Tom Byrd Hoskins

Truth be told, The Fang arrived on earth in the usual manner. But facts are often less interesting and enlightening than fiction. In this case, the lyrics of an obscure novelty song captured the spirit of an imaginative boy and propelled him into a most unusual orbit around his home planet. Thomas Byrd Hoskins was born February 3, 1941, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a cold and conservative college town, encircled by America's horsy aristocracy. The environment is oppressively class conscious, with little intermingling of town and gown, black and white, old and young. In retrospect, Tom might have felt more "at-home" in C'ville had the Japanese rethought their vision of empire, but with the infamous attack, Tom's father requested leave from the Athletic Department and joined the Navy. His wife and two young children moved to the West Coast, enjoying the exhilarating atmosphere of busy military bases, and young Tommy missed the opportunity to learn his "place" back home in Charlottesville. Bob Hoskins was posted first to Australia and then to a succession of South Pacific islands, where he oversaw the operation of R&R; camps for battle weary sailors and helped plan USO tours. Among ships' crews, these men were known as the "Yogi Boys," because recovery involved planned exercise periods led by fitness officers like Hoskins who were rumored to promote yoga as part of the curriculum. Meanwhile back at the ranchŠ.Elizabeth Hoskins settled into a wartime job as hostess at the Officers' Club at Bremerton, Washington. The Navy provided housing for Mom and her two children just behind the popular restaurant/bar, and Tommy learned to walk and talk to jukebox accompaniment, advising him to "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive" and "E-Lim-Uh-Nate the Negative." He took the advice to heart and strutted about the grounds winning adult friends and having a very good time. He became adept at shaking down guests for change to feed the jukebox and started learning the words to popular songs. Not surprisingly, "Don't Fence Me In" was an early favorite of Tommy's repertoire. Like the musical ability, that extraordinary gift for nuisance was cultivated early, as well. Sister Suzanne recalls a memorable instance at the BOQ bar one afternoon. Somehow, her little brother hustled a dime and settled in on the stool next to the bar's pay phone. In short order, three-year-old Tommy figured out that holding the receiver and depositing the dime resulted in a friendly female voice asking, "Number please?" With his childhood lisp, he replied "Long Dith-tanth Pleethe" and then hung up promptly upon transfer, at which point the dime returned, and he repeated the process. Over and over and over againŠ.until the half-mad switchboard operators had him bounced from the club. Thrown out of his first of joint at age three. An appropriate beginning, no? After the war, Bob Hoskins returned with his family to Charlottesville and resumed his coaching career. Mother and daughter eased into their new lives, but for the family Free Spirit, it was an uncomfortable fit. Tommy's interest in music persisted, and he made his debut recording at six or seven years of age, singing a new Tex Ritter hit, "The Green Grass Grew All Around." He commandeered Suzanne's first ukulele and developed that unique upside down and backwards playing style in spite of her advice that he was holding it the wrong way. Suzanne's baritone ukulele was the next instrumental advance, and this was followed by Tom's first guitar. His song list was pulled from everything on the airwaves, short of Mozart. If Tommy liked the sound, he learned to imitate it, from postwar pop to hillbilly and rhythm 'n blues. For a white kid, he played "black" with remarkable ease, a fact that Philadelphia Jerry Ricks recalled years later. And the gift for mimicry was not limited to strings. Tommy cultivated vocal imitations that entertained and fooled a couple of generations.

There are two distinct interpretations of postwar America, reflected in popular culture and analyzed to death by social scientists since: Ozzie and Harriet versus Marlon Brando. The disaffected biker came from the ranks of young servicemen who could not segue from the terror of Okinawa to the torpor of the assembly line back home. Tom understood, he sympathized, and he emulated their rebellion against social constraint. Summer camp was fun, but school was a boring confinement easily escaped. Tommy's parents struggled to keep him on the straight-and-narrow, even undergoing a costly preteen experiment in behavior modification at the exclusive Christchurch School on the Rappahannock River. But conventional means failed to turn this unconventional kid from budding juvenile delinquent into proper citizen. A third year law student and resident advisor at one of the undergraduate dormitories first encountered Charlottesville's James Dean asleep on a sofa in the lobby. B.J. Powell, a former Navy pilot, soon took the 16 year-old truant under his wing and began a special Big Brother relationship that would take Tommy from small town problems to big city infamy. In 1957, Bob Hoskins suffered a massive stroke which affected his speech and movement. B.J.'s arrival on the scene was well-timed, and Elizabeth Hoskins appreciated the much-needed assistance with her errant son. When Powell graduated and passed the Virginia Bar exam, he moved to the DC area to establish a practice and took the kid with him. Tom obtained the first in a series of delivery jobs, began collecting the vintage motorbikes that his career required and obtained a GED from the Langley High School. In his spare time, he hung out, guitar in hand, with the growing folk music crowd at area universities.

