“My grandfather’s name was James Haskell Lewis. But everybody called him ‘Hack.’ I heard someone describe him as ‘wild enough to shoot at.’ But he loved his family and never said a cross word to us–would give us the shirt off his back. But if you weren’t family and made him mad, you might get a fight you weren’t ready for. 

My grandpa grew up in Taylorsville, MS. His father was a sharecropper. He worked the fields with Black people and said they were constantly singing. They also went to church together: all of that music shaped him. Grandpa’s daddy got a job at the paper mill in Moss Point; they loaded up the buckboard wagon and moved down here. Grandpa got a guitar and won a big radio contest when he was seventeen or eighteen. Back then, they sang in the can like in the movie, ‘Oh Brother Where Art Thou.’ Grandpa played music for the rest of his life. 

We lived beside my grandma and grandpa at the end of a dirt road. Me and my brother didn’t need babysitters while my parents worked at the shipyard and cut hair–we had our grandparents. We called them Nani and Papa. Nani made sure we ate, and Papa took us everywhere he went. He didn’t care what we did–never asked–so we ran wild. There was a twenty-four-hour bar down the road, and me and my brother would take our four-wheeler down there to shoot pool. We were about nine years old. The lady running the bar would kick us out when Ingalls shipyard got off work. 

 Papa was a storyteller–reminded me of Rick Bragg. He’s also one of the reasons me and everybody in our family plays music. He played for hours every Saturday night with his band, never had a set list, never missed a beat. We followed him everywhere. He also played at his house every other night of the week; somebody was always there drinking coffee, eating homemade biscuits, and listening to him play. Their best friends were people who started following Grandpa around to hear him sing. After he died a few years ago, there was a celebration of life at his church: we played music and passed a microphone around. One lady said George Jones couldn’t hold a candle to Hack Lewis. 

I’m fortunate how I grew up and have memories that mean so much to me. They are easy for me to write about because my brain goes to the past. My song ‘Mississippi Dirt Bag’ is about my Grandpa. That title might be kind of off-putting, but sharecroppers were looked down on and called ‘dirtbags.’ Grandpa said they were so poor that his mama would cook one piece of bacon and hang it outside the door frame. They all got one lick on the way to school. 

Born a dirtbag in Mississippi/He cleaned his bluegills with a spoon/He hayed his horses in the winter and put them chickens up to roost/Picked a guitar on the weekends/He never messed with liquor much/He never talked about money/’Cause what he had he spent on us

Every word of that song is true. Papa loved to bream fish and cleaned them with a spoon. I wrote that in the song, and the number of people who say, ‘Man, that was my grandpa’ surprised me. It’s special to me–I didn’t know it would be special to anyone else. 

Grandpa taught me if a knife ain’t sharp when you buy it, you damn sure can’t keep it sharp if the man who made it can’t. He was a storyteller and Jesus in cowboy boots. I always wanted to be like him.”

Camm Lewis