I’ve got to admit, this playlist may tell you as much about me as it does about Merle. As you may notice, it’s a little on the melancholy side. But if you listen to these songs, you’ll catch a lot of the range and depth of Merle’s music, right down to “Footlights,” the personal confession at the end, perhaps as profound
a statement of personal disenchantment as one is likely to encounter in popular song. But that’s not all – nostalgia, history, social activism, desperate love and desperate faith, they’re all represented here, along with such familiar but never less than freshly felt songs as “Mama Tried” and “Mama’s Hungry Eyes.” And that’s not even taking into account Merle’s classic romantic ballad, “Today I Started Loving You Again,” written with uncharacteristic emotional openness with his then-wife (and forever musical partner), Bonnie Owens. There’s so much yearning in so many of these songs, a yearning fully sustained in one of the few songs here not written by Merle, Blaze Foley’s “If I could Only Fly.” I just wish I could have included “It’s Too Late for Me,” his duet with Peter Wolf on Peter’s album, Midnight Souvenirs, which fully lives up to its title. And when you’re done listening to these songs, go immediately to YouTube for Merle’s last song, “Kern River Blues,” recorded less than two months before he died. It’ll kill you.
I wish I could have included Bob Dylan doing his knocked-out version of “Boogie Woogie Country Girl,” but the fine tribute album on which it appears, Till the Night is Gone, is not available on Spotify. (Be sure to check it out.) There’s no shortage of star power here, though, with Doc’s original inspiration,
Big Joe Turner, kicking things off in fine fashion with one of Doc’s most beautiful ballads, and Johnny Adams, another of Doc’s favorite singers (these are all Doc’s favorite singers), contributing three songs from his own magnificent tribute album while Elvis Presley, with “I Need Somebody to Lean On,” delivers one of the finest interpretive performances of his career. The star of the show, though, is always Doc, whose soulful side never fails to show through, no matter who is doing the singing. Start at the beginning and give yourself over to all the romantic, realistic, ironic, philosophical, and melancholy moods of Doc – and then start all over again
A Playlist to accompany the chapter on Lonnie in “Looking To Get Lost.”
I would defy anyone not to be caught up in the unbridled passion and energy of these sides. They come from three different phases of Lonnie’s career. The Fraternity sides, which though they were triggered by a huge instrumental hit, exhibit some of the most soulful intensity this side of Archie Brownlee or Wilson Pickett (two early influences); the early Elektra sides, just as soulful, if not more so; and a later, more thoughtful Elektra phase in which he returns to some of the songs that inspired him (“Uncle Pen”) and meditates on the place that he came from (“The Hills of Indiana”). Obviously the selection could have been nothing but gospel-based blues and soul – but to my mind this gives a better sense of the breadth and dimensionality of this unreconstructed original
I don’t think there’s a single person on the Memphis music scene over the last 60 years who hasn’t been helped in one way or another by Knox. And when I say helped, I’m not just speaking of a smile and a nod. Knox, when he offered assistance, really put his shoulder to the wheel. Sometimes he would take your problems more to heart than you did yourself. Knox always had an analytic mind, and sometimes he could imagine greater, more sweeping, more
inclusive solutions. Most of all he offered love and friendship unconditionally, without regard for politics, factionalism, social standing, or musical preferences. Knox was just there for you.
No one loved Memphis more than Knox. No one kept Memphis history alive or worked harder to assure its future. No one believed more fervently in the possibilities of Memphis than Knox – with the possible exception of his father, who felt like he had reached the Promised Land, when he arrived in Memphis with his wife, Becky, just in time for Knox’s birth in 1945.
It was hard sometimes not to take Knox for granted.
We live in a cynical age, and it may have been difficult for some people not to wonder at first if this guy with for real. At first. But it didn’t take long to realize that all that rhetoric, all that enthusiasm, all that hand-shaking, all that verbiage, as Sam might have both termed and embodied it, was realer than real.
Activist, diplomat, mediator, Memphis booster par excellence, producer in the best sense of the word, Knox embodied the very best of his father’s philosophy. Stay true to yourself. Prize difference and individuality. But do all that you can to serve the greater good.
It would be hard to find a job description that would cover everything that Knox did – he gave himself unstintingly to the Music Commission, the Film Commission, to the mission of bringing NARAS to Memphis, to every good deed that needed to be done, whether on the broadest historical scale or simply helping out someone in trouble. It was never about success, it was never about personal recognition – and because Knox was so tireless in his efforts, because he was such a constant presence in the cultural life of Memphis, it was easy sometimes to underestimate the magnitude of his achievement. You’d see Knox in the thick of things, just like always, and you might say, Well, that’s just the way it is. That’s just the way things are. But that would be missing the point completely. Everything that Knox did was the product of grit, planning, and determination, a rare graciousness that he learned from his mother, generosity, social conscience, intellect, imagination, and wit. That’s who Knox was, the definition of the truly good citizen.
The last five years of Knox’s life were very tough – he faced one health crisis after another and was forced to withdraw almost completely from the kind of public life, and public commitment, that he loved so much. But he never gave up on himself, or Memphis, or a better future that he might not live to see but that he firmly believed would someday arrive – and with the unflagging help of his wife, Diane, and his brother, Jerry, who always credited Knox, just as Knox never failed to credit him, he remained just as firmly committed to all the causes in which he had always believed (including the rebirth of the Phillips Recording Studio, which he and Jerry had talked about for years and which Jerry and his daughter Halley brought to fruition) – and he was still able to rejoice in the dreams, aspirations, and achievements of the far-flung network of family, friends, and fellow denizens of the greater world of Memphis music to whom he had devoted his life.
Knox won his share of awards – he was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, recognized by NARAS, honored by the Germantown Arts Alliance, a recipient of the Tennessee Governor’s Award – but all of this pales beside the sum of Knox’s true achievements. He provided us with an image of the unvanquishable human spirit – he showed bravery and courage, love, and vulnerability, too. And somewhere it should be noted that if there were an award in the Life Force category, in the indescribable business of giving inspiration to others, Knox Phillips would unquestionably stand in the Lifetime Achievement circle of winners.
Rick Hall may have been the most determined (some might say stubborn, Rick might even have owned up to bull-headed) man I ever met.
The first time I met him, I almost didn’t meet him at all.
Jimmy Johnson was the vehicle for my initial introduction in 1981. Jimmy was the guitarist with the second rhythm section at Rick’s FAME studios in Muscle Shoals (all of his rhythm sections were brilliant, this one was perhaps his most brilliant), and there had been a falling out when he and fellow members David Hood, Barry Beckett, and Roger Hawkins had decamped in 1969 to set up their own studio, Muscle Shoals Sound, in direct competition with FAME. There had been bad blood for a while, but everyone survived and thrived, and Jimmy, as affable a figure as you’re ever likely to meet in or out of the music business, had long since re-established a good, almost filialrelationship with Rick.
I was just starting out on my book, Sweet Soul Music, at the time. Songwriter Donnie Fritts, a Florence native (Florence and Muscle Shoals are two of the area’s Quad-Cities), had introduced me to nearly everyone in Muscle Shoals except for Rick the year before, and now Jimmy took it upon himself to approach Rick on my behalf. Rick, Jimmy reported back to me, would be glad to do it – but when I arrived in town a few weeks later, all of a sudden, don’t ask me why, all bets were off.
This was something I could certainly live with (it was not an uncommon occurrence – very few of the people I was talking with had done interviews before, and, this may come as a shock, but not everyone is thrilled to be interviewed) – I could wait, I told Jimmy, it wasn’t the end of the world. Jimmy, however, was stricken. He saw it as a matter of honor, and he called Rick right away from his office. “I gave the man my word,” he told Rick, while I was sitting there. “You know, we’ve been friends a long time, Rick, but you gave me your word, and I gave Peter my word, and if you don’t stick by it, we’re not going to be friends anymore.”
I was more than a little mortified (and more than a little touched by Jimmy’s loyalty), but after hanging around Muscle Shoals for a few more days without hearing from Rick, I set off for Macon to talk with Phil and Alan Walden, and Otis Redding ‘s brother Rodgers, and his wife, Zelda, along with various friends and associates of Otis’.
That was where I got the call from Rick, on December 2, 1981, a Wednesday. He was, he said, willing to see me. Great! I said. When? Tomorrow, he said. I laughed, I’m going to imagine it was a kind of heh-heh-heh. Well, I’m in Macon, I said, and I’m sure I could make it by – Tomorrow, he said, making it clear by the tone of his voice that any modification was out of the question. At 7AM, he said. At my ranch.
Now Macon is at least a five-hour drive from Muscle Shoals, and it was already late afternoon, but I didn’t hesitate – and I’d like to think I still wouldn’t. (I mean, you do anything at the service of your story, right?) 7 AM tomorrow, great! I said. And I wrote down Rick’s very specific directions to the ranch (“43 South from Littleville, one mile on the right-hand side of the road, Kennedy Road 18”) on my hotel stationery.
I arrived at 7 o’clock sharp the next day, with my notebook and brand-new Sony stereo cassette recorder TCS-310 in hand. I started out, as you often do, by asking some generalized, conversational questions, just to try to establish a little rapport, but I knew immediately I had gotten off on the wrong foot just by the way Rick was shaking his head. This was clearly not the way to begin. “Well, let me start at an earlier point of my life [which turned out to be his birth],” he declared without hesitation, “and tell you what happened to me.” And he did. Four or five hours later he was still telling me, and I was exhausted. I hadn’t gotten into the Holiday Inn in Sheffield until late the previous night, and I left for Rick’s home earlier than I needed to because I knew if I didn’t make that 7 o’clock deadline, the whole thing could be off. Finally I held up my hand for the first and I think only time in my life and said, in effect, No mas. But we would go on talking, in what would eventually turn into a two-way conversation, for the next 35 years.
