ABSTRACT
Josh worked as lead boy for John Henry Arnold and other blind Greenville singers for most of the 1920s. Older members of the town’s black community still remember him, a barefoot boy with a tambourine, standing on a downtown street corner and keeping time as the men sang gospel songs in their loud, rough voices. Already a show-off, he became something of an acrobat with his simple instrument. Perry Fuller remembers that “Josh could beat it all on his knee, on his elbow, or his head, and it was quite a show.” Indeed, Fuller was so impressed that for a month or so he got himself a job with a blind singer in Anderson and tried to work up his own tambourine routine in emulation of his adventurous cousin.
