we did a good job. And I'm very proud of us. Very proud. | 36:33 |
Edie Cohn | Well, I think that's really exciting. Okay, I'm going to get more out of Ernestine. Unless you're tired of talking. | 37:08 |
Ernestine Bynum | Maybe my sister can tell you a few things. She's a little older than I am. She's 50. Yeah. So that's the oldest one right there. | 37:21 |
Edie Cohn | So is she going to talk? Would she get up? | 37:33 |
Ernestine Bynum | Yeah. Come on. Her name is. Etta. | 37:35 |
Edie Cohn | Oh, Etta, did Constance Walker ask you to come. Okay, before I let you go, this is something talking about Constance Walker's another lady that I hope to have speak here, but she couldn't today. She's going to have Ernestine's sister, Etta, talk. Constance was talking about the civil rights case when people used to go downtown on marches. And it's something about one day they came back and they went into our restaurant before segregation or integration came about and got chased out with an ax? | 37:39 |
Ernestine Bynum | She might tell you a little bit about that. | 38:17 |
Edie Cohn | Okay, so we're going to have another speaker come out right now. This is Etta. This is Ernestine's sister. Older sister. | 38:17 |
Etta Bynum | Good afternoon. The only thing was what she was talking about after we did the sit-ins and rocks downtown on this, where you're sitting now, used to be for its grill. And they had a window on the outside and we could order from the window because we couldn't go in. And a lot of times when we were coming from the recreation center or something, we would stop by to get french fries and sodas to go home and watch The Late Show. And we came in one night and we walked in, we just said we were going in because we were so worked up from the sit-ins and all. And when we came, walked in, he ran us out with an ax and it was just sort of things like that. But both these two places on this site here have been very useful to the community as far as getting food in this building where my mother worked. | 38:29 |
Etta Bynum | She worked there for years, as far as I can remember. And on the same site as you go in the door over here was the laundry that was the annex across the street. Jack Street, Jack Rabbit Laundry. And a lot of people from downtown at lunchtime would come here because they had balanced meals at a very low price at the time. And I think you would get a meal for a dollar and a half. And the hotdogs were the best. They were the best on this side of town. And if my mother was living today, I think she would be really grateful to know that this was still feeding out to the community in the way of food. And I think this is a great picture here. And the co-op has been quite an asset to the community. | 39:27 |
Etta Bynum | And Constance Walker I are very good friends. We have been friends for a long time from kindergarten through college and all. And right now we are working with the Lyon Park Community Center, the youth in that aspect. And we are having quite a bit of cooperation with them and the community center down here. It seems right now that they're sort of divided, but not really. But we are working together to get that because when the grand opening of the co-op, we had both groups to come up. And tomorrow I think the both groups are going to be in the Christmas parade. | 40:26 |
Etta Bynum | So we are working, we are really working and striving to make the kids on this side of town see what it's like to have some of the things that you want, if not all of it. But we tell them when we were your age, we came to Lyon Park every Friday and Saturday night and we had a dance. And at 10:30 when it was out, we came home. But now the kids want to go to clubs and stand on the corner and do, and so we had a pizza party for both groups, the primary and the intermediates. And the other week we carried them to Hillside and Jordan High football game. And we are doing things constantly like that, working with them to show them that somebody up here cares about you. And so I just want to say thank you for your help in bringing the children into things in the neighborhood. | 41:08 |
Edie Cohn | Thank you, Etta. Is There anything else here that would like to talk about the community or their experiences or the past about the community? No. If you'd like to wait just a minute or two, I'm going to go inside and get some of the materials that I used to make the mural. If you're interested in hearing about the process, I'll go in and get my supplies that I brought along and then I'll talk about that. Okay. Does that sound like a good thing for next? Okay. Here's a drawing that I've worked on for quite a few months, and this is what I went from to paint the mural. Well, let me just get my backpack. Well that would probably be helpful. Stand there and hold it up too. Yeah, you can. Okay. I started out taking all in these photographs and this is the photographs of [indistinct 00:43:49]. | 42:09 |