Read Rick’s book, Rick Hall: My Journey from Shame to Fame. Or try Sweet Soul Music for an abbreviated version of the story of a boy who grew up in the “deep sprawling, isolated woods of the Freedom Hills with the whiskey makers and whiskey runners and saw millers,” raised by a father who could barely eke out a living (“he was a pauper”), after his mother left, when he was four, to become a prostitute in his Aunt Es’s house of ill fame in the city. In all the years I’ve known Rick and his wife, Linda (the home that I visited has since become the FAME Girls Ranch, dedicated to help victims of abuse and neglect “overcome the adversity they have endured”), the conversation has never changed. In fact, it was renewed and deepened in the ten years that he worked on the book, first with Florence TimesDaily reporter Terry Pace, then with Robert Gordon. He wanted it to be raw, he said, something like a cross between Tobacco Road and Harry Crews, whose work he (like many of us) was introduced to by Atlantic Records head Jerry Wexler, a genuine polymath whom Rick alternately resented (their business relationship came to an end with Aretha Franklin’s disastrous 1967 Muscle Shoals session, and Jerry was the one who encouraged the second rhythm section to leave) and, more often than not admired.
The last time I saw Rick (though we always continued to speak on the phone) was about a year ago, when Rick was awarded an honorary degree by the University of North Alabama in Florence, and I was scheduled to give the commencement speech. He was already sick, although he wasn’t publicly acknowledging it, but he was in buoyant spirits, with an undiminished determination to continue to make his mark. There was a dinner the night before graduation at the president’s house, next to the lions’ cage (“Go lions,” is the university motto), where Rick exchanged fond reminiscences with old friends, none more fond than with State Representative Johnny Mack Morrow, whose father, Grover, taught Rick agriculture at Phil Campbell High School and gave Rick his first instrument, a mandolin. Rick always kept a picture of Mr. Morrow on his desk, on which he had written, “To the man who believed in me and my music when nobody did.”
The next day, in Rick’s name, and in the name of Sam Phillips, Rick’s original role model (and a native Florentine), I urged the graduates of the Colleges of Nursing and Arts and Sciences and Business and Education to hold on to their individuality, to identify and seize upon their dreams, not to let themselves get pushed around by disappointment or others’ expectations of them. And I cited how Rick, after a particularly devastating blow to his ego early on (he was fired by his partners from the musical enterprise that became FAME – it’s a long story, you’ll just have to read about it elsewhere), never gave up, barely even wavered. “I thought it was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” Rick said. “It was like they’d put the roller skates under me and pushed me out the door.” But, I told the graduates, he was determined not to be left on the shelf for long. As he described it, “I just went home to Phil Campbell to lick my wounds – but then after a few months I took kind of an arrogant attitude and dug in for the kill.” And the next time twenty-year-old songwriter Dan Penn, who was part of the firing cabal, saw him, Dan said, “He was standing on this concrete slab he’d just poured for the studio that now stands, and he said, ‘Hey Penn, why don’t you come over here and go to work for me.’”
That was Rick, to the end. It didn’t always make for smooth sailing – and there were, unquestionably, lots of ruffled feelings along the way – but you never had any doubt about where Rick stood. And you never had any doubt that he had a good heart.
He was the furthest thing from the back-slapping, easy-going caricature of a good ol’ boy – I mean, Rick was driven from the start. “I was so very aggressive and fired up at the beginning,” he told me, trying to explain why he got ousted by his friends. “I was the guy who was beating and banging and slinging sweat over everybody else, and it got to the point where they thought, This guy’s crazy! Because, you know, IT WAS LIFE TO ME.” It was not lost on him that the ferocity of his determination could overwhelm everyone around him sometimes, but in the end, I think, it was the lingering self-doubt, the crippling insecurity of a young boy who grew up lonely, impoverished, motherless in the Freedom Hills of rural Mississippi and Alabama, that proved to be his saving grace. As much as anything else, I would imagine, that was the innate quality that allowed him to focus on the improbable hopes and dreams of all those artists and musicians, black and white, who found their way to the studio he built with his own hands in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
L to R: Son House, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt
I had never been South before.
My brother and I set out for Memphis in a Volkswagen that lost its clutch in Knoxville, and as we got closer, it seemed like I knew a blues lyric (“I’m going to Brownsville, take that right-hand road”) for nearly every town we passed. Our destination was the 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival, which took place at the Overton Park Shell, where Elvis’ career had been launched fifteen years earlier. It was early June, hot, humid, sitting on the old wooden benches at the Overton Park amphitheater, there was no escape from the sun.
But the music was magical: rediscovered (or recently discovered) blues legends like Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Reverend Robert Wilkins,
Fred McDowell, Joe Callicott, and Sleepy John Estes, all in their sixties and seventies, were the stars of the show, along with an assortment of young white disciples like John Fahey, Sid Selvidge, and Johnny Winter.
I had seen many of them before, certainly, in coffee houses and college concerts, but it was a different experience to see them for the first time in a steamier climate, and there was no question that the music benefited from the change. A new ten-album series on Fat Possum, developed in collaboration with Amazon Originals under the umbrella title of Worried Blues (most of the albums were originally issued in a limited edition by the Genes/Adelphi label in the ’90s), presents the first three on that 1969 Memphis bill, plus such other luminaries as Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Houston Stackhouse, R.L. Burnside, and Honeyboy Edwards, all recorded in what appear to be relaxed, easy-going settings at the outset of their new careers. And yet in few cases did those careers live up to the expectation of either artist or audience. The gulf between anticipation and achievement was simply too great.
Bukka White, one of the towering figures of pre-war country blues, whose 1940 recordings rivaled the taut poetry and tightly controlled performances of Robert Johnson (his indisputable masterpiece, “Fixin’ to Die,” was featured on Bob Dylan’s first album), is a case in point. To his young cousin, Riley B. King (soon to become B.B.), his visits home, to Kilmichael, Mississippi, in the early ’40s were like the visits of a Hollywood star. “Razor sharp. Big hat, clean shirt, pressed pants, shiny shoes. He smelled of the big city and glamorous times; he looked confident and talked about things outside our little life in the hills.” But it was Bukka’s music that impressed his younger cousin most, the ability “to connect [his] guitar to human emotions,” a standard that B.B. would strive to uphold all his life. Bukka (more properly “Booker” as in “Booker T. Washington White”) was rediscovered in 1963, when guitarist John Fahey, a brilliant blues abstractionist who preferred to describe his music as “American Primitive,” sent a letter to “Bukka White (Old Blues Singer), c/o General Delivery, Aberdeen, Mississippi,” on no other basis than that White had proclaimed in one of his early recordings, “Aberdeen is my home/But the men don’t want me around.” As it turned out, the letter was forwarded to the Memphis boarding house where Bukka lived while working part-time in a tank factory, and his musical career, on hold for the last fifteen years, almost immediately resumed.
Certainly the recordings on the Fat Possum album, originally titled 1963 Ain’t 1962, and made within weeks of his rediscovery, retain some of the power of his early work, and there are evocations, as there would be on subsequent recordings, too, of influences like Charlie Patton and contemporaries like Howlin’ Wolf. But it was clear at the same time that the knife-edge quality of his voice had coarsened, and the astonishing focus and fluidity of his songwriting and performance had ineradicably declined. And it was clear as well to anyone who had contact with the man that at fifty-four he was not looking for rediscovery, he was ready for the stardom that his cousin B.B. King had long since achieved. I think for me the most poignant manifestation of this dilemma came when I first saw Bukka, in the spring of 1964, as part of a folk series at the Boston YMCA, where the featured performer showed up for his Boston concert debut in a tuxedo, with little more than a dozen people in the audience (and not well-dressed ones at that) to applaud his performance.
With Skip James, the situation was somewhat different. Rediscovered in the Tunica County Hospital in June of 1964 by a trio of fans (once more including John Fahey), he was playing again, for the first time in years, at the Newport Folk Festival in July, his singular musical skills and imagination largely undiminished. He continued to develop his music, and even write new songs reflecting on his current situation, until his death five years later, but in a dark and characteristically introspective style that set him apart from almost every blues singer of his, or any other, generation. Playing in an open D-minor tuning that can best be described as “eerie” (it was a style that was confined almost entirely to his hometown of Bentonia, Mississippi, population then and now: less than 500), he sang fully thought-out and composed songs far removed from a blues mainstream that for the most part defines itself by fervor, not form. As a result, Skip never achieved anything like the popularity of many of his fellow rediscoveries, and it clearly ate at him to see the adulation that his good friend Mississippi John Hurt got from a young audience that was won over by the charm of both his personality and performance.
And just in case you should have any doubts on that score, listen to the music on almost any of Hurt’s recordings, early or late – I defy you to resist the nimble finger-picking and winsome charm of such performances as “Richland Woman,” “Louis Collins,” and “Avalon Blues,” or his self-deprecating star turn at the end of the PBS series American Epic. To Skip, though, this was little more than “play-party music,” perfectly good for dances and country suppers, as Skip’s manager Dick Waterman put it, but “not to be taken seriously as ‘great blues.’” And just for the record, Mississippi John Hurt agreed; he considered Skip a “genius,” beyond any doubt. But on the other hand, you wonder just how much of John’s irresistible charm was that very agreeableness.
There were few moments of rest for Skip, it seemed – he was ill, and he was troubled – but I remember seeing him once with John at a Boston coffee house, where in addition to presenting their own songs in separate sets, they performed together as well. The two songs that I recall were utterly…all right, charming “Silent Night” (though you haven’t heard “Silent Night” until you hear Solomon Burke’s soaring, soulful version, recorded live in a Georgia church at the blazing height of summer) and Jimmie Rodgers’ epochal country (as in country music) blues “Waiting for a Train.” But let’s pause here for a moment, if only to recall all the different strands that go into all the different kinds of music. Jimmie Rodgers, as I’m sure everyone knows, was almost universally hailed as “The Father of Country Music,” and to all intents and purposes he was. And yet his music drew upon the most diverse sources, not the least of which was the ululating blues of Tommy Johnson, who (just to illustrate some of the complications endemic to every form of cultural transliteration) greatly influenced that purest of all blues singers, Howlin’ Wolf, who in turn cited as one of his greatest inspirations none other than…Jimmie Rodgers.
