Bill Cheng at VQR:
Melon Floyd was born out in the Salts, 1881, in the border country between Winnemucca and Susanville—before they recorded Black voices on acetate, before his knife-throwing contest with Charlie Long, before “Laughing Man Blues.” His father was Terry Floyd, a freed slave and smuggler who hid out in the Salts for thirty-six years before the Reno law flushed him from the mountain crags. His mother was Anne Smith, who died while in labor.
Floyd was a sickly boy, an asthmatic. When he was four, his father sent him to Susanville, a flat country where the air wasn’t so thin, to live with his grandmother. He was schooled out of a single history book, sang in the church choir. By Floyd’s sixth birthday, his grandmother had saved enough to send away for a pine guitar from Sears-Roebuck.
When he was thirteen, he left home.
more here.
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