The Return of Cabbage Alley
Chapter 1. Uncle Willy's guitar
Down on the bayou, flag is on fire.
Cochise coming, soldiers all running.
Me and my Spyboy, sitting on the side.
Watching trouble, passing us by.
- June Victory and the Bayou Renegades, 'Down On the Bayou'
Wilson Victorian, Jr.--June Victory--is a guitar player and songwriter from New Orleans. He is an outlaw, a Mardi Gras Indian, and a hero. He is a brother and a son, a father and a good friend. His face is bronze, spotted with tiny freckles, without too many wrinkles, considering the miles on the man. Today he is clean-shaven, but he often wears a mustache. His mid-length hair hangs in braids, under a black Oakley trucker hat. He is dressed in a white button-down shirt, left unbuttoned over a black T-shirt, and white pants over tennis shoes. He has cut a dime-sized piece out of the back of his cheek, shaving this morning, but he is no longer bleeding, and is still confident enough to wear white. Our conversation begins under the blue sky on a patio off Tchoupitoulas Street two blocks from Tipitina's, where June has played many times.
"I was born Sept. 29th, 1949. My mother and father, Wilson and Mildred Victorian, were raised up in a place called False River, the island up in New Roads, Louisiana, about thirty-five miles outside of Baton Rouge," June says. "It was mostly French Creole. And they moved to New Orleans when they were real young, and had a baby girl. That was my sister, Vera, and she was born on Valentine's Day. Later on, here I come: June Victory.
"As far back as I can remember, I believed when God gives people a gift, it's real," he says.
"I remember living on Third Street, off of Claiborne and Jackson. I didn't know nothing about guitars. Then we were living on Philip Street and Willow, and they had a guy named William who used to sell vegetables. 'I got lettuce and tomatoes, ladies'" (in a singsong voice). "And they used to have these crates. I'd bust the crates up and take the sticks and put rubber bands on them and just play with it, plucking and plucking. I was about six years old.
"And after a while we moved to Washington and South Dorgenois, to a place called the Plaza Towers. I had to have been about seven. From there, we went on South Derbigny Street, off of Claiborne, across from Taylor Park. It was a private park, for whites only. It was a mixed neighborhood, but a little better. Because my mom looked white, and my dad was black: We had to fight both sides, blacks and whites. And they had a lot of bullies, and when my mom and dad would go to work in the summertime, we'd be home alone, me and my sister, and the kids would come around there, trying to hound-up, acting crazy and stuff.
"My sister was going to a Catholic school on First and Galvez. (St. Monica's.) Pretty soon I got in--kindergarten. And it was like around a public school for the Calliope housing project, so we had a hard time with that, because a lot of fighting was going on at that school. It was rough in that neighborhood. Me myself, I remember going to school--didn't learn nothing. My mind was on something else, I guess.
"My mom never wanted us to socialize with kids, and as a matter of fact, my sister was crazy about Indians, and she didn't allow her to entertain or get involved with Mardi Gras Indians, nothing like this. But Vera would always sneak off and try to follow them around, on Mardi Gras Day. And then we had family members that masked Indian, like first cousins: the Black Eagles, my cousins Curly and Geneva.
"One day my aunt gave me a little plastic flute thing, and I would play, and my sister started hearing things. It sounded pretty good. And my mom took me to my uncle's house, and he had a guitar. He was an older man. He was learning how to play.
"His name was Uncle Willy, and he was married to Geneva, and he had a little daughter named Cynthia. So anyway my mom and the family used to take turns going by different family members' houses on the weekends, and they would party and drink and the kids would be in a certain spot. I never hung with the kids.
"But I walked in there and I seen this guitar in the bed. So they was in the back, and you know how a kid tampers with things. I was eight years old. And I picked it up, and I went in the front, sat on the floor, and I didn't know what I was doing. But the next thing I knew, my mom, dad, aunt, uncle were running into the front room. When I picked my head up, the family members was surrounded around me, and my Aunt Geneva was sitting on the floor with her legs crossed, looking. And when I raised up my head and I seen her, she looked at me, she screamed and she flipped over! And everybody said, 'Wow, oh, wow, oh wow!' So I'm figuring out what's going on! They say I was playing!
"It so happened, the next morning when I woke up to go to school, the guitar was in my bed. Uncle Willy gave the guitar to my dad, and he gave it to me. I'll never forget Uncle Willy for that.
"My first guitar--it was an acoustic guitar. And he went and bought him an electric one.
"So I'm playing, at eight years old, and I'm studying, fooling with it. Catching on. I can play the guitar.
"So I'm sitting in the alley--don't want to play with the kids, go in the park. Just fooling with this guitar, day after day.
"And my sister had an old juke-box 45, and she would put the records on and I would play. It didn't take me no time to learn. Plus sing it!
"I was taking the guitar with me to school every day, learning nothing, just jamming. And I wanted to sing so what I did, I took a receiver off a land line, cut it, put the jack on it and plugged it into an amp; and there it was, I had a microphone.
"Boy, my momma liked to had a fit when she came home! And my dad, that was a big joke to him!
"I'd never been to (music) school, so my parents said we need to put him in some kind of school or something, see what he can do. And they sent me to Houston music school. To a man named Walter Epps. I didn't learn how to read at that time. But I had a certain style.
"He tried to teach me to bend my fingers a certain way to do a bar chord, but I just couldn't do it. I had a certain way of bending my fingers on majors and minors, double-octave style, playing rhythm. So he said, 'Just follow me.' And he would start playing, and there I go.
"He spent a lot of time with me. And it got so I was doing pretty good in school, and at home, and my dad went to Epps and said, 'You think he's ready for an electric guitar?' And Epps said, 'Sure.' And my dad bought me my first electric guitar. It was a Dean Electron, with lipstick pickup.
"It got to where my people couldn't afford the lesson anymore and Epps said, 'Don't worry about the money. I tell you what I'm gonna do. I want him to come to my house every Saturday, about ten in the morning, and I'll work him over.' And he did. And what he would do, he would sit me in his house and show me all kind of pictures in this big photo album, of when he was working with famous people, big concerts, a lifestyle of him playing with big bands and he would just show me these pictures of him when he was young. He was playing around the country with all kinds of bands: big bands, Count Basie, you name them. Big stars, and he was the guitar player. I said, 'Wow, this is what I want to do.' And he kept going through them and I kept looking at these pictures and then we would sit down and play a few things.
"And he would ask me, 'Do this, do that,' and I couldn't. But he said, 'Go and do what you wanna do, and I'll follow you.' He started letting me do what I wanted to do with the guitar and he started following me and something caught on.
"He took me to a show where the music teachers would pick one of the students out of all these music schools to perform with. And we won first place. At ten, eleven years old I was making money playing music with my teacher.
"I'll never forget this man: Walter Epps. He was a music teacher, and I loved him for the chance that he gave me to develop my own style. And I do have my own style. He let me lead.
"He let me lead, as a child. And at fourteen years old I ran away from home and went to making money to support my mom and my dad. I've been gone ever since." ##
Excerpted from The Return of Cabbage Alley: Stories of June Victory as told to Thomas Brent Andrews
Copyright 2020 Chronic Discontent Books, Franklin, Tennessee
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