Last updated 2/15/2008; the "Keith Chronicles," as Neil Slaven calls this essay, has now grown so large that I've split it into THREE separate files so it will load faster. And as always, this is a continuing work in progress; text and photos will frequently be added and rearranged. All the drawings were done by Keith; all the photos were taken by Mary Katherine unless otherwise noted.

KEITH JAMES BRIGGS
July 15, 1943-March 6, 2005  

                                            
Left, Keith Briggs standing in front of Mary Katherine's house in Hollywood, pretending to be a tourist. Must have been around 1985 or thereabouts, as his beard has not gone gray yet. Right, he was fascinated by the idea of having really fresh orange juice for breakfast every day; standing in my driveway early one morning, circa 1985.

We met on Labor Day, September of 1984. He was visiting L.A. with his pal, U.K. record collector Sailor Paul Vernon, and they were staying with a friend who had my Sunday night blues show tuned in on the radio. I was a subscriber to the blues magazine "Sailor's Delight," and Sailor knew my name because we'd had some correspondence, so he called me while I was on the air and we arranged to meet the following day. The two of them showed up at my apartment together, and Keith endeared himself to me immediately by going quietly off to sleep on my living room floor while Sailor and I yakked it up for hours. (Sailor's own recent reminiscences about Keith can be found at the end of Section Three).

After they returned to England I eventually lost touch with Sailor, but Keith and I kept up a regular correspondence, and early the following year (caveat: all dates approximate!) he wrote asking whether I knew any place he could stay for a few days in L.A. on his way to a proposed vacation in Mexico. I offered my apartment, and we were off. From then on he always stayed here, for anything from a few days to several weeks, at least once and sometimes twice a year, and more often after he retired.  (And he never made it to Mexico that time!)

    
Left: on State Street in Santa Barbara, probably around 2000. Right, with my close friend Mark Humphrey in front of the 150+ year old banyan tree that Mark and I had "adopted" and took Keith to visit.

We had a lot of common interests, and as many differences, and we truly enjoyed and were comfortable with each other. We both got teased a lot by our respective friends, who didn't seem to be able to grasp the concept of an adult man and woman who loved each other profoundly but never felt any need to hop into bed. Friends, we'd say. Like sister and brother, we'd say, and so I started calling him Bro. It fit perfectly; he was the brother I'd always wanted, and I was the sister he never had. When we went to New Orleans together for the first time, I had a baseball cap embroidered for him that said "Bro;" the next time, it was a t-shirt. By the fourth or fifth visit we'd nearly filled his wardrobe with personalized items, so we decided on a New Orleans-only variant. From then on, it was "Breaux" while in the Crescent City, and Bro everywhere else. I only called him Keith on special occasions, like when I was mad at him. I've since learned from his friend Jeannie Patton that he insisted on being called "Bro" whenever he went on the Grand Canyon river rafting trips; it's nice to know that our private nickname had grown to become part of his life in America.


   
Left: with Mark Humphrey, standing on the Santa Barbara Pier. He's wearing his first "Bro" baseball cap. Probably 2000. Right, a riverlet near our favorite banyan tree in Santa Barbara.

Our first road trip together was a real struggle for him. We drove north, with my then-eleven year old son, to the 1988 San Francisco Blues Festival. The festival itself was great, and we wandered around backstage taking pictures and visiting with musicians and friends, but on the morning we were to leave I awoke in our motel room with a terrific headache and no vision in my left eye. I had suffered a spontaneous detached retina in my sleep, and poor old Keith had to endure a frantic 500 mile drive south, me with my one remaining eye fixed on the road and my foot on the floor, him holding the map and calling out lane changes. He later told me he was terrified, but he put on a good show while it was happening. I pulled into the emergency parking lot of UCLA and was wheeled in to surgery, and Keith spent the rest of his vacation answering my ever-ringing phone, telling people I was okay, and changing the bandages on my eye with those strong and surprisingly gentle hands several times a day.
                                                                                        
       

           
Left: At Robert Freeland's eclectic store, As Seen On TV, in Oxford, MS, 1998, with Daffy Duck and Tweety Bird. What a pity that the folks at his day job never saw this side of him! Right, in front of Central Grocery on Decatur St., during one of our many trips to the French Quarter; photo by Deborah Freeland. Thanks, Deborah!

