Beau Jennings is a guitar picker who admits to a Will Rogers obsession. Since I share that obsession, I traveled to Claremore, Oklahoma to catch a showing of Jennings’ film, The Verdigris: In Search of Will Rogers, at the Will Rogers Memorial Museum.
Vimeo: The Verdigris: In Search of Will Rogers
Claremore is a small town situated in the Cherokee Nation. Will used to call it his hometown “because nobody but an Indian can pronounce Oologah.” Notice I call him “Will” rather than “Mr. Rogers”? Aside from not wanting readers to associate the cowboy philosopher with the gentle TV personality in the homey sweater, I just feel that I’ve always known Will Rogers and that we’d be on a first name basis.
I never heard Beau Jennings (who was at the showing) say “Mr. Rogers,” either, but nobody who sees the film will doubt his respect for the subject. The real Will Rogers birthplace was his home near the Verdigris River. The Rogers home was moved to higher ground in 1960, away from the rising water when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Verdigris for flood control at Oologah and the lake of the same name was filling.
Beau Jennings titled his film after the Verdigris River because the river flows directly between Will Rogers’ home in Oologah and Jennings’ home in Inola. In linking the Rogers and Jennings homes, the Verdigris came to symbolize the link Jennings had always felt to Will Rogers in his life. “The Verdigris River flows from his hometown to mine, and I couldn’t help but see that as a kind of opportunity to grab whatever he sent floating downstream.”
Since Jennings is a musician, it’s natural that he would be writing songs that parallel themes in Will Rogers’ life. To hear him talk, you might get the impression that his film project started as an extremely elaborate video to go with the record album—an old fashioned vinyl one—of the same name.
The idea of a lengthy and complicated music video was on my mind, but it didn’t take long to notice that the songs did not appear to be performed in their entirety in the film, but rather enough of the song to form a conceptual hook to the place where the performance was taking place.
To get in the mood for the pursuit of Will Rogers, Jennings (on camera) visited a barber shop and acquired a Will Rogers cut which, truth be told, was not all that complicated. Then his first interview was his grandfather, which reminded me that my first introduction to Will Rogers was through my own grandparents.
The film is divided into “chapters,” each representing a place with significance to the Will Rogers story. The first is Oologah, which is now a lake, and it was there that Jennings got the shot that is used in most publicity stills for the movie: Jennings picking his guitar in a boat out on the water.
In response to my question after the showing whether he used GPS to find the Rogers home, he explained that he did not have the coordinates and so the boat was anchored by a seat of the pants guess.
Chapter 2 moves to Rogers, Arkansas, hometown of Betty Blake, the love of Will’s life. The name of the city is unrelated to Will, since it dates from 1881. Will’s letters to Blake during a lengthy and at times long distance courtship have been cited by scholars as proof of Will Rogers overplaying his Indian hayseed from Oklahoma role, since the diction in those letters is substantially more sophisticated than he used when writing as the cowboy philosopher.
Will first proposed marriage to Betty Blake in 1906, but she turned him down. Show business was not all that respectable in those days. He finally wore her down and promised to quit after “one more tour” in 1908. She let him off his promise to quit show business and Betty Rogers turned into a major booster of his entertainment career while trying to inject some business sense for Will, who never entered written contracts and was always nonchalant about money almost to the point of negligence.
Will and Betty moved from Arkansas to New York City, which was at that time the point of origin for several vaudeville circuits. Naturally, Beau Jennings made the same journey. All along the path Rogers trod and Jennings followed, there were interesting characters and most of their descendants were happy to cooperate in Jennings’ project.
The one glaring exception was in New York, where Jennings wanted to perform on the roof of the New Amsterdam Theater as Will Rogers had long before. It might have been a scene similar to The Beatles in Let it Be, except that the theater management would not give the scruffy kid from Oklahoma the time of day.
After getting no response from letters and phone calls and emails, Jennings showed up with his cameraman in tow and perhaps anticipated executing a Michael Moore style ambush. That idea came a cropper when the first thing the management did was chuck the cameraman out, and the cameraman was not interested in getting arrested. Beau Jennings had to settle for strumming from a balcony down the street at the New Victory Theater.
In Chapter 4, Jennings followed Will back to Oklahoma, the state Indian Territory had become in 1907. The Rogers family, like my own family and most other Cherokee families, tried to sign up for allotments adjacent to each other. In the case of the Rogers family, this meant allotments side by side in the Verdigris River bottom, where the grass grew easily and Will’s father Clem had done well buying cattle from Texas and fattening them on Verdigris grass before driving them to market on up to the Kansas railhead.
Jennings brought his band to photograph a recording session in the legendary Church Studio in Tulsa, https://www.facebook.com/TheChurchStudio/timeline where the building dates from Will Rogers’ times but then it was really a church. Leon Russell made it a recording studio and hub of the Tulsa sound in the seventies.