"Walking through Dupont Circle one day [I] came upon a guy playing the guitar upside down and backwards, which I found fascinating, so I stopped and talked with him a while." Leland Talbot's first memory of meeting Tom Hoskins is prototypical of the formation of those early and enduring friendships. Most people just came across this guy and his guitar. In the next moment, they were beginning the adventure of their lives. Tom was a lightening rod. He turned people on to music, drugs and imaginative existence. He entertained and aggravated in equal measure on an unpredictable schedule. He became The Fang.

Exactly what started the obsession, the people who claim to know simply "ain't telling," but everyone remembers that Tommy's brain locked on a singular goal sometime in 1962, when he announced that he would locate Mississippi John Hurt, whose recordings from the late 1920s were causing such excitement among the old timey music collectors. Using "Avalon, my home" from "Avalon Blues" as his first clue, Tom scoured AAA maps for towns and cities by that name in the South. Avalon, Georgia, did not pan out, but the 1895 Rand-McNally Atlas revealed an old hamlet named Avalon in Mississippi. At a fraternity party in February of '63, Tom announced his wish to attend Mardi Gras and search for Hurt, as soon as he had a ride. A girl volunteered her new car, and the two set out for points south. Somewhere between Roanoke and Bristol, they stopped for the night, and Tommy felt "obliged" to put the moves on his travel companion. She recoiled in terror and admitted to several disturbing things. First and foremost, she was still a virgin and hoped to remain that way for a bit longer. Also, she was not quite in college yet. And, by the way, it was her father's new Dodge Rambler, not hers. Tommy considered these revelations and assured the girl that he would not molest her. Then they proceeded across state lines, oblivious to the APBs placed by her distressed parents and the dangers of the Mann Act. The gods were truly smiling, because northern car-tags were deeply suspect in Mississippi in 1963, as were young white visitors among local black people. But Tom found John and left the startled old bootlegger with a guitar and a promise to return. Back in Washington, Tom found financial backing from an older couple, who were folk music enthusiasts, and the trio returned to Mississippi for Hurt. All Southerners know that only bad news comes from the "natural born eastmen" of the nation's capitol, and John Hurt was no exception. He rued his misfortune at having been caught by these government agents, but he packed his bags and politely accompanied them on the long drive, after they settled his account with the white landlord. As Bill Tydings recalls, John had to spend at least a night or two with Tommy and his friends before he could accept that it really was about his music rather than his moonshine. Even John giggled, as he later revealed to Pete Seeger the story of his fearful brush with Federal authorities. No one could have predicted what happened next.