Edie Cohn | Okay. Right now I just show you how I did it. Took all of these photographs, you want to look at some of them? And I went through them and I decided who, what kind of people did I want to include in this picture? And I had a projector that I could project these photographs onto the wall. And then I traced them onto this piece of paper, these photographs I projected onto the wall and this piece of paper was taped onto the wall. And so I traced the pictures with proportions of everybody. Here, you can look at it. | 43:32 |
Edie Cohn | And see, depending on how close the projector was to the wall, depending on how big the person would be on the piece of paper. And so I kept on adjusting the sizes of people so that they would look appropriate for where they were on the wall. So once I got this drawing done, I cut the drawing into little six inch squares, maybe turn it around just to show people, just turn around there. Okay. Yep. You go that way, you go that way. | 44:29 |
Edie Cohn | See the whole thing. I cut it into pieces and in the projector would only take a piece of paper that was six by six inches. So once I put each piece into the projector and then I projected it onto a larger piece of paper. Okay, well each one of these pieces of paper right here is one of these sections and this particular piece folds out. Let's try to hold it, open it up. Whoa. Okay. Now do you recognize—Can you stop? Here, let's go closer to the wall. Can you see where that came from? I have 15 of these pieces of paper made up this mural. | 45:04 |
Speaker 7 | Did you hang these up on the wall? | 46:03 |
Edie Cohn | Yeah, I take them up. Okay. But once I drew the lines on there, I had to put tiny holes into the lines. Will somebody hold this for a second? Okay. Okay. Oh, where's my photograph at? Ah, thank you. How did you know That's what I was looking for. Okay. This I think is called a pouncing wheel. It's a wheel that's got these sharp points on the edge, and if you run it along a paper, it'll poke little holes in it. And this side, this insulation thing is what I put underneath the paper to poke the holes through. It's protecting the table and it made it easy to push into. So this was underneath that paper. | 46:04 |
Edie Cohn | And my daughter, Rachel, who you saw earlier, I guess she was nine at that time, she did most of this process of punching all the holes in those 15 pieces of really large paper. Okay. So once I got it up on the wall, taped it onto the wall, then doused it, I used this powder, this cloth has got a powder in it, a blue powder. And I whacked that all along the lines. And then when you take it down, you can't see—Well, you see that blue line there? There'd be a blue line there. But because I knew this process was going to take me forever, I took crayons and I went along all of those lines. So three months from now, those lines would still be there. And that's the big, that's how— | 47:07 |
Edie Cohn | I wasn't working from a colored drawing. I was working from a black and white drawing. I had the photograph to [indistinct 00:00:11], but then I started to put the color on. And initially I thought, well, I could paint all the basic colors on to the mural and then I'll go back and I'll put the detail in it, but having never done a mural before, when I did get up there and I started doing it, I realized that I had to paint it as was going to look like pretty much the first time around. The paint that I use is a really high quality paint, but one of its properties is that it dries real fast. It dries within just a few minutes so I had to work fast and I had to constantly get out more paint because the stuff I had had dried up. But it was a totally new experience for me using this painting medium because it was unlike any other medium that I had used. | 0:01 |
Edie Cohn | If you do an oil painting, oil paints take two, three days to actually dry that you can touch it and you don't get it on your fingers. But this is 5, 10 minutes and it's dry. So I had to sort of develop a new technique, a new style for myself to paint. And then also the walls, you can see it's got tremendous amount of texture. How do you get detail into that texture? Often some of the faces would fall right on some big gouges and cracks in the wall and stuff and those parts, Phil and I had to fill in with some putties so then we'd smooth it out a bit, so there wouldn't be really deep holes. But I just kept at it. It was just a matter of working and working and working till I was satisfied. | 1:00 |
Edie Cohn | I had so much fun with the color. It was just so delightful for me to just have that bright orange there and think, now what would really clash next to it? What really bright color could I put next? And so then I got to the pink shirt. Her shirt wasn't really pink. It was a white shirt she had on, but I made it that color. And then the tablecloth, what would go with orange and pink, purple? And I just had a lot of fun with it. It was a real learning experience for me. If all of this had been small paintings, there would've been parts of this painting I would've thrown away a long time ago. I would've just said, "Well, this isn't working," and throw it away. But I couldn't because it was up there in front of everybody and it wasn't going to go away. So I had to keep added and added and added and added and added until it finally worked. Does anybody have any questions? Yeah? | 1:50 |
Speaker 1 | [indistinct 00:02:57] the face of the girl in totally different setting here and just use parts of the different pictures? | 2:56 |
Edie Cohn | Right. Basically, I had pictures of particular people, but they were all in different settings and so I had to pull everything together. What is between this person and that person? I made up all of that stuff. Or I had maybe photographs of bins of vegetables that I transplanted into different areas. The tying together of all of these different people was a real big, big job in itself. And also, I had to deal with composition the whole time, making the movement of the picture something that you wanted to look at and that your eyes wouldn't stray off. If I would've made a table that would've gone straight across off to the edge of the mural, that wouldn't have worked because your eye would've traveled off and gone off into space. I had to make things that would stop your eyes from moving away. | 3:09 |
Edie Cohn | Up here in the corner, the wave device and the red trees up there, the orange trees, all of that was part of the composition that I was dealing with. Trying to make it so that your eye wouldn't travel off in that direction, would stop and come back in. The umbrella being there, that's a stopper two. Okay. | 3:57 |
Speaker 2 | I guess the first part where the pictures came from. | 4:17 |
Edie Cohn | Farmer's markets at Raleigh. A Saturday afternoon also in Carrboro. Phil took pictures in Carrboro and I took pictures in Raleigh. And then I also took some pictures at EK Powe of some kids. I felt like I wanted to have kids in the mural and I didn't have any good kids. The kids that are right here, I didn't pose them in that pose. I went into this playground and the kids were running around and then they started noticing me and then they all started wanting to have their picture taken. And at one point, four little kids just lined up like that. I only had room for two of them, but they just lined up like that and I go, "Wow, I should include them." Oh, I also went to Durham High and took some photographs of teenagers because I wanted teenagers to be part of this project too. | 4:24 |
Edie Cohn | I changed the clothes on some of the people. Some of the people weren't wearing these outfits, but I never changed the clothes on someone who I thought would be offended by my changing it. The man here with a dark brown shirt. I like a lot of color. And normally, if I would've just had my own fun, I would've put a wild Hawaiian shirt on them, but I figured he probably would've been offended by that. And so I tried to keep that in mind when I worked on their clothes that some of the teenagers, like these girls, I doubted if they would care what they would wear. So I tried to keep that in mind. And in terms of anybody recognizing themselves on the mural, nobody has done that yet. Nobody's come up to me and said, "What?" And I always thought that if anybody really was unhappy about being on this mural, that I could so easily it. I could turn them into a different person if that ever became a problem. | 5:22 |
Speaker 2 | So these kids don't know that they're— | 6:22 |
Edie Cohn | Not that I know about. No. | 6:29 |
Speaker 2 | Might be surprised some day. | 6:30 |
Edie Cohn | Yeah. Yeah. | 6:30 |
Speaker 3 | Do you know who they are? | 6:30 |
Edie Cohn | No. | 6:38 |
Speaker 2 | I recognize the man. | 6:39 |
Edie Cohn | Oh you do? What about the lady way back there selling the flowers, way up high in the pink? Because she's from there too. | 6:42 |
Speaker 2 | [indistinct 00:06:54]. | 6:50 |
Edie Cohn | The baskets right behind him? | 6:57 |
Speaker 2 | He's all the way behind the baskets. | 6:58 |
Edie Cohn | Yeah, yeah. He was somebody that was at the Raleigh farmer's market and I was really impressed with him. And it was real, real important to me to get through the sense of authority and stuff that I felt he projected sort of a presence that I really thought was really special about him. And he was one of the figures that I'm not sure I did capture that. I tried. I think I probably did his face over 50 times. | 7:04 |
Edie Cohn | But part of the problem I had in capturing his face was in all of these photographs, the sunlight is coming from different directions. And when I put this mural up, I had to decide the sun is coming from one direction and I had to transpose that on everybody's face and that's a real trip. That's not easy, especially when you're talking about portraiture because portraiture, it's tough to begin with. And if you're having to do everything just the opposite of what you see, it's murder. And I think maybe that's why I had so much trouble with him because the lighting is all different. | 7:31 |
Speaker 3 | The brown shirt is such a contrast to everything else that it really stands out. And the watermelons are really my favorite part of the mural. | 8:07 |
Edie Cohn | Yeah, yeah. | 8:07 |
Speaker 4 | I think it's nice too because it captures a lot of different [indistinct 00:08:32] | 8:07 |
Edie Cohn | Right, right. Oh, I guess I should add one more thing. This is something that I haven't really told many people about, but if you ever read this brochure that's inside about the process that I did with the mural, the black bird over there, that to me symbolizes my presence here in the mural. I had really wanted it to be a raven because I really like ravens, but when I got my bird book out, I found out there were no ravens in North Carolina so I had to tone them down to a smaller bird, a black bird. But that's why he's there. Oh, and did everybody see the praying mantis? | 8:39 |
Speaker 4 | No. | 9:23 |
Edie Cohn | You haven't seen the praying mantis? There's a praying mantis there. A real good one, but it's hard to see. It's on an orange area. You saw. You saw. You were there. Yeah. Yeah. In the original drawing, there's no praying mantis. When I was working on painting one day, a praying mantis actually flew and landed on the mural up in the dark green tree area. I thought, wow, this must mean I need to have a praying mantis in this mural. And I already packed all my things and I couldn't paint him in anywhere, but I got down in my car and I got my notebook out that I keep my mileage records on and I drew the praying mantis while I had him up there. I climbed back up the ladder and did a fast draw. So that praying mantis is from my sketch from a praying mantis. And I really like praying mantises a lot so that's why. That's why [indistinct 00:10:39]. | 9:23 |
Edie Cohn | I was on TV. I think it was last weekend on Urban Hester's show. And they highlighted my work that I've been doing on a homeless people project. I've been interviewing homeless people, doing drawings of them for a couple of years. And they also came here and they took pictures of the mural and they did a story too on the drawings that I did at the hospital. I do drawings of babies at a regional hospital. But the guy who took the pictures—I didn't come when he came here. The photographer, he got my praying mantis. It was on TV. I was quite impressed that he had found it. Does anybody have any more questions? No? | 10:38 |
Speaker 2 | I got a question. Would it ever happen that you were doing a project and in advance, you knew where the sun was going to come from and so when you went out to take pictures, you try to set up your models so that they would have the sun coming from the same— | 11:24 |
Edie Cohn | Well, if you had your act together, that's the way to do it. But I don't think I'd ever be there. I'm a real strong believer in having people and settings as natural as they are. I'd love to take photographs. And the drawings that I do and the paintings that I do, they're all unposed situations. I like to capture things the way they're at that moment. And that would cause troubles like what you're saying I could avoid and that I had problems with this. But that's the way I work. Hi. Does anybody else want to talk? Huh? You want to talk? Okay. You can talk right after her. Okay? Okay. | 11:46 |
Speaker 5 | Much of what Edie said in the introduction that not only is this an unveiling of the mural, but it's a celebration of people of the community, of unity. And a few weeks back, I got part of Phil's greeting card on behalf of the co-op finish and then we put up another board so that anybody that wanted to could put their greetings and well wishes and healing powers on it. And so very conveniently today, the second installment of your card feels ready. And we just want you to remember you're in our hearts, you're in our thoughts. We love you and keep on getting well. | 12:52 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | Thank you. | 13:53 |
Edie Cohn | Our next speaker is Kenneth Murray Muhammad. He has come from Raleigh to come and talk to us. He's been very much a part of this community through its mosque, and I think [indistinct 00:14:24]. | 13:53 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | Peace be unto you. And it is certainly a pleasure being here with you today Ms. Cohn, and wonderful people. | 13:53 |
