Guitar Shorty is often pictured with the large Kay guitar Ken Bass gave him and which he covered in flower decals. Poverty bred resourcefulness when it came to his music. If a string broke, he would tie it back together below the bridge. He used an improvised capo, a pencil held down over the strings with a rubber band.
According to Lowry, Shorty and Lena were “bottom-of-the-trough” poor. From 1967 to 1975, they lived in a barely habitable shack on land owned by a white man for whom Shorty did occasional farm labor. (Bass remembers that Shorty’s hands were so calloused that the broken edges of the bottleneck he played with never cut him.) The house had no running water, a woodstove for heating and cooking, walls patched with cardboard, and few decorations other than a cluster of portraits of Jesus and the insert from a package of pantyhose showing a friendly young woman modeling the product. Although there was sometimes electricity to power an unreliable TV, photos of the interior show lanterns and bottles of lamp oil.
Some of Shorty’s friends have wondered in retrospect whether the ways they tried to help him—professionally, financially, nutritionally—might have been somewhat problematic. Peter Lowry wrote, “I hope that the three of us [Lowry, McLean, and Bruce Bastin] made Shorty and Lena’s life better for [them] in some way, even though we could be viewed in this century as non-p.c. and paternalistic in our actions.” Their efforts on behalf of the Fortescues were not confined to publicizing Shorty’s music. Lowry related a time when he “insisted on going grocery shopping with the two of them,” trying to ensure that they would spend at least some of Shorty’s recent concert earnings on food, rather than wine. McLean—whose friendship with Shorty was by far the closest and most sustained in the group—encouraged and helped Shorty to set up a bank account for his music earnings, trying to make his money last longer, and often drove him on errands and to gigs. Shorty needed all the help he could get. Their relationship with Shorty wasn’t ethnography, requiring hands-off objectivity. It was friendship.