This was all, for me, in 1969, a vast unexplored land, and like every realm of the imagination it remains so to this day. There are always going to be new, or overlooked, or simply misconstrued, treasures to discover, there are always new and unexpected connections to be made. And I hope this is not beginning to sound like, ‘There were giants that walked the earth in those days,’ and that with the passing of those giants this kind of music is no more – that isn’t what I mean at all. If you need a mantra, just remember the lesson of the Internet, nothing ever really disappears, and listen to the music of new champions of the old and new, like the North Mississippi Allstars’ Luther and Cody Dickinson, who learned at the feet of such legendary champions of the hill country style as R.L Burnside and Junior Kimbrough and Otha Turner, listen to no less dedicated disciples like Dan Auerbach or Paul Burch or Colin Linden, or poetic practitioners like Kevin Gordon – and who knows how many more?
Because by now it should be clear there’s no end in sight – how could there be, unless we’re talking the twilight of the gods or the inescapable impermanence of the flesh? When I first came to Memphis in 1969, I did my best to imagine the world as it must once have been. A world in which Elvis’ performance of the Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup blues “That’s All Right” at the Overton Park Shell in 1954 stood out as a revolutionary act. And yet as I was later to learn, Elvis listened to the Metropolitan Opera, too, as a child, he went to Overton Park on many Sunday afternoons (“The same place that I did my first concert”) to hear the Memphis Symphony Orchestra play. While at the same time he was tuning in religiously to WDIA, the first all-black station in the country. And listening every night to DJ Dewey Phillips’ aptly named Red, Hot, and Blue show,which mixed r&b and pop, the sacred and the profane, the trivial and the profound for a black-and-white audience that competed in its fervor for both the music and its egalitarian champion. It took a long time for me to disimagine categories, but as Howlin’ Wolf said the first time we met, in response to one of those foolish questions we all tend to ask, like, What did he think of all these white kids, like the Rolling Stones, who had so recently adopted his music? Well, he said, he liked Paul Butterfield, “he grown up in it just like that other boy out in California, [who did] that ‘Hound Dog’ number.” You mean Elvis Presley? I finally managed to blurt out – I mean, I was caught. “Yeah,” said Wolf impatiently, as if the reference should have been obvious to anyone. “Elvis Presley,” he said, “he made it his way.”
Which only goes to show that nothing ever really changes. Marketing strategies (which, after all, is all that categories are) may rise and fall, but to the democratic listener they are beside the point. The music calls attention to itself, and then takes you somewhere else. It isn’t really any different than going to Memphis was for me in the first place. One thing inevitably leads to another, and before you know it, you are caught up in the ecstatic dance, the ecstatic trance of the music. But just remember: If you’re going to Brownsville, take that right-hand road.
This piece appeared in a slightly different form on The Oxford American website.
L.C. and I always called each other on our almost-shared birthday.
It was always great to talk to L.C. He had a positive word for, and about, everyone. How’s your Dad? he would say. Give your wife a kiss for me. Grandkids doing good? That’s good. It was just his nature.
If you met L.C., you might think you were meeting his older (by 23 months) brother, Sam. Like Sam, he was charming, talented, outgoing, and thoughtful (L.C., he said, which in fact was his full Christian name, stood for “Loads of Charm”) – but he wasn’t Sam. He was L.C., and he knew it. If you asked him how he was doing, he declared, “I’m better than good.”
He was, as I say, one of the warmest and most gracious people you’d ever want to meet. Also, one of the most truth-telling. Nothing was ever prettified or embroidered. Nothing ever changed in his account. And he was always able to paint a picture, right down to the last vivid, eidetic detail. Because, without ever saying anything negative about anybody (there was only one person I ever heard L.C. speak ill of, and he was quick to point out that was the only one), he was a keen observer, an appreciative student of human nature, who didn’t believe in leaving anything out. “What’d you tell that man that for?” his sister Agnes said of some R-rated scene he hadrecounted to me for my biography of Sam. L.C. just shrugged. “Because it’s the truth,” he said. To L.C., a deeply religious man, who was a member of Christ Universal Temple, where his wife, Marjorie, served as assistant minister, for over fifty years, there was nothing alien in the human experience – which meant there was nothing to be ashamed of either.
There was unquestionably a cocky side to him, too. (L.C. would have called it confidence – though I’ll bet he would have accepted “cockiness.”) You could see it in his walk, hear it in his talk. And like all the Cooks (Sam added the “e”), he was not going to allow himself to get pushed around. He and his brothers and sisters had been taught by their father never to shrink from a challenge – whether it was from the cop on the beat or the massed forces of Jim Crow. It got him in trouble in the army, where he was almost court-martialed for defying the accepted rules of segregation. You could see it surface occasionally – but only occasionally – when he felt he was being disrespected. In situations like that, whether public or private, he was not about to back down. But you rarely got to see it – it was reserved for that rare moment when his charm failed to deflect what he perceived as a direct affront.
When I first met the family in Chicago in 1996 – I had known L.C. at that point for several years, but this was the first chance I got to meet his four living brothers and sisters and his 98-year-old father – I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I told L.C., “Man, I want to be a Cook.” “Okay,” said L.C., without seeming to give the matter a whole lot of reflection, “you are.” I said, “L.C., you can’t just speak for the whole family, can you? Don’t you have to consult with anyone else?” He looked at me like I must be crazy. “Naw, I’m the head man now,” he said. “You’re my brother.” And while I don’t really know how anyone else in the family felt about it, I felt great. And I still do.
For as long as I knew him, L.C. was pretty much of a homebody. He had long since stopped performing, and while he maintained all of his far-flung show-business connections (L.C. knew everybody, and everybody knew L.C.), he never showed any interest in returning to the life he had led. He cherished his friends. He cherished his family. He cherished his memories. And he cherished his wife, Margie, whom he met when her family had a restaurant on the South Side that all the r&b singers frequented. The church, while always important, became more and more so in later years. At his funeral at Christ Universal the story was told of how he became an usher, a position of great respect, when he started going to prayer meetings and, after a number of invitations, offered up a prayer. When he finished, everyone was in agreement, they wouldn’t need to have church now, because, after L.C.’s comprehensive praying, they had already had it. As an usher, he was given the honorary title of “Bishop,” the same as his father, a prominent evangelist in the Church of Christ (Holiness), and he wore it proudly until his death.
In his last years he suffered from a debilitating condition which left him in a wheelchair, but with the help of Margie and his good friend, “Junior” Mayfield,he remained undaunted in spirit, dedicated to his rehabilitation, and to the end he never gave up the hope that someday he might walk again. “You don’t ever have to check up on anything I tell you,” he said the first time we met. “Because I’m going to tell it to you the same every time.” And he expected me to hold up my end of the bargain, too. “Didn’t I tell you that before?” he would say with some exasperation, when I tested my own understanding of the story from time to time. “Thank you.”
The only time I ever had reason to question his total reliability not just as a family chronicler but as a social historian arose when we were looking at a bunch of family photographs supplied by his sister Agnes. “That’s Sam!” L.C. said proudly, holding up a picture of a young boy in a button-up sweater, with a kerchief around his neck. A year or two later, when my friend Susan Marsh was designing the book, she said, “That looks an awful lot like L.C. to me,” and Alexandra thought so, too. “Well, they were brothers, weren’t they?” I said. “I mean, they did kind of look alike.” At Susan’s insistence, though, I went back to L.C., and was met with the predictable reaction, which fell somewhere between indignation and hurt. “Man, I already told you that was Sam,” he said. Which necessarily settled the matter. But then, not long after the book came out, I was talking with Agnes, and she asked me why I had labeled the boy in the picture as Sam, when anyone could plainly see it was L.C. I told her that her brother had been very emphatic on the subject. Agnes just laughed. “That fool don’t know his own self,” she said. But, of course, he did, with perhaps that single inexplicable exception. And he laughed about it afterwards, reluctantly conceding that Agnes was right.
I can still hear his liltingly assertivevoice, the seductive rhythms of his speech. I will always recall his warm smile, that warm laugh. And I think about when his debut SAR album came out in 2014, fifty years after it had been completed and announced for release just before Sam’s death. (SAR was the label Sam started to record some of the artists he most admired both in gospel and pop, artists like the Sims Twins, Johnnie Taylor, Bobby Womack, and the Soul Stirrers.) What was revelatory about hearing so much of L.C.’s early work all gathered together on one disc was not how much L.C. sounded like Sam (everyone already knew that) but how much he possessed a voice of his own. “Sam wanted me to be different from anybody. He wanted me to stand out alone,” L.C. said, and even though Sam wrote most of the songs and produced all of the SAR sessions, it is L.C.’s voice that comes through most of all: jaunty, buoyant, upbeat, but more than capable, as it turns out, of really bearing down on a deep-soul classic like “Put Me Down Easy.”
He started out at the age of five singing bass with his brothers and sisters in the family group, the Singing Children. He sang with Lou Rawls in a teenage gospel group, the Holy Wonders, and met Elvis Presley at the WDIA Goodwill Revue in Memphis when he was singing with the Magnificents in 1956. (“You’re not related to Sam Cooke, are you?” Elvis said with almost awestruck wonder, at a time when Sam was still singing gospel with the Soul Stirrers and scarcely anyone in white America knew his name.) Even after L.C. stopped performing professionally, he might still singoccasionally with old friends at informal gospel singing reunions or events like Lou Rawls’ 2006 funeral. When the album came out, he relished the attention that both he and the music were getting, without ever being tempted by the numerous offers to perform that came his way. Talking to him about the album just before it came out, I asked if he had any favorites, and of course he named “Put Me Down Easy” as one. But it was his own, self-penned “If I Could Only Hear,” recorded for Chess just before he started recording for his brother’s label, that he felt represented him best. “It was probably the best song I ever did in my life,” he said. “To me. You know, sometimes you cut a song and you listen. You say, ‘I could have done that better.’ But ‘If I Could Only Hear’ – if I had sung that song for 100 years, I couldn’t have done that song no better than what I did. That’s always been my favorite song. And I think you all will agree.”