But the very best of Chapter 4 was the visit to the even more legendary Ike’s Chili Parlor, http://www.ikeschilius.com which does date from Will Rogers’ times and still uses Will’s description of Ike’s chili in advertising, “a bowl of blessedness.” It was at Ike’s where Jennings scored one of his best interviews, but I do not wish to plant a spoiler here, so I’ll just recommend that you pay attention when you see the film.
Nip and tuck for the best interview in the film was a talk with Andy Hogan, who has been called a storyteller, a Will Rogers historical guide, and a Will Rogers impersonator. Will Rogers reincarnation is more like it. Eat your heart out, Elvis!
Chapter 5 takes up the Rogers trail in Los Angeles, where the filmmaker set out to find the location of Will’s famous “Bacon, Beans, and Limousines” speech.
The place where Will Rogers broadcast his reaction to the Great Depression, Jennings’ research convinced him, had become a vacant lot in Koreatown. Jennings baptized it in song and moved on to the Rogers home in Santa Monica, where he found and recorded on a piano in the Rogers living room that had been untouched for 75 years—but was still in tune.
By the twenties, Will and Betty Rogers had four children and the vaudeville showman was a movie actor. Will famously did not want to kiss his leading ladies because he didn’t want Betty to get the wrong impression. At least one director solved that problem by having the actress kiss Will and filming the amorous ambush.
From Will Rogers the movie star, Beau Jennings moved on to Will Rogers the promoter of civil aviation. The great man’s fascination with flying and his belief in the future of civil aviation led him to minimize what he called “incidents” rather than “accidents,” so how many of them he survived before the one that took his life is open to dispute.
It was exciting to see that Jennings was able to interview people who had the story firsthand and record it before another generation passes.
I found myself regretting that Beau Jennings had such limited funding. His travels did affect his songwriting and his thinking, so I wondered a bunch of “What if?” What if he had been able to follow the Rogers trail to Argentina, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—all places he visited when he first left the U.S. and before he became famous in the U.S.
It was on that first trip Rogers developed the persona of The Cherokee Kid and learned the ropes, as it were, about how to please an audience.
Later, Rogers traveled the world on a whole other level, representing both his countries, the U.S. and the Cherokee Nation. When he got friendly with Benito Mussolini, some of us might wish he had met a man he didn’t like, but all the bad stuff happened after Rogers’ death.
Toward the end of the film, we see Jennings contemplating what he has learned on camera.
I thought it was about the songs and what Will meant to me. It was more about what Will meant to everybody.
This brings me full circle to the big thing I have in common with Beau Jennings. Will Rogers was also my boyhood hero, although the Verdigris River did not connect his home and mine. From the time I escaped rural Oklahoma, I knew exactly why.
The first toy I bought myself was a manual typewriter just like Will’s, and it was his smashed typewriter from the plane crash that hit me the hardest of all the exhibits at the Will Rogers Memorial Museum.
Will Rogers was smart, funny, and respected by all kinds of people. Will Rogers was Cherokee and proud of it. He was everything a Cherokee kid growing up in Oklahoma was told he could not be.
Will Rogers showed me what was possible. He was hope. He was inspiration. If he could do that for me, he could do the same for Beau Jennings, and if you get a chance to see this film, I think you’ll agree that he has.
Jennings said the project “felt like a solitary thing for a long time.” Unbeknownst to him, Will Rogers’ grandniece Doris “Coke” Meyer was in the audience the night I saw the film in Claremore. She gave him a big and richly deserved attaboy for preserving the Will Rogers story she remembered and encouraged him to continue with it.
Coke is right. The Verdigris is a fine piece of work and it has a lot of heart. It touches emotional chords for Cherokees. I’m not sure this criticism is a criticism, but I think Coke was getting at it. The project feels unfinished. Each “chapter” seemed more like an introduction than a small narrative arc fitting into a larger one.
Then I realized what the larger narrative arc is. Will Rogers’ life. Cut off at age 55. Unfinished.
The showing of The Verdigris: In Search of Will Rogers, was a celebration of its debut on American Public Television. You can request your local public station to pick it up if you find it on this list: https://www.aptonline.org/aptweb.nsf/vViewers/Index-Stations+Near+You
Order the DVD here: https://beaujennings.bandcamp.com/merch/the-verdigris-in-search-of-will-rogers-dvd
Beau Jennings carries forward a deep tradition of home grown music in Oklahoma, and the album from The Verdigris came up number one on Literati Press’s Top 15 of ’15 Okie Albums. http://literatipressok.com/index.php/the-top-15-of-15-jarvix-picks-his-best-local-albums-of-the-year/
