On the Road
It’s important for history’s sake to tell who my early influences were. These great entertainers were who I was fortunate enough to share the stage with, and because I was 15 I was literally being raised in the music of an earlier era — an era of some of the most important names in blues and jazz, at a time when rock and roll was just being named Rock and Roll. Promoters threw me out there before I even knew what I was doing.
I was thrilled but so scared to death when I tried to walk out on the stage for a rehearsal when there sat Johnny Otis at his piano to go over my music. My feet just stuck to the floor and I couldn’t walk. I waited there in the wings not wanting to embarrass myself until he looked around and said, “OK, who’s next?” He looked right at me and said, “Are you Rosie? Come out here, darlin’.” I tried to walk, my voice trembled. I had seldom left my little town and here I was on the biggest stage I’d ever seen.
Can you imagine what it would be like to be walking backstage with 16 to 20 groups all in their dressing rooms singing and rehearsing their songs with their doors open — the heat in each room caused by the 4 to 6 guys each singing their hearts out with songs I had heard on the radio and seen on the Johnny Otis show on TV.
As I walked to my dressing room I walked slow so that I could hear all the harmony and just feel all the wonderment that existed back there, and my heart would swell so much that I could almost cry. I could not let that happen because of how it would look later and how it would look now.
As I walked to my dressing room I just looked around at the big theater or concert hall and I knew in my heart that if the walls could talk they would sing. I had no idea that one day I too would be part of this history in the making. Don and Dewey, Jackie Wilson, Johnny Otis, The Drifters, Ben E. King, Big Joe Turner. Big Joe was a dear friend. He would invite me to come over to the house for a BBQ and singing. I met his wife Pat there and they had a dog named Spot, there in South Central.
I was on the road with Thurston Harris, Sonny Knight, Big Joe, Shirley and Lee, so many. It was an unspoken thing but known nonetheless that the Blacks and minorities didn’t fly to a gig — the promoters put them all on a bus for 30, 40, 60 one-nighters where we weren’t allowed to go into a motel or a restaurant, sent us out on the road into white territory which got us escorted out of town, run out of town, and almost got us killed in some places.
The promoters Mickey Shore and Hal Ziegler would ride the bus, or one would ride and the other fly or ride in a nice car. We had to clean up in the bathrooms at the gig before the doors were open. We weren’t allowed in hotels at that time. When we got food, the bus would have to park a ways from the place in case anyone would see us all and we would have to leave in a hurry, and the promoter would order tons of hamburgers and a roadie would wait outside and help carry the food. We made a lot of music on the bus, drank a lot of wine — Silver Satin — made too much noise, played cards, told stories.
I remember one time when I had my two musicians with me, Noah Tafolla, my boyfriend, his brother Johnny, both guitarists and singers. We seemed to be in a better state, less racism we thought, and so we went into a restaurant with Sonny Knight. They didn’t bring Sonny’s food but brought ours. We didn’t start eating — we were waiting for the waiter to bring Sonny’s food. Noah put his plate of eggs in front of Sonny and said, “Where’s my eggs?” The waiter just stammered, embarrassed, and said something like he can’t eat in here — and we all got up and loudly said something about a racist bunch of honky crackers and left. I don’t know why he waited on us and not Sonny; he was lighter skin than we were.
But in most towns nobody got off the bus except the promoter. They were the ones who walked around with the briefcase bulging with money from the concerts, and they slept with one hand on the case too! The promoters paid us little, made us sleep on the bus, kept us in food and wine. I worked with another set of promoters in the mid to later ’60s into the ’70s, same thing with the bus, only they had the briefcase tightly guarded as it contained coke. I found out way later that the concerts were the cover for the drug deals!
I remember after one gig we had a police escort to the state line, and they came on the bus with flashlights, shining them in each of our faces as we were already wrapped in blankets trying to sleep — just to make sure there were no white girls on the bus wrapped in any of those blankets. Which sometimes there were three or four, and they’d be rounding them up and they’d be putting on their shoes and what not as they were dragged from the bus, and we were told never to come here again. We’d all be laughing at whoever got caught.
Later we talked about how one of those good ole boy red-faced sheriffs could very well have shot us all and left our butts out there dead at the state line. In those days it was happening all around us.
A lot of stories were told on the bus about previous road gigs, and the scariest one yet is one I was in. I’m trying to remember who all was on the bus this time. I know Ron Holden was, Gene and Eunice, or either Shirley and Lee — I think it was Gene and Eunice. The Coasters with Jerome, Bobby Day, Thurston Harris, and I think Don Julian and his guys, Don and Dewey, and myself with my two guitar players and a California group called The Silhouettes and Tony Allen.
We had come from some gigs in Texas and the South. The promoters had to check Tony out of Bellevue State Mental Hospital in Los Angeles to do any gigs. They had to bring him directly back and check him in after. He was real touchy. If he got wound up — which he did every day and night — nobody wanted to make him mad, because he might go off. He lived where he did because he killed a guy when he was a professional skater with the Thunderbirds.
He also drank Thunderbird and Silver Satin. He was walking back and forth in the bus, yakking and shouting about nothing in a real high-pitched voice, and was really irritating everybody. He kept it up all day and all night while we were trying to sleep. He’d get next to the bus driver, yak gibberish in his ear, and thump him on the head, and the driver was real shaky.
We had been climbing and were now pretty high in elevation, and I will never know if the driver failed to slow down enough to make the turn or if the road was just too icy, but we slid right off the icy road. When I opened my eyes you could’ve heard a pin drop — the bus was hanging off the side of a cliff by the back two wheels. Someone said, “Don’t nobody move, but walk slowly to the back of the bus.”
I distinctly remember someone saying, “We have to get the weight into the back. Open up some back windows.” We left everything in our seats and slowly crawled out the back window to the safety of the road. We didn’t even take our coats. I don’t think we even felt the cold as one by one we reached the safety of solid ground. I felt bad for whoever was sitting up front, but I was sure happy that I always sat in the back.
As the last person climbed out of that window and we dared to breathe, I guess we all thanked our maker, feeling that it must not have been our time. We had a long night waiting in the cold for a tow truck, another bus, and a new driver to get there.