Sometimes I get asked who or what influenced me most in my deep-seated (and very early) desire to write.
I’ve named books and writers: Tristram Shandy (don’t miss the book, but don’t miss the movie either), Norse mythology, and Henry Green, Alice Munro, Grace Paley and Hubert Selby Jr., Ralph Ellison, Italo Svevo, Sigrid Undset and Zora Neale Hurston. For the last few years I’ve been working on a series of loosely connected short stories suggested by Dawn Powell’s novel My Home Is Far Away, a book that I can best describe as suggesting the tone of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander transplanted to the world of Winesburg, Ohio. Which could lead me to Hemingway, or Hemingway’s Boat, or – well, I’m sure you get the point.
There were teachers, certainly. Omar Pound (Omar Shakespear Pound, son of Ezra) is the one who stands out the most. He came to Roxbury Latin when I was in the ninth grade and was greeted with almost universal rejection bordering on scorn by my classmates – for his oddity, for his self-determined eccentricities, for his stubborn scruffiness, both personal and intellectual. But for me, and a few others, he provided a wonderful opportunity for self-expression in the two or three extended writing exercises he assigned each week, suggested by a phrase or saying that he provided, of which the only one that comes immediately to mind is, “Only a fool learns from experience.” True? Untrue? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. But as I recall, I wrote a short story that I hope was as open-ended in a fifteen-year-old way and lent itself as much to individual interpretation as I have intended in my biographies of Elvis, Sam Cooke, and Sam Phillips, or any of the other books that I’ve written.
But there’s still that lingering question: what in the world would lead an eight or nine-year-old kid to want to be a writer – if he couldn’t be a be a Major League baseball player, that is. It was my grandfather, Philip Marson, who taught English for over thirty years at Boston Latin (no, not the same Latin School – it’s complicated), founded and ran Camp Alton (which I would later run) in what he conceived of as a fresh-air expansion of the educational experience, dreamed of having the time one day to finish Finnegans Wake (he finally did at seventy-eight, over his customary breakfast of shredded wheat), and explored the second-hand bookstores of Boston’s Cornhill for $.25 masterpieces like Jean Toomer’s Cane, without necessarily passing up a sidetrip to the Old Howard burlesque show in adjacent Scollay Square, where he pulled his hat down over his face for fear of running into one of his students. I wasn’t around for the Old Howard, which closed in 1953, but by the time I was ten or eleven I started accompanying him on his foraging trips to Cornhill (now the site of Government Center), which always included a mid-morning hot fudge sundae at Bailey’s, where the fudge sauce was so thick it could have been a meal by itself.
It was his enthusiasm, I think, that inspired me most of all, his enthusiasm and his unfettered appreciation for life, literature, sports (he was a three-sport athlete at Tufts – Tris Speaker, the Grey Eagle, he said, had praised him for his play in a college game at Fenway Park), grammatical niceties, and democratic ideals. More than just appreciation, it was his undisguisedavidity for experience and people of every sort. “Hey, Pete,” he would shout out in his high-pitched voice, to my pre-adolescent, adolescent, and post-adolescent (does that count as adult?) embarrassment, “Will you look at that?” And I’m not going to tell you what that was – because it’s still embarrassing. But, you know, it was always interesting.
But none of that would have counted for anywhere near as much if he were not such an unrestrained fan of me – it just seemed like whatever I did was all right with him. He came to all my baseball games, naturally, but when I took up tennis, which he had always scorned as an artificially encumbered (don’t ask me why), pointless kind of sport, he embraced it wholeheartedly, coming to all my tournaments and swiftly learning the finer points of the game. If I recommended a book, he was quick to embrace it. And when at the age of eleven and twelve and into early adolescence, I suffered from fears that so crippled me that I found it difficult even to go to school, his belief in me never wavered. Or more to the point perhaps, he never seemed to see me as any less, or any different, a person.
I grew up in my grandparents’ house off and on from the time I was born. My father, whom I could cite as an equally inspiring influence in terms of both character and commitment, landed in England the day I was born and didn’t return from the War until I was more than two years old, nearly a year after V-E Day. So my mother and I camped out with my grandparents, very comfortably for me, though I’m not so sure about my mother. (One of the short stories I’ve written lately tries to imagine what it must have been like for her, twenty-three, twenty-four-years old, with no certainty of the future, an only child living with her only child in her parents’ house.) Then, when my father finally came home, we remained for another three years, until we could finally afford a place of our own, moving into the garden apartments that had recently opened up near-by as affordable housing for returning veterans. A year or two after that, my grandparents gave my parents the house and moved to a roomy old apartment in Coolidge Corner, not far away.
Staying with my grandparents on weekends in their new apartment, even more book-crammed than the house because it was crammed with the same books, was always a treat. We went to theater together, my grandmother, my grandfather, and I – I can remember seeing Charles Laughton in Don Juan in Hell, the stand-alone third act of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman when I was nine or ten years old.(Shaw was always a great favorite of my grandfather’s, along with such native-born contrarians as H.L. Mencken.) We went to serious plays, musicals, Broadway try-outs, and revivals. Along with Shaw, Eugene O’Neill undoubtedly loomed largest in my grandfather’s theatrical cosmos, and it was as exciting to listen to my grandparents talk about seeing Paul Robeson make his Broadway debut in The Emperor Jones or attending O’Neill’s marathon nine-act Strange Interlude, which included a break for dinner, as it was to hear my grandfather tell the story of how he lost his hat when he stood up to cheer Franklin Roosevelt at the Boston Garden.
But it was books in the end that were the instigators of the most passionate discussions, books that inspired me to want to write books of my own, books that would always provide an impetus for dinner-time conversation and home décor. My grandfather introduced me to Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe, to James Joyce and Knut Hamsun, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (he loved to discourse on what he called the shuttle-and-weave of their narrative technique), and Sigrid Undset. I’ll admit, I might well have been better off if I had stuck a little longer with the Landmark series of biographies that continued to excite me or the Scribner Classics editions of Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson and James Fenimore Cooper, with those wonderful N.C. Wyeth illustrations, or any of the other children’s classics that I had indiscriminately devoured. But I was so bereft of self-awareness (while at the same time so consumed by self-consciousness) that I started to record my impressions of each of the books that I read in little tablet notebooks, earnest summaries not just of the books but of my own judgments of them. I could only express my “wonderment at, and admiration for, the author’s scope and ability,” I declared, writing about Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter when I was fifteen. And struggled for six handwritten pages to express more specifically my admiration for this 1000-page trilogy that takes place in fourteenth-century Norway, with its rare combination of epic sweep and unexpected intimacy. My grandfather considered it the greatest novel ever written, a judgment with which, as you can see, I struggled mightily to concur – and in fact still do. But I also knew, as my grandfather’s own omnivorous passion for discovery suggested, that all such judgments were nonsense. In the end, like the question of who was the greatest baseball player of all time, an early and abiding conversation of ours, it was a provisional title only, waiting for the next great thing to come along.
And yet, and yet, well, you know, when it comes right down to it, it wasn’t books or writing or epistemological fervor that were my primary inspiration. They would have meant nothing if it hadn’t been for everything else. What my grandfather communicated to me most of all was a hunger for life, for the raw stuff of life that served as the underpinning for every great book that either of us admired. I’m oversimplifying, I know, but it just seemed like, in the greater scheme of things, with my grandfather there was no exclusionary gene. There was no sense of high and low (no one appreciated a “dirty joke” more shamelessly than he) and, save for the inviolable principles of grammar and the strict standards of a “good education,” everything was in play, everything existed on the same human plane.
In many ways, I think that was what opened me up to the blues – not just the music but the experience of the music, the many different implications of the music – which turned out to be the single greatest revelation of my life. So many of the places where I started out are still the places where I am. Books, writing, playing sports (sadly, no more baseball), the blues. As my grandfather got older, his enthusiasm never diminished. When $100 Misunderstanding, an alternating dialogue between a fourteen-year-old black prostitute and her clueless white college john, came out in 1962, my grandfather got the idea that he and I could write a novel in the same manner about the generation gap, which was very much in the news then. We would write alternate chapters – well, you get the picture – and he was so excited about the idea that I couldn’t say no, though we never advanced to the point where we put anything down on paper. When the draft briefly threatened, he decided he would buy land in Canada and we could start a commune there, and while the threat went away before he was ever able to put his idea into practice, I had no doubt it would have been a very interesting (and well-ordered) commune.
A few years later, in 1970, he asked if I would help him run camp the following year. I’m not sure I need to explain, but this came like a bolt out of the blue. Alexandra and I had been working at camp for the last few years, and I was running the tennis program and coaching baseball. “No speculation,” I told my twelve-year-old charges, taking my cue, as always, from William Carlos Williams. It was a wonderful way to spend the summer, and it was certainly rewarding from any number of points of view, not least of which was being close to my grandparents. But not for one moment had the thought of running camp crossed my mind. I was twenty-six-years-old, working on my first full-length published book, Feel Like Going Home, and my fifth unpublished novel, Mister Downchild, and I thought I knew where my future lay.
At the same time, the idea of turning my grandfather down never crossed my mind. He was seventy-eight years old and had never asked for my help before – in fact, I couldn’t remember him ever asking anybody’s help. So, sure, yes, unequivocally. And yet I found it impossible to imagine how this could ever work. How exactly was I going to help? And if his idea was to defer to me, to withdraw and leave the day-to-day running of camp to me, well, this would require a lot more conviction, self-belief, and, above all, knowledge (since no one knew anything about the running of camp except for him) than I possessed. The question was, did I have it in me to be the person that I needed, that I wanted, for my grandfather’s sake, to be?
As it turned out, I never had to answer that question. My grandfather got sick – it appeared at first to be a stroke, it turned out to be a brain tumor – almost immediately after asking for my help. I kept things going over the winter in hopes that he would recover, and when he didn’t, it was like being thrown into the water and discovering, much to your surprise, that you actually knew how to swim. I ended up running camp by myself that summer, and I ran it for twenty-one years after that, and whatever my grandfather intended (and I suspect it was a great deal more than just providing me with an income to support my writing), it turned out to be one of the most rewarding, existentially engaging experiences of my life. And not just in the ways you might expect – camp was a thriving, self-sustaining community of 300 people that continued to grow and evolve, as did my own views of democratic institutions and possibilities – but because it inescapably exposed me to real life, it forced me out into a world in which my feelings were not the center of everything. A world of building things and balancing books, where you dealt of necessity (and to your own incalculable experiential benefit) with all kinds of different people, benefited from the wisdom and experience of others (could that have been what Omar Pound meant?), and learned not just to stand up for yourself but for everyone else, because no matter how much inner turmoil you might feel (and I think back to my ten- and –eleven-year-old self, curled up in a ball reading a book, afraid to leave the comforting familiarity of my room), you don’t have the luxury of dwelling on your own emotions. Because – why? Everyone is depending on you. It forced me, in other words, to grow up, in a way that deeply affected not only my writing but my ability to understand all the different personalities and perspectives that I wanted to portray in both my fiction and my nonfiction, in my biographies and profiles of such multifarious personalities as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Waylon Jennings, Sam Phillips, and Solomon Burke. It forced me, when it came right down to it, to embrace the world.
My grandfather used to come see me in my dreams sometimes. He always wore his tan windbreaker and stood by the tree on the right field line at camp, where he used to watch my games, both as a kid and as an adult. It was always good to see him – there was never a time I didn’t wish he would stay longer. But even though I rarely see him nowadays, I carry with me always the conviction that he communicated so unhesitantly: that everything is just out there waiting to be discovered. And I try to keep that belief in the forefront – well, maybe the backfront – of my mind. I continue to be drawn on by the prospect, I continue to struggle for its discovery.
A brief note to mark the passing of Pittsburgh soul man Johnny Daye (John DiBucci), who passed away on May 6 in his hometown. The energetic, tender-and-tough-voiced Daye recorded just six singles in a recording career that lasted from 1965 to 1968, but managed to get “discovered” – signed and mentored – by both Johnny Nash at Jomada Records and Otis Redding at
Stax in that brief time. Most of the white teens who were held spellbound by the voices of Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, James Brown, and Solomon Burke filtered their music through a rock and roll lens. The Righteous Brothers in Los Angeles, Roy Head in Houston, the Rolling Stones in London, and Mitch Ryder in Detroit, all had dramatic success accommodating the new music called soul to their own style. But for Johnny Daye in Pittsburgh, like the Magnificent Men out of Harrisburg, Steve Colt in Boston, Baltimore’s Bob Brady, and Philadelphia’s Temptones, accommodation was out of the question. Instead they went all in, not just adopting a soul style, but putting all their cards on the table. They competed on soul’s home turf, let the best man win. When the Magnificent Men first appeared on stage at the Uptown Theater in North Philadelphia, the audience was silent until lead singers David Bupp and Buddy King opened their mouths to sing. Then they went wild, when they heard a group that sounded like Smokey and the Miracles, with moves to match.
Johnny Daye was a natural by all accounts, a singer, dancer, and all-around sharp entertainer who could really wow a crowd. When he substituted for Wilson Pickett as an opening act for Otis Redding in Pittsburgh in the spring of 1967, Otis, watched from the wings, enthralled. He took Johnny on the road with him, then to Stax Records, where Steve Cropper was given the job of producing the Big O’s young guy. The hard-driving “What’ll I Do for Satisfaction” came out just two weeks before Redding’s plane crashed into that Wisconsin lake, and the record’s fate was inevitably linked to the company’s dark, post-Otis period of depression. Cropper also produced the deep soul follow-up, “Stay Baby Stay,” in the summer of 1968, one of the first singles on the reinvigorated, finger-snap yellow Stax label. But in that tense summer, on the heels of the deaths of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the country seemed to have little appetite for “blue-eyed” soul. With his career all-but-over at age 25, Johnny Daye returned to the Iron City, where he worked over the years as a car salesman, security guard, bus driver, and telephone company employee. Years later, out of nowhere, “What’ll I Do for Satisfaction” popped up on Janet Jackson’s Jam-and-Lewis-produced Janet, in a faithful updated cover that became the ninth single from her mega-hit album.
When asked about Johnny Daye, Steve Cropper said, “The kid was dynamite….Otis really wanted to do a lot with him.” Johnny’s brother echoed Cropper’s words . “Otis told Johnny he’d make him a star when he got back.” But Otis never did get back. And Johnny Daye remained a legend for a small group of dedicated fans. As it is and as it was, Johnny Daye coulda been a contender.
To read more about Johnny Daye.. check out this post on the I DiG PGH blog and his obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
This piece appeared in slightly different form on the occasion of Chuck’s 90th birthday on Rollingstone.com
The first time I met Chuck Berry he was playing a club called Where It’s At, which, in contradiction of its name, occupied the second floor of a drab business building in Kenmore Square and was operated by long-time Boston DJ Dave Maynard and his manager, Ruth Clenott. It was 1967, and I was in my senior year of college, working at the Paperback Booksmith, as I had for the last four years, both in and out of school. I was making $65 a week. The reason I know this is because Chuck Berry signed my paycheck.
Well, it wasn’t my paycheck exactly, it was my paycheck stub, and the reason he signed it was because I didn’t have anything else to present to him for an autograph. He had just given an exhilarating performance with a pick-up band of Berklee College students (unlike Bo Diddley, say, whom I had recently seen at the same club, Chuck Berry never carried his own band, and the result was inconsistent, to say the least). But tonight, for whatever reason, Chuck’s creative impulses had been stimulated, and rather than performing tired rehashes of his familiar hits with a rhythm section that didn’t have a clue, he followed what I’m sure was the unintended lead of the band, jazz players all, freely improvising on the hits, while throwing in unexpected bonuses like “Rockin’ at the Philharmonic” and Lionel Hampton’s “Flying Home,” in addition to a few T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan numbers. He was clearly in good spirits, but it still took a while for me to work up the nerve to approach him as he stood to one side of the foot-high stage, packing up his guitar and getting ready to leave.
He regarded me with a quizzical look, casting an even more quizzical look at the book I was attempting to give him – “book” might actually be a little bit of a stretch for the pamphlet-sized booklet I was finally able to hand him, with its smudged white cover and stapled-together pages. What’s this? his noncommittal expression seemed to say, in a manner that betrayed neither receptiveness nor hostility. More to the point, that blank stare seemed to suggest, without meaning to get all in your face about it, who the fuck are you? I have no idea what I said. I’m sure I wished that the book could simply declare itself. The stark black lettering on the cover announced “Almost Grown, and Other Stories, by Peter Guralnick,” and it had originally been published three years earlier, when I was twenty. I must have mumbled something about how the book had been inspired in part by his music, that the title obviously came from his song, that I hoped he would like it. (Help me, I’m trying to paint a sympathetic picture here.) He flipped through the pages and placed the book carefully in his guitar case. “Cool,” he said, or the equivalent, and flashed me what I took to be an encouraging, if inescapably sardonic, smile. And then he was gone, off to the airport, off to another gig, or maybe just home to St. Louis. I still like to think that he read the stories on the plane on his way to whatever turned out to be his next destination.
It would be another forty-four years before I actually met him.
But, first, perhaps I should say – well, you tell me, do I really have to say? – that there is no end to my admiration for Chuck Berry’s work, even if his commitment to performance has at times proved wanting. As much as Percy Mayfield remains the Poet Laureate of the Blues, Chuck Berry will always be the Poet Laureate of – what? Of Our Time. Has there ever been a more perfect pop song than “Nadine,” a catchier encapsulation of story line and wit in four verses and a chorus, in which the protagonist (like all of Chuck’s characters, a not-too-distant stand-in for its author but never precisely himself) is introduced “pushing through the crowd trying to get to where she’s at/I was campaign shouting like a southern diplomat.” I mean, come on – and the song only gets better from there. When he was recognized in 2012 by PEN New England (a division of the international writers’ organization) for its first “Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence” award, his co-honoree, Leonard Cohen, graciously declared that “all of us are footnotes to the words of Chuck Berry,” while Bob Dylan called him “the Shakespeare of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Which is all very generically well. But perhaps the most persuasive tribute I ever encountered was delivered by the highly cerebral New Orleans singer, songwriter, arranger, and pianist extraordinaire, Allen Toussaint. I was trying to get at some of the reasons for the dramatic expansion of his own songwriting aspirations (musically, poetically, politically) in the ‘70s, when he graduated from brilliant pop cameos like “Ride Your Pony” and “Mother In Law” to more ambitious, post-Beatles, post-Miles, post-Civil Rights Era work. Was it the influence of Bob Dylan, say, that allowed him to contemplate a wider range of subjects, a greater breadth and length to the songs? Oh, not at all, Allen replied in his cool, elegant manner, he wished he could agree with me, but his single greatest influence in terms of lyrics and storytelling from first to last was Chuck Berry. And with that he started quoting Chuck Berry lyrics, just as you or I might, just as Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis do on the fabled “Million Dollar Quartet” session. “What a wonderful little story that is,” he said of “You Never Can Tell,” Chuck’s fairy-tale picture of young love in Creole-speaking Louisiana, “how he lived that life with that couple, you know. Oh, the man’s a mountain,” said Allen unhesitatingly, and then went on to quote some more.