Delmark Records founder Bob Koester had toured Europe with Big Joe Williams, Sonny Boy II and many of the other badass players from the Chicago Blues Scene by the time John Hurt's rediscovery began to make news. Manhattan was the big deal, home to the influential music critics and the epicenter of cultural change, but white New Yorkers systematically snubbed the earthy, raucous black music that poured from Chicago recording studios throughout the Fifties. Then, in a single stroke, this tiny, soft-spoken man from Mississippi had the elite by their long noses. Koester wryly appreciated the moment. "John Hurt didn't scare people. He wasn't a convicted murderer like Bukka White. He wasn't a mean drunk. He wouldn't try to steal your girlfriend. He just agreed politely with everyone and played beautiful guitar. SingOut ate it up, which hinted at serious blues record sales for the first time." As Tommy and friends plotted John's career course, the repercussions of success seemed to catch them asleep at the wheel. Lacking Bob's experience, they were overwhelmed by tactical issues, such as moving John, his wife Jesse and their two grandchildren up to a comfortable home in the DC area, making contact with various booking agents who could help expand John's playing radius beyond Washington and learning the record business to capitalize on sales of new recordings. The attention showered on this 70 year-old overnight sensation was blinding, and too many people wanted to be "the only white man he could trust." John was delighted, confused and ultimately dismayed by the commotion. He dealt with it in time-honored fashion, saying "Yessir" to everyone, but after three years of observing backbiting competition among his various would-be saviors, John told Tommy that he just wanted to go back home. A devoted proponent of personal happiness, Tom tried to put the brakes on John's career and restore pre-discovery peace, but the cash register's "ching-ching" drowned out his pleas. John was the acknowledged star of the snowballing blues movement. He was the top-ranked draw as one folk festival rapidly begat another, and more than one career was established on the promise of delivering Mississippi John Hurt to hungry audiences. Tom dreamed aloud to friends like Ed Denson about sending John home with enough money to provide for the next two generations, and in pursuit of this goal, he asked Herb Gart to work out a lucrative "Farewell Tour." The venture looked especially promising after Hurt's moving performance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, but the plan was undermined by a competing booking agent with backdoor access to John. In the end, John escaped to Avalon, where he died in November, 1966, of heart failure. Then the shit really hit the fan.

Tom could never escape the legacy of John Hurt's rediscovery, and his ties to John's widow and grandchildren left him responsible for chasing the money, a pursuit filled with bizarre legal maneuvering and acrimonious rivalries. Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky was hardly suited to the task, but a series of stronger personalities kept the discord from dying out. For some of these hangers-on, life had frozen at that moment in time, and, at regular intervals, they drew Tom back into the web with lawsuits and allegations. Temperamentally out of tune with protracted struggle, The Fang responded with fight or flight. His battles became the stuff of urban legend, and until his passing, there were writers afraid to reference him by name, lest he materialize and rearrange their features. New interests and obsessions replaced the old, and Tom shifted his attention among fascinations with the Civil War, Native American culture, pioneer arts and crafts and vintage musical instruments. Poker, fireworks and a good buzz were constants, as were fiendish practical jokes and cornball humor. A Smithsonian ethnographer resided alongside the spirit of Brother Dave in this man who could enlighten and annoy simultaneously. When he finally located and stepped on your last nerve, Tommy could leave with a smile and a wave. He respected the need of others to "grow up," although he never possessed it. Life was a succession of little adventures shared with a variety of people for as long as each lasted. Some hobbies, like late night B&E; excursions to the homes of recently deceased wealthy people, just naturally wound down as the body lost flexibility and running speed. Other interests were explored to the limit and abandoned. In the late eighties, Tom took a notion to find the missing musical link between sub-saharan Africa and the southern plantation. He made a reconnaissance trip to South Africa and returned to Annapolis in search of investors. Like many explorers before him, he left for the big journey underfunded, but unlike most, he ended up in the movies. The gods smiled again and said, "Cast this boy as an outlaw biker in your film," and another dream materialized for The Fang. He returned from Africa just in time to undertake the next lawsuit, ultimately investing the winnings in an enormous collection of blues and country 78's, which were located in Fort Worth by an old friend. He spent a long season in Texas, sifting through a barn full of records and keeping us advised by nickel a minute long distance of his progress. After escorting the 60,000 or so best buys to North Carolina for auction listing, The Fang then settled for a while in Rutherfordton, not only for its proximity to his business interests, but also for the way he could stutter and mangle the name of the town in conversation. He supplemented the meager social life of the place with extended phone calls and short road trips among friends. We each knew a slightly different Tom Hoskins, but certain stylistic touches were constant.

Lee Talbot recalls the "yabuts, wellbuts and surebuts" that interrupted one's train of thought. I keep thinking about that inevitable question: "Do you know what I like about you? Nothing!" Kathy Stewart can recite the most oft-told jokes by heart. It was like verbal soul food, complete with indigestion. One last brush with the law forced Tommy into exile at a Tallahassee trailer park. What led him there, other than decent weather and another funny sounding name, were probably the same things that drive a wild animal to seek a solitary resting place‹exhaustion and fear. The resurrection in Mississippi Court of the Estate of John Hurt among a new generation of potential heirs was more than he could bear, and the rapid loss of sight brought on by glaucoma traumatized the veteran explorer. So Tom Hoskins slipped away from us, but as for The Fang: