Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [50]
Robbie Montgomery used to be one of the backing singers for Ike and Tina Turner – an Ikette – shaking her tail feathers and singing fabulous soul songs such as ‘River Deep, Mountain High’. That meant she’d got to know everybody. She’d sung with Mick Jagger and lots of other sixties and seventies stars like Dr John, Stevie Wonder, Barbra Streisand, Elton John, Pink Floyd, Rod Stewart and Joe Cocker. When she’d been starting out, restaurants on the road would often refuse to serve black performers, so Robbie and others in the band would cook dinner in an electric skillet in their motel rooms. Eventually forced to quit singing because of a lung disorder, Robbie turned to her second love, cooking soul food. She opened a restaurant, and after many years and a lot of hard work, she now owns two fantastic restaurants called Sweetie Pie’s, one of which is in South St Louis.
It was a real privilege to meet a woman I’d previously admired in a soul revue. Now seventy years old, she is still very beautiful, with a shock of white hair tied back under a chef’s hat.
‘I never thought I’d stand this close to you,’ I said. ‘The only time I ever saw you before, you were … ’
‘Shaking my tail feathers?’
We both laughed.
‘That was my favourite,’ I said. ‘Shaking the tail feathers!’
‘Really? Well, the tail feathers broke. I can’t shake it any more. I’ve gotten too old for that now.’
It was very easy to laugh with Robbie.
‘Well, welcome. Are you going to come on in?’ she said.
‘I hear I have to stand in line like everybody else. That’s demo cratic. I don’t need special treatment. I don’t seek it, I don’t need it.’
‘Oh, good.’
Robbie’s dishes, learned at her mother’s hip, are best described as from-scratch cooking. The menu features recipes like baked chicken, ox tails, candied yams, macaroni cheese and peach cobbler made in the traditional way.
‘White people call it home cooking,’ she said. ‘Black people call it soul. We call it comfort food. Or we call it Mississippi-style cooking, because these are all my mom’s recipes and she was born in Mississippi, like me, and she taught me to cook.’
I was really looking forward to my first taste of soul food, but I was nervous about sitting there – the only white guy in the restaurant. It was nothing to do with race. I just didn’t like being the only guy who didn’t understand what was on the menu. But Robbie guided me, and it was just darling.
‘It’s Sunday,’ she said, ‘so most people have collard greens and candied yams; and if you like meatloaf, that’s your choice.’
‘I like meatloaf,’ I said. ‘And I haven’t had it in such a long time.’ I’d never had candied yams or collard greens. I’d only read about them in William Faulkner books. They were fantastically good, but the experience was made so much better by being able to sit and talk to the woman who had sung such sensational songs. We talked a lot about music, food and life in general, and Robbie was the best company. It was a great start to the day.
So far on Route 66, my meetings with black people – from Preston Jackson in Bronzeville and the Quinn Chapel congregation to Robbie here in St Louis – had been a joy and a constant surprise to me. If I was black in America, I think I’d be angry at the way black people have been treated over the years. And I’m not just talking about slavery. From the Civil War through to Vietnam and Iraq, black people have fought for America, then returned home to bloody shoddy treatment. Yet they seem unfazed by it. Their experiences haven’t broken their niceness. On this trip I was constantly amazed and pleased by their attitude. I know that sounds hellish – like I was a fucking explorer – but I’d expected them to be angry, and they just weren’t. There was a quality to black people in America that I found unbelievably impressive, especially when I was talking to Robbie. I was glad to meet her, and I was even gladder that I ate her food. It was unbelievable.
All that said, though,