I saw Chuck in performance many times over the years, everywhere from Carnegie Hall to a decommissioned state armory. I wrote to him at one point at the invitation of Bob Baldori, who started playing with Chuck in 1966 and has been close to him ever since. Chuck had just begun work on his autobiography, and Bob thought, a little fancifully perhaps, he might welcome some help. (‘Dear Mr. Berry,’ I wrote in effect, ‘You won’t remember me, but…’, then cited Bob as a reference and suggested that while I didn’t know that I had anything to offer as a writer, maybe he could use me as someone to bounce ideas off, if he were so inclined.) I never heard back from him, which was just as well, because when the book came out two years later, in 1987, it was a masterpiece. “It is at once witty, elegant, and revealing,” I wrote of it for Vibe, “and (or perhaps but) ultimately elusive. Every word was written by its author in a web of elegant, intricate connections that are both coded and transparent. Very much like the songs.” And it was all Chuck – with a little help from his editor, Michael Pietsch, who traveled to Chuck’s amusement park/residence, Berry Park, outside of St. Louis, to retrieve it.
New Orleans 2011
It was not until New Orleans, in 2011, though, that I got beyond that first, monosyllabic exchange. We were both there to fulfill a date that was initially referred to without irony as “The Summit Meeting of Rock,” because it was to include filmed interviews with Chuck, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Fats Domino, both as a group and, in the case of the first three, individually as well. It was part of a Rolling Stone-sponsored oral history project for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame that had only recently begun, and I was the designated interviewer. Do I have to stipulate that it was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, and also, unquestionably, one of the funnest? You try facing down Jerry Lee Lewis, Richard, or Chuck, each with his own keenly intelligent, widely divergent, and informed point of view, and try to get a go-ahead smile out of them on their own uncompromising terrain. I think I’d be safe in saying that, overall, unaffected warmth and affection prevailed, stimulated as much as anything by everyone’s genuine love for Fats, but at the same time it was not an entirely smooth and mellow meeting. Religion, politics, personality – all of the usual sources of conflict were present in good measure. Little Richard at one point wanted to thank God for bringing them all to New Orleans, but Jerry Lee, an intensely religious man himself, demurred at what I think he took to be a too-casual appropriation of faith. “I don’t know about you,” he muttered, “but I came here on a plane. And I think you came by bus!” Someone suggested that Louis Jordan was one of the key figures in the development of rock ‘n’ roll, and someone else objected that “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens” was not in their view anything like rock ‘n’ roll. It was incredible! The interview with Jerry Lee was probably the most wide-ranging; Little Richard, for all of his avid study of history and precise recollection of it, was not about to abandon his theological texts; but it was Chuck who proved the most surprising, as, robbed of the constraint of memory, he abandoned, if only for a moment or two, his life-long habit of emotional indirection and spoke unguardedly of his family, his mother and father, the expectations they had had of him and the inspiration with which they provided him, growing up.
He was as slim and elegant as ever, wearing the jaunty captain’s hat that has become almost ubiquitous since the departure of most of his beautifully coiffed hair some years ago. Communication was sometimes a challenge, because not surprisingly he had left his hearing aids at home, despite the repeated reminders of his family and his friend Joe Edwards, proprietor of Blueberry Hill, the St Louis club where he played off and on for almost twenty years before “taking a break” from performing two years ago. He spoke of poetry and politics (just to clarify, nearly everything is “politics” to Chuck, from the endemic chicanery of the music business to the endemic racism he has encountered over the years), and he insisted for the most part, just as he always has in his art, on speaking metaphorically, if unmistakably.
He spoke, too, of the sources of inspiration that he always points to for much of the flair, if not the full scope, of his creativity. (There is, Chuck will never fail to tell you, nothing new under the sun.) He cited Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan, not to mention Louis Jordan’s great guitarist Carl Hogan (check out “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman” if you want to hear one of the fundamental sources for Chuck Berry’s guitar style) – and Nat “King” Cole, too, for his diction. But as to his idea of reaching everyone, not just the “neighborhood” (the ur-definition, of course, of rock ‘n’ roll), well, that was something he derived from the concept of get-ahead capitalism that he got from helping out his father in the grocery business as a young boy. “By then,” he said, describing himself at ages ten and eleven, “I had a bit of politics in my head. My dad had a business of his own, selling groceries, and he worked for himself, so I came to handling money at that age. He carried vegetables in a basket and would go by someone’s door and knock on it. ‘Would you like –’ You know, the material looked so good. [But] I sold a lot [of it] because of the ingenuity that I [showed] trying to sell.”
That was the very idea that he applied to the music, when, after driving up to Chicago to introduce himself to Leonard Chess on Muddy Waters’ recommendation, he introduced himself to the world at the age of twenty-eight by employing that same sense of ingenuity, that same sense of “politics.” Meaning, he said, “M-O-N-E-Y. What sells. What’s on the market. Now I knew the market. There had to be a market in order for you to be successful in a business. The market had to need your business, or the product of it. So I tried to sing as though they would be interested, and that would become a market.” And then, he said, you multiplied that market, and you added another market to it, and it was as if you were still traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood, and pretty soon you had a constituency that included nearly everybody. That was the constituency that Chuck Berry was aiming for as an artist. And that was the constituency that he ultimately reached.
We started out our interview talking about poetry, and we came back to poetry in the end. Remember, this is a man whose older brother was named for Paul Laurence Dunbar, the great African-American poet, whose “We Wear the Mask” should be required reading in all the schools. It had always tickled me the way that Chuck would end so many of his concerts with a poem. It was a poem I had never heard in any other context, though it reminded me of “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which a traveler from “some antique land” stumbles upon the tomb of one of its ancient kings. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” proclaim the words engraved on the faded stone at the base of the ruined monument, while “the lone and level sands stretch far away….boundless and bare.”
The poem that Chuck recited, while nowhere near as bleak (it takes a more positive, transcendental spin), was certainly in the same philosophical ballpark. It was called “Even This Shall Pass Away,” and, as I discovered from asking him about it, it was not an original poem by Chuck Berry at all; it was in fact a poem that he had first heard his father recite (“That’s my dad,” Chuck said. “I get a little choked up when I think of him”), when he was no more than six or seven years old. The poet, I would later learn after a little research (very little – it’s all over the internet!), was Theodore Tilton, an American poet, newspaper editor, and Abolitionist, and the poem was first published in his collection, The Sexton’s Tale, in 1867. With very little prompting, Chuck recited the poem, and as he did, he got more and more choked up. “My dad,” he said, “was the cause of me being in show business. He was not only in poetry but in acting a bit. He was Mordecai in the play, ‘A Dream of Queen Esther.’ [This was a church production by a prolific white playwright and meteorologist, Walter Ben Hare.] He was very low in speech and music, and he came out on stage, he came out to tell the king, ‘Sire, sire, someone is approaching our castle.’ And I knew his voice. I’m five years old right now. I knew his voice and I hollered out in the theater, ‘Daddy!’ I don’t remember it, but they tell me I did. His position in the choir was bass. Mother’s was soprano and lead. That’s all there was in our house, poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction – I don’t think anyone could know how much it really means.” Who were some of his favorite poets as a kid? I ask. Edgar Allen Poe, he said after some consideration (“I can’t think of them [all], my memory’s really bad”), and Paul Laurence Dunbar was his mother’s. On second thought, he offered, Dunbar was his favorite, too. But getting back to that recitation – he couldn’t do it as well as his father, Chuck said after completing several verses of “Even This Shall Pass Away,” “my dad’s voice rang. But here’s something for you.” And with that he launched into the fifth verse (out of seven), searching for the words, searching for the memories, concluding triumphantly, “‘Pain is hard to bear,’ he cried/‘But with patience day by day/Even this shall pass away.’ Oh, I’m breaking up again.” And with that he concluded, to the applause of everyone in the room, the film director, the sound and camera man, his son, Charles Jr., a woman who carried a card “Sherry with Berry,” and assorted other bystanders – no more than 25 or 30 in all. He was in tears. He was in triumph.
The problem for Chuck Berry at ninety is the same one we all face: mortality. His work, of course, is his immortality, though as Woody Allen has often said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying” – and Chuck might very well agree. He is, like many of us, his own best advocate and his own worst enemy, but the particular problem for Chuck is that, for all of the accolades that have come his way (listen to Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis celebrate his genius on the Million Dollar Quartet session, just for a start), to this day he has not been unambiguously embraced in the full artistic terms he deserves. There are undoubtedly a multiplicity of reasons for this (race would certainly have to be factored in), but the principal reason that Chuck has not been lifted up on a wave of critical and biographical hosannas is Chuck himself. His unwillingness to ingratiate himself. His unreadable apartness. The deep-seated sense of anger and suspicion that can unexpectedly flare up and turn into overt hostility, with or without provocation (check out the 60th birthday, star-studded performance documentary, Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, which is both brilliant for its uplifting artistry and maddening for its self-inflicted failures). Most of all, I would guess, it comes down to his determined, uncompromisingly defiant refusal to conform to anyone else’s expectations but his own.
