Col. Bruce Hampton — the man, the myth

I’m looking at a black and white photograph taken more than 100 years ago. In the foreground, a group of cowboys sit astride horses. They’re kicking up the dusty earth, surrounding a pair of settlers sitting nervously on the bench of a covered wagon, facing out of the frame, ostensibly fearing the dangers of the cowboy’s eternal enemy, the Indian.

Further back in the frame there’s a grandstand, then the white tops of tents. In the distance, the peak of Mount Vesuvius is emitting the slightest stream of white smoke, topping the scene in a surrealist haze.

The players in the front of the scene are a part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, traveling through Europe to give the other side of the world a peek into the unhinged wildness that was the American West.

The show wasn’t an objective representation of the past, but perhaps Buffalo Bill knew by intuition what historian and folklorist Henry Glassie would posit over 100 years after those photos were taken. That “history is not the past. History is a story about the past, told in the present, and designed to be useful in the future ... writing history is speaking myth.”

Buffalo Bill’s (aka William Cody) ultimate goal was entertainment, but as a byproduct of his Wild West Show, he ended up teaching Americans something about themselves. As Glassie would say, he used the “past as a mythic resource ... open to endless transformation during the crafting of engaging narratives ... drawing people together and refining their relations on the basis of shared cosmology.”

Col. Bruce Hampton (born Gustav Valentine Berglund III), who passed away May 1 on the night of his 70th birthday celebration at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, was an exemplar of that sentiment, a myth-maker and master storyteller in the tradition of Buffalo Bill, a gatherer of kindred spirits.

He was able to exist in the past, present and future, this world and others, simultaneously. On stage, he was always the focal point, even when sitting back with eyes closed, intensely taking in the details of his aural surroundings.

Off stage, he helped to make sense of the last 50 years of rock ‘n’ roll history through his stories, showing up as the mythological Trickster for multiple generations of musicians and listeners, decade after decade.

His story was the stuff of legend. His first record with the Hampton Grease Band was nearly the worst-seller in the history of Columbia Records, second only to a yoga instructional video. He led his band through a full set of out-of-tune Three Dog Night covers when opening for Three Dog Night. Duane Allman introduced him to Frank Zappa, which led to the Columbia connection in the first place.

Those and other stories were recounted over and over through the years. Maybe they weren’t the objective truth, but they were part of something larger and more important than the objective truth: a myth that told the rest of us a little more about ourselves, about who we are collectively as music lovers. Thanks, Bruce.

This story was originally published May 10, 2017 at 8:00 AM with the headline "Col. Bruce Hampton — the man, the myth."