Nelson Rufatt: For Bix Beiderbecke

For Bix Beiderbecke

Hot, sweet melancholy swooned you,
And darkened your deathbed.
All the bullets that could wound you
Were braced inside your head.
And there were others who
Had more right to be blue
And reasons to be dead.

White boy, what did you have to lose?
What made your song so gloomy?
What chorus in you cried the blues?
What sang in Satchmo’s roomy
Heart? Glowed in his eyes
As he confided: “Those
Pretty notes went right through me.”

You took your crippled innocence
And sad-eyed self-belief,
And pawned them when you got the chance
And sold them like a thief,
And played them in a sequence
Of desolate exuberance,
In lines of playful grief.

Nelson Rufatt

“Sequence of desolate exuberance” and “playful grief”: from Clive James’s essay, “Louis Arm-strong”, in Cultural Amnesia