He is not like any other popular performer that I can think of (oh, Merle Haggard might be a distant cousin, even a second or third cousin once removed, but no closer). For all of the canny “political” (read artistic here) inclusiveness that established both his career and his legacy, he has from the beginning chosen to set himself apart. Or been set apart. By a juvenile conviction for armed robbery before he ever thought of entering show business (remember: this was an upwardly mobile, middle-class kid, by his own description). Later by two mid-career prison terms, one coming at the height of his success in 1960 (a contested Mann Act violation, which could certainly be seen as a form of “political” [read racial here] reprisal). Not to mention some of his well-documented sexual proclivities and peccadillos (and I don’t mean to minimize them here), what his biographer, Bruce Pegg, writes, represent the actions of “a man whose detachment from society made him feel immune to its mores and taboos.” (For details see Pegg’s Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry.) Sometimes that sense of detachment has served him well (by allowing him to speak in another person’s voice for example, in his songwriting), sometimes it has not – but it has always been a non-negotiable part of his personality. And it has at times alienated his own audience at the very times that, were he but able to admit it, he might have needed them most. Which has tended to make his transition to lovable icon, to venerable (and much-venerated) elder statesman, a little daunting at times. In the last few years he has enjoyed a round of gracious honors: a larger-than-life duckwalking statue in St Louis; that PEN New England “Literary Excellence in Song Lyrics” award, held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, where Chuck was delighted to snap pictures, and have his picture taken with images of JFK; his celebration in a week-long series of events as an American Music Master at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame; the $100,000 international Polar Music Prize, which has often been referred to as “the Nobel Prize for Music.” At each of the first three (he was not able to attend the Polar Prize ceremony in Sweden in 2014), he acquitted himself with more than a hint of sentiment and a large dose of his own brand of idiosyncratic charm. “I’m wondering about my future,” he told Rolling Stone reporter Patrick Doyle. When pressed to be a little more specific, “I’ll give you a little piece of poetry,” he said. “Give you a song?/I can’t do that/My singing days have passed/My voice is gone, my throat is worn/And my lungs are going fast.” Or as he put it ten years earlier, in 2002, “In a way, I feel it might be ill-mannered to try and top myself. The music I play is a ritual. Something that matters to people in a special way. I wouldn’t want to interfere with that.”
Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Joe Tex – what do these four all have in common? Well, they were all charter members of the near-mythic (no, I mean really mythic, as in “some mythic creature”) Soul Clan, who recorded just one side of one picture-sleeve 45 – without Otis, who had died, without Pickett, who had had an emotional flare-up – but were conceived by Solomon, in typical Solomonic fashion, as a force that might have changed the world. Well, they did – with their music. And three of them are enshrined in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Only Joe Tex, who is on the ballot this year for what well may be the last time, remains excluded.
The first time I saw Joe Tex he was on the same bill with Solomon and Otis (Solomon was the headliner) in a 1964 Soul Summer Shower of Stars, and he more than held his own. As an entertainer, who took great delight in his ability to give pleasure to his audience and in their evident delight with him. As a songwriter and exemplar of mother wit, dispensing healthy dollops of good humor mixed in with sharp shards of his own earthy philosophy. (Check out songs like “Anything You Wanna Know” or “Grandma Mary” on his brilliant, entirely self-penned album, Buying a Book.) As an effortless performer, endlessly enchanting his audience with his easy onstage manner, lithe dancing, and microphone manipulations. Not for nothing was he known as the Dapper Rapper.
But in the end, what made Joe Tex an intrinsic member of the Soul Clan, dues paid up in full and in perpetuity, was his dedication to Deep Soul (think James Brown’s “Lost Someone,” Solomon’s “The Price,” Otis’s “These Arms of Mine”). Just listen to his breakthrough hit, “Hold What You’ve Got” or, for that matter, “The Love You Save,” self-written like nearly every one of his hits and much of his album material, and see if you can resist the pathos and deep-seated feeling at the heart of his music.
So I’m asking for your vote, the last vote left to us in this Year of Jeremiah (I wonder what Solomon would have to say about that): VOTE JOE TEX FOR THE ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME.
And now I’ll turn over the lectern to Brother Joe.
Mr. C Speaks:
I second that emotion.
And just to reinforce the point: there’s a three-part, black-and-white YouTube clip of the full Joe Tex Show, live in Sweden 1969 and complete with explosive sound, that provides a rare visual glimpse of the stage mastery of Joe Tex. Part 3 opens with an original take on Henson Cargill’s #1 country hit, “Skip A Rope,” and ends with a burning version of Joe’s signature “Skinny Legs and All,” a highly eccentric Top 10 pop hit in 1968. Joe and his band, led by ferocious drummer Clyde Williams, turn “Skip a Rope,” a socially aware composition with a nursery rhyme structure, into a Sam Cooke kind of rave-up, complete with horn voicings lifted from any number of late Cooke uptempos. It’s that same odd mix of sass and soul that made Joe Tex so different from any other soul singer, while at the same time declaring his commonality, that same utterly unique talent which was on display night after night, whether in Sweden or on the endless string of clubs and stages that Joe Tex inhabited. “Original,” like “genius,” is a much-abused appellation, but Joe Tex fully deserves both titles. VOTE JOE TEX
Sam Phillips always said that Scotty may have been the most honest man he ever met. That was as high a compliment as Sam could bestow. In fact, Sam almost went on to imply, if it came down to a choice between Scotty’s version of a story and his own, choose Scotty’s! Now don’t get me wrong – Sam never actually said that. But that was how much he thought of Scotty. And he wasn’t just talking about facts – he was talking about character.
That was one of the main reasons he put Scotty together with Elvis in the first place. Elvis was nineteen, Scotty was twenty-two, and Elvis referred to him as “the Old Man” almost from the start. Scotty was always the one to provide a calming influence, even as all hell was busting loose around them in new and unpredictable ways.
But it wasn’t just a matter of temperament. His easy-going manner could not fully disguise the depth of his intellect or musical ambition. Of all the artists who found their way to Sam’s studio, Scotty was the one to whom Sam most readily revealed his vision of the future. They started meeting at Taylor’s Restaurant three or four afternoons a week, when Scotty was trying to get his own hillbilly group, the Starlite Wranglers, recorded, several months before Elvis Presley entered the picture. “By doing the record I became pretty good friends with Sam. He knew there was a crossover coming. He foresaw it, and practically every day after work [Scotty worked as a hatter at his brothers’ dry-cleaning business, which left his afternoons free] I would drift by the studio, and we would sit there over coffee at Miss Taylor’s Café and say to each other, ‘What is it? How can we do it?’”
There were times when I first met Scotty in 1976, when I wasn’t sure that he could even be lured into a conversation, let alone an interview. He was forty-four years old, and as proud as he was of his historic contributions and accomplishments, he had little interest in dwelling on them. He had his own friends, his own enthusiasms, his own tape-duplicating business, his own life. Why should he live in the past? In fact, were it not for the help of Gail Pollock, his employee at the time and devoted companion until her death in the fall of 2015, I’m not sure if he ever would have entertained the idea of doing a full-length interview, let alone a succession of them over a period of more than twenty years. But Gail persuaded him that I had a good track record (she checked) and an honest face (we soon became good friends, all three of us). And once he started to talk, once he agreed to start scrutinizing the past, he gave it his full attention, just as he did with any of the endeavors upon which he seriously embarked: his guitar playing, his engineering, his producing –well, let me take it several steps further, just the whole manner in which he conducted his life.
“Ooh, you’re making my brain hurt,” he would say when we really got into it some years later, after I had started my Elvis biography. But he never dismissed any line of inquiry, no matter how far afield it might seem (or actually be); he took every question seriously and always provided the facts as he knew them, or, upon consideration, as he came to understand them. He never exaggerated his role, he never fabricated a connection, he never answered a question when he didn’t know the answer – he just gave the matter his careful, considered attention.
I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m making Scotty out to be some kind of brooding introvert. Nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, there are introverts, and there are introverts. Someone like Sam Phillips, for example, for all of the brilliant extroversion of his work, was at heart a solitary figure. But Scotty loved to have fun – there was no question about it, there was no piety about it, there was certainly never any boastfulness about it, but there was never any doubt that Scotty in his own quiet way – sometimes with a soft chuckle where from others you might expect a loud guffaw – always had a good time. It was no different from the day we first met: Scotty valued his life, he valued his music, above all he valued his friends.
Guitar players of every generation since rock began have studied and memorized Scotty’s licks, even when Scotty himself couldn’t duplicate them afterwards. (“It was all feel,” Scotty said of the early RCA sessions. “On 'Too Much’ we just got lost, but somehow or another we finally recovered!”) He lived long enough to see himself sought out and celebrated by rock icons from Keith Richards to Bruce Springsteen to Paul McCartney. Those tributes, both genuine and personal, certainly meant a lot to him. But I’m not sure if it wasn’t the informal “thumb-picking” sessions with old friends like Chip Young and Thom Bresh (maybe with Tracy Nelson singing!) that didn’t give him the most satisfaction.
He remained to the end a deeply thoughtful, deeply modest man with a twinkling manner and a dry sense of humor (“Very dry,” Scotty would say), whose intentions were to celebrate the moment, place no faith in the business part of the music business, and always maintain the kind of informal convivialities that make life worth living. I never saw Scotty seek out a public moment, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happier than he was at his 80th birthday party at the Gibson Beale Street Showcase in Memphis (see accompanying photograph). There, in a packed room full of family and friends, for a moment the private became public, and despite a number of offers to see him back to his hotel room, Scotty stayed well into the early hours of the morning, when the party was finally over. That’s the way I like to remember Scotty – well, I like to remember him in so many ways – but always as a man surrounded by friends, happily enjoying not the limelight but a lifetime of shared experiences.
There are, certainly, graver
injustices in the world.
That
goes without saying.
But
it doesn’t mean that situational injustices can’t be addressed. And while
everyone knows that industry awards and recognition are, in the end, mere
bagatelle (it’s the work, after all –
in this case the music – that’s the only measure of the man or woman), can
anyone imagine a greater absurdity than the fact that Jerry Lee Lewis is not in
the Country Music Hall of Fame?