Edie Cohn | Closer, we can't hear you. | 14:37 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | It's very good to be here with you today and such a great day. Lovely. Such a beautiful work here. And the last time I saw this wall, there was a black and white figure on this wall. I believe it was on this wall quite a while ago. And that represented something that was going on in that particular time of two people trying to get together and bring a community together and be oneness, have oneness in that particular community. I would like to say that I came to here approximately about 20 years ago and that particular time, we bought the property that you see there called the masjid down the street. I was [indistinct 00:15:31] particular property and at that particular time I was a minister of the Nation of Islam. However I've evolved from that into just Muslim now. | 14:38 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | And so this particular time, say 20 years ago, the neighborhood was very, very, very rough. It was very rough. And the Upstairs Downstairs club was just down the street. It was a place called the Upstairs Downstairs Club. And probably there had been some murderers in the Upstairs Downstairs Club and the city was all upset and they closed the club down and they didn't want anymore of that sort of thing in the neighborhood. So we came in and we brought our little act in and our little work, which was Islam. And in the process, we bought the building. And a little later on, we had what you call a bean pie. Bean pie was a very famous pie, very famous pie all over America. And we made that pie famous. So we needed a place. We didn't have quite enough room in the restaurant. We had the masjid, we had the fish market and we had the restaurant there. | 15:42 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | But we didn't have quite enough room so we rented the building, this particular building here, and we put a bakery in it. At that particular time, it became a bakery. We pushed our bean pies. We had various restaurants throughout the city, one on Federal Street, one down on—I can't think of the name of the street right now, but we go on. But we had about three locations of the restaurant. In the process, we pushed the bean pie and we occupied this particular place. | 16:55 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | After that, after we closed down the bean pie operation, a good little brother in Brother Yusuf Salim, Yusef Salim, and Brother Billy Stevens came through and that was what's called the Salam Restaurant. They took it over and it became the Salam Restaurant. And they did a tremendous job there, playing a lot of good music and having a lot of Indian cuisine. Very, very good. The people from Duke, people all around. And the neighborhood really cleaned up and the neighborhood came together and it was the very beautiful thing. | 17:27 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | Then I guess we're going through another phase and then we are looking at right now what you see is the co-op at and it is a very productive event, productive situation that's going on. It's very beautiful. And it's so good to have this beautiful mural on that particular building. I think it represents now production, people being fed. It's representing a beautiful thing and the artist has done a beautiful job. And I do a little drawing myself. This is outside this is beautiful and I'm very happy to be here just to say a few words about that. And most certainly, I take my hat off to you, my cap off to you and to the good work that the people are doing in the area. Please keep it up. Peace. (applause) | 18:10 |
Edie Cohn | Can I ask you a question? | 19:04 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | Certainly. | 19:04 |
Edie Cohn | You were talking about when you had a bakery here. Did I miss you say what years that was? | 19:07 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | Oh, that's been about 15 years ago. I can't tell you exactly. It must have been about— | 19:18 |
Edie Cohn | Late '70s? | 19:21 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | Yes. In the '70s. Probably in the '70s. Something like that. '75? About '77. Something like '77, '76, right around that time. Then Billy came in and Yusuf came in with the place. I guess '79. We kept it for a couple of years. They came in and I imagine they kept it for about five to six years or something like that. And then [indistinct 00:19:56]. | 19:30 |
Edie Cohn | Did you grow up in Durham? | 19:55 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | No, I'm native—I grew up in Baltimore, between Baltimore and Washington. | 20:03 |
Edie Cohn | So what year did you come to Durham? | 20:05 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | I came to Durham in 1958. | 20:06 |
Edie Cohn | [indistinct 00:20:06]. | 20:06 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | I didn't live right in this particular neighborhood, however, I did live in Durham in Roxboro Street up in [indistinct 00:20:09]. | 20:06 |
Edie Cohn | So you're saying that when you came here in '75 and turned this building into a bakery, [indistinct 00:20:46]. | 20:09 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | Previously there had been a club called the Upstairs Downstairs Club, anyone who's familiar with that particular time. When I came here, they told me that there had been a couple of murders right there downstairs in the Upstairs Downstairs Club. And really nobody wanted it. The building was very odd itself. So we were able to come in and buy that particular building for a fee and just really begin working the are and clean the area up. | 21:09 |