                 
With Tom Freeland at the Presbyterian Church in Rodney, MS, a ghost town that was once a port on the Mississippi River. Tom notes that the church steeple was shelled by Union gunboats during an engagement related to the assault on Vicksburg. There's a cannonball visible in the brick above the center arched window.

 
Left: With Tom Freeland, doing what men do: climbing up things, in this case an abandoned fire tower near Alcorn, MS, just south of Port Gibson. At right, Canemount Plantation, Claiborne County, MS, where we stayed in 1998.

 

                    

Right, with Tom Freeland, visiting the Union ironclad Cairo, in a museum in the Vicksburg, MS National Battlefield Park.

      
At a (now defunct) Oxford, MS blues club called Blind Jim's, 1998.

             
Stevenson Palfi, Keith Briggs and Tom Freeland, New Orleans, LA, February, 1998, just after we'd all had dinner at Galatoire's (hence the jackets) and watched the Krewe de Vieux Mardi Gras parade (hence the beads, which were all caught throws, not purchased). I took off one strand of my own Mardi Gras beads and wound it into the bracelet on his left wrist.

Our friendship wasn't all about road trips; we spent as much time together at my house as anywhere else, talking for hours on end, and he was constantly fixing things for me. He built me a set of sturdy bookshelves for my home office on one visit, and on another we went to a store, I chose a pattern, and he laid a new linoleum floor in my kitchen. His sense of humor sometimes got away from him: if he happened to be sitting closest to my phone when it rang, he always answered it by saying in his snottiest English accent, "Mary Katherine's residence, the butler speaking." He'd come with me to the radio station when I was hosting my Sunday night blues show, lifting the heavy crates of albums and 78s in and out of the trunk of my car and making suggestions and requests for his favorite songs. Whenever we went out anywhere, whether in town or traveling some distance, his rule was that I would always drive; although he was an excellent driver, here in America we drive on the opposite side of the street, AND the steering wheel is on the opposite side of the car, than what he was used to in England. He said that in any sudden emergency calling for instinctive moves he didn't want to veer the wrong way.  Also, I was his designated "American interpreter," since not everyone could tune their ears to his British accent. I never had any trouble understanding him, but he was so often asked to repeat things by waiters and clerks that he finally appointed me his mouthpiece. Don't let me out alone, he'd say, I obviously don't speak the language!

         
Left, with Tom Freeland at William Faulkner's house, Rowan Oak, Oxford, MS, 1998. They're standing in front of the same door at which Faulkner is standing at right; Tom is 6'1" and Keith was just about 6 feet even, whereas Faulkner was 5'6" which is why he fits into the doorway! The photo of Faulkner was taken by Martin Dane, and the copyright is owned by the University of Mississippi.

Which reminds me that we had a language of our own, Keith and I; more like a code, really. It started when he tried to teach me Cockney rhyming slang, which Sailor Vernon used to sprinkle freely through the pages of Sailor's Delight. WHAT on earth, I'd say, does THIS mean? And he'd try to translate,  but I usually got it scrambled up, and in the process created a new word that made him smile, and then that word entered our vocabulary. We'd often use a phrase here or there that meant something only to us, and this man was the master of saying volumes with nothing but a cocked eyebrow.  Eventually we were able to communicate almost intuitively, especially in book stores and restaurants, each knowing what the other one wanted or didn't want. A single sock was a "widow" to us both, but how we got there I couldn't tell you, other than that we spent years folding laundry at home and on the road together, sorting everything into "his" and "mine" stacks; it wasn't always easy, since we both wore the same size t-shirts, and they were almost all music-related, and (the real challenge) they were also sometimes identical, since we attended so many of the same concerts and festivals (here's your B.B. King, I'd say, and he'd toss me over a Howlin' Wolf--no, that's yours, THIS one's mine, and is this your Jazz Fest shirt or mine?). At the end of the day it didn't matter; "it'll all come out in the wash" was completely true in our case. After his last trip here I mailed him back three odd socks and two t-shirts, and by return mail came one of my t-shirts and a paperback book.

        

   

At Maggie Mortenson's house in New Orleans. He finally found a woman who didn't talk back!

His first California earthquake was hilarious (to me, not to him!) : it was only about a 4.0, which for the natives is no big deal, but it happened at about 2 a.m. when he was sound asleep. He came rocketing out of the bedroom at 90 mph, saying, what the hell was THAT?, and then he sat on the end of the living room couch, sharing my duvet with me for about an hour, pretending that nothing had happened, that he just wanted to have a conversation at 2 a.m.! He finally went back to bed, and the matter was never referred to again. His second earthquake experience was somewhat bigger, and came when he was, fittingly enough, in a record store. He and Ted Berkowitz were shopping at Eastside Records when a fairly substantial shaker hit. He later told me, with the amazement that only comes from visitors who live where earthquakes never happen, that the whole glass front window of the store was shifting in and out of its foundation as everyone in the place ran for the exit; then, when he got out to the parking lot, all the cars were bouncing up and down on their shock absorbers. He was "completely gobsmacked," as he put it. Good thing he wasn't here for "the big one" a few years later!

He loved books. I mean, he LOVED books. One of the funniest conversations we ever had was when he first went through my bookcases and realized that I had as many shelves full of Tudor and Plantagenet English history books as he did of American Old West and Civil War volumes. We must have spent half our waking hours in second-hand book shops, and he had an incredible memory. He was the only person I knew who lived in England but could describe, in detail, the contents of the shelves of bookstores in San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Flagstaff, and New Orleans. "His" sections in every shop were the Civil War, Americana, mountain men, and the Southwest. Anything about the Alamo, Custer, the Indian Wars, true crime (Bonnie & Clyde, Jack the Ripper) or gangsters always got a look too; I think he'd be pleased if he knew that he had managed to die on the anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo! When I went back to New Orleans the Christmas after we were last there together, he asked me to check and see whether a certain book was still in one of the shops (he perpetually suffered from what he called "browser's regret") and if so, to get it for him; and he told me, not only the author and title, but what shelf it was on and in what part of the store! These are a couple of the eight or nine bookstores in New Orleans that we went to on a regular basis:

            

He loved music, too, and after he took early retirement (or was made redundant, as they say in England)  from his day job at the leisure center and was free to come to America more often, he spent more time writing liner notes for albums ("financing the next holiday," he said cheerfully, when I asked him how he could possibly bear to write liner notes for eleven volumes of Big Bill Broonzy!). He was always complaining about how slow the record companies were to pay him, and said that it often came down to withholding one set of notes till he'd been paid for the two previous. He enjoyed writing his "Words, Words, Words" column for Blues and Rhythm Magazine, and editing the record reviews section. There were periodic minor fallings-out with one member or another of the B&R team, but it was always soon over and they were, as far as I know, all on good terms when he died. They did a very nice tribute to him in their issue #199, on the pages where his column normally would have appeared. And the column itself lives on, too, thanks to Chris Smith, who has taken over the idea Keith formulated and continues the concept.

          

Among his many and wide-ranging interests I must include his great love of Icelandic sagas. He actually travelled to Iceland a couple of times, camping in the rough so that he could see the sites where the events depicted in the sagas took place. He liked it there well enough, I guess; he praised the scenery, and sent me photos of himself perched precariously on hilltops and mounds. But apparently the food isn't the greatest (especially as he disliked fish, which is most of what's offered there), and it was always "freezing bloody cold," as one of his postcards says, so eventually even Keith the loner decided that he'd do better spending his holidays somewhere a bit more populated!

            
Left: Keith mailed this photo of himself in Iceland to Deborah Freeland in Oxford, MS, who was kind enough to email it to me for this site. Thanks, Deborah! Right, on my balcony, wearing my Professor Longhair t-shirt because all his own shirts were in the wash!

