Stole This Knowledge
Lonnie Holley
So, what I learned about, all the lessons that I’ve been through, everything, from the ditch of digging worms and going up and down the creeks, from me crawling through the sewer pipes. I did this song called “I Stole This Knowledge”. I stole all of this wisdom that I obtained. I had to sneak and get it. I didn’t pay my way like everybody else. I didn’t learn through books and the institution of books. I had to turn the pages of the books that I found thrown away in the alleys or books that I found up and down the ditches or something that somebody threw away at the state fair ground.1 I had to find that knowledge through laying on my back on the top of the house, because they told me to get the hell out of the house, that I was too young to hear what was going on in the house. And I built me a little bitty place up on top of the house, and took the speakers from the drive-in and brought them through the sewer pipe with a telephone line.
And I had stereo speakers I lay between, and I looked at all those movies.2 I stole that knowledge looking at those movies and hearing them. I didn’t have to really steal looking at the movie, because the drive-in theater was so big and I could see it. But to hear it, I had to go through the sewer pipe, I had to take the speakers off the post. I had to bring them up on top of the house at five years old. And I had — that’s the way I got the sound. Everybody said why did you get all that sound from where — how do you know how to sing like this, and how do you know how to sing like that? I got it from the Rock-Ola in the house, that was a jukebox. I got it from listening to all of those songs over and over and over.3