Eric Taylor: It was at the Family Hand. During that time, I was playing a version of “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”, and I think it was probably just terrible. Townes claimed to like that song as I did it, and he talked me into playing it twice in the set. I mean, back in the warmup room he actually said, “Man, I like the way you do that song, and I think you should play it twice tonight.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, man, really. I think it would be cool. Just play it twice.”
“I don’t know, man.”
“Well, all I’m sayin’ is, it’s a great song and you ought to play it twice. And if you don’t, I will.”
So, when it came time to go on, sure enough, I played it twice. Finished it and did it again! Of course, the audience is looking around and thinkin’, “This poor bastard.” Well, when I got off Townes was laughin’ his ass off, and Condray was reading me the riot act.
When Townes got up to play, he was still laughing and said, “I want to thank Eric for playing a medley of his hit.”
Hey now, look comin’ through that mission door
It’s Tokay Sam and his best friend, Dollar Bill Hines
I ain’t really a preacher, I’m Tommy the Frenchman
And I like Lucky Strikes, Jesus and wine
— Eric Taylor, “Mission Door”
It sounds like a largely joyous, if at times problematic apprenticeship. And it was, and it wasn’t. It was music and drugs and drink, laughter and all-night friends. It was also a busted marriage and an unhealthy dose of wind-whipped poverty. Taylor’s 1995 self-titled album included a song called “Mission Door”, which brush-sketched characters such as Dollar Bill Hines, Tokay Sam and Blind Sally (who “talked back to the preacher,” saying she “can’t tell one sin from another”). Some listeners assumed Taylor had once worked with the mission in some capacity.
“No, I didn’t work with these people as a counselor or something,” he said. “I lived in the same mission house they did, down on San Jacinto Street. Those were people I met not long after I came to Houston. Bill [Hines] just wanted to know if I’d worked that day — you know, day labor shit. If I said, ‘Yeah,’ he had a smile on his face because he knew we’d have something to eat and a bottle to drink.”
Once in a while, Taylor would take off on what he calls “sabbaticals” from an ultimately doomed marriage. During one of these, he followed a carnival and wound up in Aiken, South Carolina. There he met a fiddling juggler named Kasaban and had a brief but fruitful encounter with Piedmont blues harpist Peg Leg Sam.
“I hung out on the outskirts of that little carnival for a couple of days, and he was there every day,” Taylor said. “One night, I was playing guitar and we got to sharing a few drinks and talking.”
Peg had experience as a medicine show draw man, which meant he knew how to attract a crowd.
“A lot of it was cut-up stuff, like minstrel stuff,” Taylor said. “I thought he was blind, but I guess he wasn’t. He had a real fucked-up looking eye, I know that. He could roll his eyes around back in his head. He’d do a little bit of a song, then whistle real loud, dance and kind of walk off.”
