There is no record of James Crutchfield's birth: "My mama never know'd what day it was, she never know'd what month it was, but she always know'd what year it was. 'Lotta folks back in them days never even know'd that much, but my mama always did. She told me I was born in '12, in
Baton Rouge, when the high water was highest." Crutchfield said his mother, Sarah, was a "
Geechee", a descendant of slaves of the
Georgia/
Carolina sea islands, and said he much resembled her. His father, Tom Crutchfield, he described as a large copper-colored man from southwestern
Mississippi, whom he had never met until he was eight years old and with whom he maintained a cordial relationship thereafter. An only child, James and his mother, a farm worker, migrated through
Louisiana and
East Texas with the cotton and sugarcane seasons, moving often and sometimes living in tents. His earliest memories were of the "boys" coming home from
World War I and the silent-movie Westerns of
William S. Hart, whom he idolized. Around 1920, his mother married and settled in
Bogalusa, Louisiana. In his early teens, while employed as the
janitor in a theater, Crutchfield began to teach himself to play on the house piano. Also around this time, curious about the exact day of his birth, he went to the Baton Rouge library and told the story his mother had told him to an intrigued librarian. Together they looked through the 1912 newspapers and found that indeed, there had been a flood then, which crested on May 25. From that time on, he regarded that date as his birthday. In 1927, working as an underage employee for a local railroad, Crutchfield lost his left leg below the knee in a
coupling accident. The railroad settled out of court for twenty thousand dollars. Part of the money was used to buy his mother a house in Baton Rouge; the rest, with his now diminished opportunities for employment, was used to subsidize his fledgling musical career. ==Career==