Edie Cohn | What do you mean by clean the area? | 21:26 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | Well, hopefully change the mentality of the area, bringing some peace in the area, trying to get rid of the drugs, trying to get rid of the blight that was raised in the community. | 21:29 |
Edie Cohn | So were you involved in this area, in this community in the early '60s? | 21:35 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | I was in the city and I was working. We had little spot over there on Pettigrew Street and we had a little spot up there. And we were working and looking for a spot and we finally settled here in Durham. But we have been working here in the Civil Rights area with Floyd McKissick and all of the great people who came through with the Civil Rights team. Lewis, who came through. Now he's a senator or something like that. Congressman. But we were familiar with all of those people here. | 21:54 |
Edie Cohn | Can you say little before about that time because I don't know. I think [indistinct 00:22:37] and nobody talks about that. Right now, people asking if I'm really serious and I suspect there's a lot of people here that don't know what happened to Durham during that time. The idea that Martin Luther King was here. There's so much to be said. Can you talk a little bit about it? | 22:27 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | As I was saying, we came through and at that time this area was a real hot bed for Civil Rights. Lot of these people sitting in the sit-in movement was in the particular area. CORE coming, that was one of the movements of the Civil Rights movements. Lots of African-American with lots of Caucasians coming together trying to bring in Civil Rights. So at that particular time, Mr. Floyd McKissick, Attorney Floyd McKissick, we met and we became friends and he was instrumental in trying to bring a little cohesiveness, unity in the area concerning, well, just unity and bringing about Civil Rights. | 23:01 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | At that particular time, we brought Malcolm through here over at the college, at the university in Chapel Hill. And there was just a lot of action going on, lots of action going on downtown, a lot of sitting in the restaurants, a lot of marketing going on, a lot of people's houses talked about being bombed, a lot of things like that. One of the little spots, things I can call the name of it, it was a bookstore. We spoke at the bookstore and I can't think of the name. Bookstore? No, no, no. This was a bookstore down near Duke, Duke's campus. | 23:51 |
Kenneth Murray Muhammad | [indistinct 00:24:26] Bookstore. [indistinct 00:24:26] Bookstore. Yes. And they were going to bomb that, but matter of fact they burned it down. They burned the [indistinct 00:24:46] bookstore down there. Had a little problem with the race relations and there were some people had some real problems thinking that they were better than other people and things of that nature. And little crazy to hear, but things have been a little better. Hopefully, we are on a better road today. (Muhammad laughs) (applause) | 24:20 |
Edie Cohn | Kenneth Murray Muhammad. Okay. How are we doing on time? Okay. How about if we have some music for a bit? Is that okay? Would you be up for it? All right. Okay. Oh Travis looking for his drumstick. You got your drumstick, Travis? | 24:54 |
Edie Cohn | (music) Okay, we'll have some music for maybe half an hour so have some music, and then maybe some more of our speakers will show out. | 25:48 |
Edie Cohn | (music from about 00:26:00 until around 00:36:00) | 25:48 |
Edie Cohn | (applause around 00:36:00) | 25:48 |
Speaker 6 | Thank you all. Thank you all. Thank you all. Thank you all. | 25:48 |
Speaker 1 | Oh, I don't need to carry, a man in here. | 0:00 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | Yeah. | 0:00 |
Speaker 1 | Me, and Brian never played on the stage, but all of the local jazz musicians were—From 1978 to 1981, all the jazz musicians played there. Right here. That's it. This was the stage. | 0:06 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | That's right. | 0:07 |
Speaker 1 | It was only this one side of the building. | 0:07 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | That's right. | 0:07 |
Speaker 1 | It was during those years, that an African American brother came and painted that mural. The original mural, what was happening here was, that Duke students and Duke off-campus community, whole [indistinct 00:00:34] community, and the Muslim, and the African American community in one place. | 0:24 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | I'm telling you! | 0:41 |
Speaker 1 | And we had food— | 0:42 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | We got steaks! | 0:44 |
Speaker 1 | —and we had music by the chimney. The band was right here. | 0:44 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | That's right. | 0:48 |