  

                        
Left: His favorite spot on my balcony, working on his tan. This was before he quit smoking, obviously. The hair is greyer but the beard's still brown; probably around 1993. At right, in my kitchen, admiring his intake. This is the old floor; he later laid me a new one.

e funny nickname for me on the envelope.

 

The next big step was when Blues & Rhythm got him a fax machine; we established a system of faxing each other long letters once a week, and I'd remind him to turn his fax machine on every Saturday morning, as it was on a shared line with his phone. Then email came into our lives, and that made a huge difference. We gave up the weekly faxes and instead wrote shorter email notes almost every day, and called each other early every Saturday morning unless one of us was out of town (morning my time, that is, which was when he woke up from his afternoon nap). We took turns calling, alternating Saturdays to share the phone bill; he lectured me, I nagged him, we traded requests for books, magazines, and CDs, plotted future vacations, and he told me all about the work, the writing, the magazine, the job at the leisure center, and the women in his life. The only negative was that once the email and phone calls kicked in, we almost never wrote long letters back and forth anymore, and he was a GREAT letter writer. Some five or six years before he died he called me late one night, sounding what in anyone less preturnaturally calm I would have called upset, and asked whether I still had any of his old letters. I said sure, a file full, why?, and he asked me to return them all to him. I still don't know what that was all about, but I did as he asked and sent him all I could find. I'm still finding others in file drawers and boxes from time to time.


 

       
Left:

The Swami of Skellingthorpe, on a 2003 trip down into the Grand Canyon. Photo by Jeannie Patton. Thanks, Jeannie!

It was great fun introducing him to my friends, to see how they'd hit it off. One year early in our friendship, when he had timed his visit for March so he could be here for my annual family birthday party, he had been to a book store that morning and had stacked the day's purchases on his bed, prior to packing them for shipment back to England.  At the party, my blues collector pal Ted Berkowitz, walking past the bed to get to the bathroom, stopped dead in his tracks and started looking through the books. Picking up a volume about mountain men, he said, "YOU like that book?" to which Keith replied, "YOU like that book?" and a beautiful friendship was born. Ted and Bro went off on several trips together in Ted's car; they did at least one long drive across the California desert, they went to Little Big Horn together so that Keith could stand on the site where George Armstrong Custer died, and another time they went camping up in Yosemite National Park. Ted also shared Keith's great love of old and new movies, and many afternoons were spent at my kitchen table with the two of them heads down in a newspaper, making lists of the films they'd go to see together. Ted, his wife Linda, and their young daughter Julia also once visited Bro in Lincoln; they stayed at his house in Skellingthorpe, and he took a day off work and showed them around the town. When Ted died on January 28, 1996 at only 50 of a massive heart attack, I called Keith, crying uncontrollably. He was obviously stunned, having just had a letter from Ted a day or two before, but set aside his own feelings to calm and comfort me. Terrible for his family, but great for Ted, he said. Quick and clean, the best way to go.


With Ted Berkowitz on the balcony at one of my birthday parties, probably circa 1991.

In addition to Ted, Bro met many of my other friends here in L.A., and became so popular that eventually we had to book lunches and dinners in advance to be sure he had time to see everyone during his stays. All my friends liked him, and he fit right in. Willie and Marie Dixon were quite fond of him, and we spent many afternoons visiting at their house in Glendale; Willie, at first misunderstanding the nickname, thought that Keith actually *was* my brother, and wondered at the blue and brown eyed siblings till I explained. He also became good friends with Ed Archer, Larry Cohn, Andy McKaie, Billy Vera, Bruce Bromberg, Lowell Fulson, Ron Crum, Tina Mayfield and Mark Humphrey during the times he spent here. Although I live in Hollywood, I definitely don't travel in movie star circles, so the occasional "celebrity sighting" was always fun; I think his favorite of these was the day we ran into Little Richard (accompanied by two bodyguards!) at the Hollywood Post Office. Richard was his usual flamboyant self, in fine form (camp as a row of TENTS, my dear); Briggs the Stone Faced Man actually displayed some emotion at that one!

With Ed Archer at the same birthday party, circa 1991.