Speaker 1 | So, what we're going to do, "Alhamdulillah," "Alhamdulillah" means "all praise due to God." That's what we said everyday over here. I promise, when we closed up the salaam every day, Brother Yusuf and I would make the prayer— | 0:53 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | A prayer right there on that cute little carpet. Right here. | 1:02 |
Speaker 1 | We go over there. | 1:02 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | Right here. That's right. | 1:02 |
Speaker 1 | We go up there, right here, make the prayer at two or three o'clock in the morning. | 1:02 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | Ain't that beautiful? Ain't that beautiful? That's beautiful. Right, right. | 1:02 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | (music from around 00:01:16) | 1:02 |
Speaker 1 | Remember that [indistinct 00:01:02]? | 1:02 |
Speaker 2 | Yeah, okay. | 1:02 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're doing good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. [indistinct 00:02:45]. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, got to play it right. Getting on down. Hey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get on Brother over here. [indistinct 00:03:47]. | 1:02 |
Speaker 2 | Play that song, Brother Yusuf [indistinct 00:03:54]. | 1:02 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | One more time. | 1:02 |
Speaker 2 | (music ends, applause around 00:05:23) All right. Hey. | 1:02 |
Speaker 1 | Yeah, I got [indistinct 00:05:23] over there and then she hit that coffee machine back there and you'll do whatever you want to do. I'd be hitting that coffee machine just the same way. | 1:04 |
Speaker 1 | (music starts again 00:05:40) | 5:28 |
Speaker 3 | Thank you, brother. | 5:28 |
Speaker 4 | I didn't see my [indistinct 00:05:36]. | 5:28 |
Speaker 2 | [indistinct 00:05:37]. | 5:28 |
Speaker 1 | And not only did the great blues family did a caring premier in 1979, but right here in this room. All the older Durham musicians who, still were living into the late '70s used to play here. You guys remember Arthur Lyons, who worked all his life in American Tobacco Company. He play guitar. He came up here in wooden legs. | 6:36 |
Speaker 5 | Every night. | 6:36 |
Speaker 1 | [indistinct 00:06:41] up, he come here and he'd sit down and then he'd start to play. And he would just play, and it was great. Then, after he play here, he walk around to play here. We walk up over here. This is the CNC Disco Lounge. There's Arthur in the middle part there and was where the disco lights were. It's all black, except for the disco lights and the strobe lights. And Arthur was up standing on his feet. Arthur would walk through and it was like, they'd hold Arthur up. [indistinct 00:07:11] trying to get a hold onto this man [indistinct 00:07:13]. He's getting all blues than he's on. So, Arthur played in here. [indistinct 00:07:23] Henry playing with Arthur. Danny [indistinct 00:07:26] played here. | 6:41 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | [indistinct 00:07:27]. | 6:51 |
Speaker 1 | [indistinct 00:07:29] but frankly, the biggest thrill for us is when Sonny Terry came to town. By the time he's a friend of ours, he was driving from Atlanta to DC and they stopped for the night here and had dinner with us. And I asked Sonny what he wanted for dinner. He said he wanted some good old country ham, because when he's his wife he can't [indistinct 00:07:53] ham, because he has high blood. I smiled and looked at Brother Yusuf— | 7:52 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | "Brother Yusuf—" | 7:54 |
Speaker 1 | Because we ran a Muslim kitchen, you know, we were only using halal meat [indistinct 00:08:02]— | 7:54 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | "Brother Yusef, how you make old country ham?" | 7:55 |
Speaker 1 | And he never let me forget that, that I asked a Muslim how to make country ham. And that's what we're trying to explain up here. [indistinct 00:08:21] songs, so we're going to just play couple of songs. | 7:55 |
Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:08:41]. Stay out. Stay out. | 7:55 |
Speaker 1 | [indistinct 00:09:13]. We actually play this on (singing) | 7:55 |
Speaker 2 | All right. | 7:55 |
Speaker 1 | (singing). | 7:55 |
Speaker 2 | (music ends around 00:11:55, applause) Wow. Wow. That's [indistinct 00:11:52]. | 7:55 |
Speaker 6 | [indistinct 00:11:54] with my job. | 7:55 |
Speaker 2 | Oh, yeah. | 7:55 |
Speaker 1 | All right. | 7:55 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | Yeah, for today. | 7:55 |
Speaker 1 | All right. Thank you. Thank you. | 7:55 |
Speaker 5 | [indistinct 00:12:07]. | 7:55 |
Speaker 6 | That's it. [indistinct 00:12:09]. | 7:55 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | Yeah. All for today. | 7:55 |
Speaker 2 | Yeah, that's right. | 7:55 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | What's up? | 7:55 |
Speaker 2 | All right. | 7:55 |
Speaker 4 | It's so nice. | 7:55 |
Speaker 6 | If you would ask me, I'll guitar [indistinct 00:12:16]. | 7:55 |
Speaker 2 | Thank you. | 7:55 |
Yusuf Salim (?) | Have a good day. | 7:55 |
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