Jerry
Lee has called himself The Greatest Live Show on Earth – and he is (though even
he might concede, there are, certainly, others). Who else could go toe-to-toe
with Jackie Wilson on a month-long tour of the Deep South in the early ‘60s? He
could appreciate – he always appreciated
– the talent of a Jackie Wilson, a Tom Jones, a Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, or Little
Richard, any one of whom he was happy to share a stage with. But he never took
it as anything less than a challenge – as he saw it, only one person was going
to come out on top, and he never had any doubt as to who that person was going
to be. As he said one time of an appearance on Tom Jones’ television show, “I
cut his ass, and he knows it. Love him like a brother – but I don’t want him to
forget who the old master is.”
Even the audience had to live up to his expectations. I’ve seen him shush a blonde (“Honey,
will you kindly quit your yakking? There’s lots of our loud numbers where you
can do all the talking you want. But this here’s a real sad song and you ought
to listen”) and stop a couple from dancing with the admonition, “I’m the show.”
And
then, of course, there was always Elvis. – Elvis was there from the start.
You have only to listen to the recording of their first musical meeting, at the fabled
“Million Dollar Quartet” session in December 1956, where it becomes immediately apparent that even
a young, untried and unproven Jerry Lee Lewis is not about to yield the stage to
anyone, even if Elvis was coming off
five #1 hits and Jerry Lee, whose first single had just been released, was glad of the $15 he received to play piano on the Carl Perkins recording
date that gave the impromptu jam session its impetus. He was never, as many people
have thought, jealous of Elvis – in fact, said Sun session guitarist Roland
Janes (who played on virtually every great Jerry Lee Lewis hit, not to mention
countless other memorable Sun recordings) he had the highest regard for him. “But in his
mind he thought he was a better performer than Elvis. And who’s to say he
wasn’t?”
Well,
take a look at the video. The circumstances become immediately apparent in his
introduction to the song. He has just been out for Elvis’ 1969 opening in Las
Vegas – at Elvis’ invitation, he is quick to add – and he has words of praise
for the performer and the show. But what does it prompt him to do but to raise
the stakes on one of Elvis’ greatest recordings, as he has so often in the past
– only this time on guitar. “Now don’t get too shook up,” Jerry Lee suggests with a
certain amount of wry amusement, and you’ll have to make up your own mind about
this. (I’ve got to admit I got pretty shook up when I first saw the clip a few
weeks ago.) But see if you don’t catch the humor and self-awareness here, not
to mention the irrepressible life force that lies at the heart of all his
music.
Jerry
Lee has always cited Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, and Al Jolson as his models
– though on any given day he might just as likely speak of the inspiration he
took from Ray Charles, B.B. King, Gene Autry, or Sister Rosetta Tharpe. There
is no question that his genius puts him in the company of each and every one of them. Remember
Sam Phillips’ unqualified declaration that of all his discoveries Jerry Lee was
the most musically talented. This was to take nothing away from Howlin’ Wolf
and Charlie Rich, who were “the most profound,” Elvis, who was “the most
charismatic,” or any of the other great Sun artists, for whom Sam always had a
well-chosen superlative. But in Sam’s words, “Jerry Lee Lewis was the most
talented man I ever worked with, black or white. One of the most talented human
beings to walk on God’s earth. There’s not one-millionth of an inch difference
[between] the way Jerry Lee Lewis thinks about his music and the way Bach or
Beethoven felt about [theirs].” This may sound a little over-the-top (well, all right, more than a little),
but immerse yourself for a few hours, or a few days, or a few weeks, in Jerry Lee
Lewis’ musical world – and see if you can discover any deeper feeling than
you’ll find in his greatest country numbers (from one of the earliest, “You Win
Again,” to his heartbreaking version of Mickey Newbury’s “She Even Woke Me Up
to Say Goodbye”), see if you can find anyone whose music manifests more
powerful, all-out emotional abandon.
Something
that is rarely acknowledged: Jerry Lee Lewis is a person of the keenest
intelligence and wit. He can size up a person at a glance, dispose of a
troubling argument with a pithy insight. It should be noted, however, that like
certain presidential candidates he refuses to be defined in anyone’s terms but
his own, and a foolish consistency is definitely not one of his hobgoblins. I
remember one time I was interviewing him in New Orleans, and he was casting
about for some of the farther-flung sources of his inspiration. “Fats Waller,”
he said. “You know that song –” And he paused, unable to come up with a title.
Now
I was casting about – flailing would be more like it.“‘Honeysuckle
Rose?” I ventured at last, dredging up, with
great uncertainty, one of the two or three songs I could think of. “Yeah, that’s it,” he said, and I felt like the brightest sexagenarian in the class. The
next day we returned to the subject, looking to some of the early sources of
rock ‘n’ roll. “How about Fats Waller?” I said, mustering as close to confidence
as I could ever get. “Fats Waller?”
Jerry Lee said, as if he had never heard the name before and his eyes narrowed
in that familiar expression of dismissive indignation.“Fats
Waller,” he said, after a suitable pause. “I don’t know what the hell he’s got to do with it!”
I’ve
seen people try to give him advice – sometimes the best advice in the world.
But if it comes down to acting the way they expect him to act, he will
invariable – invariably – turn it down,
even if, as often seems to be the case, it may be to his own detriment. “I am
what I am, not what you want me to be” he proclaimed long ago in song. Or, as
he announced to his sisters, who complained, or failed to grasp, why as a
teenager he should be allowed to practice piano five, six, seven hours a day,
every day, when they were forced to do ordinary household chores: “I am the
great I AM.” Which may or may not have cleared up the misunderstanding.
To
say that he is a person of supreme self-confidence would be begging the
question. Maybe that’s the reason he’s not in the Country Music Hall of Fame:
he has never been one to curry favor, certainly, he has never been one to live
up to anyone’s expectations but his own. Just look at his reaction to the catastrophic drop in his popularity when he returned from England in 1958, after news of his
marriage to his 13-year-old cousin was revealed. It was said that he went from $10,000
a night to $250 a night at that time, but he never complained, said Roland Janes. “But it did get
to him – there was a certain sadness [and] he probably became a little more
arrogant as a self-defense mechanism.” “What could I do?” said Jerry Lee.
“Holler and scream?” Nor was he about to
apologize in anything more than cursory fashion. He wouldn’t give the world
that satisfaction. He was still Jerry Lee Lewis – the only one.
And
he still is. As much as Merle Haggard, as much as Hank Williams, as much as Sam
Cooke, as much as any of his predecessors and heroes, he has created an
astonishing body of work that is his own. Every song he sings might just as
well have been written by him for all the individual panache he gives it. Like
Alan Lomax, like a whole school of trained ethnomusicologists, he has uncovered
a treasure trove of American song, from raw blues and hillbilly laments to
fervent gospel, from “Goodnight Irene” to “The Marine Hymn” – and then, quite unlike
the trained ethnomusicologist, he has put his own distinctive brand upon it. He
is an American Original, he might just as well be called the American Original, he is, as it might once have been said, a
credit to country music – now let country music give some credit to itself by
finally installing Jerry Lee Lewis in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
L to R: William Bell, PG, Nicole Cooke, Julian Bond, Atlanta 2005
William
Bell has always been among the most thoughtful of soul singers and songwriters
– and one of the most eloquent, too. Originator of the timeless soul classic,
“You Don’t Miss Your Water,” co-writer with Booker T. Jones (of Booker T and
the MGs, of course) of Albert King’s equally classic “Born
Under a Bad Sign,” William has never been out of the public eye since
first joining the Phineas Newborn Sr. band in his
mid-teens (you can hear a
little bit about this in thetitle song of his new album,“This Is Where I Live”). He arrived at
Stax pre-Otis Redding several years later,
where “You Don’t Miss Your Water” was not only his first solo record but the
Stax label’s first solo-artist hit.
He has written and sung any number of soul classics (“Everybody Loves a
Winner,” “Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday,” “Share What You Got,” “I Forgot to
Be Your Lover,” “Tribute to a King”), which have been
covered and sampled by artists ranging from Carole King to Kanye West. Hestudied acting for a couple of
years after moving to Atlanta, and following the example of his mentor, Sam
Cooke, started his first record company, Peachtree Records, in 1968, while continuing to maintain its successor, Wilbe Records, to this day. Throughout
it all, he has remained grounded in a way that has eluded many of his peers. “I
believe it takes a lot of sorting out,”he
says, “a lot of soul-searching,to keep your head screwed on right in
this business. A lot of people get caught up in being a star all the time, but
I think in order to be creative, to be effectively
creative, you’ve got to keep a pulse on the everyday person – that’s who’s got
to relate to whatever you’re writing about.” Clarity in both message and diction,
a melody that can be easily grasped, and a story line that may very well include
personal details but will always suggest universal themes – these are lessons
learned from Sam. “When I write, I try to write about things in my life that
other people can relate to. Structure it so they don’t have to guess.” This
combination of introspection and universality is what has always given
William’s music its unique feel, andThis Is Where I Live, as the title alone
would suggest, puts that singularity on full display. But I think it can safely be said
that neither William nor any other soul singer has ever recorded an album quite
like this before.
Don’t
get me wrong – it’s just as passionate as any of William’s soul classics, and
just as personal, too. But William
has really – I was going to say outdone himself, but he couldn’t do that. He
has really extended himself here with a range of songs that,
far from recapitulating the past, look at things from a very different angle,
convey home truths from a perspective of age and experience that would not necessarily be available to a younger man.
There’s every kind of mood here – love
gained, love lost, bittersweet moments of both passion and regret – pretty much
as you could expect from any true celebration of the heart. And, like all of
William’s work over the years (William has never been one for nostalgia),
there’s a contemporary feel to it all, strongly bolstered by his collaboration
with producer John Leventhal. For William this partnership has permitted him to
venture into new territory without ever abandoning the old. “It’s the first
time other than Booker that I really clicked with a writer that felt the same
mood thing that I did.”
Every
one of the songs here means something (“You look back on your life, at things that are
happening nowand things that have happened – I wanted to have substance to the
songs”) –each has a depth and directness of its own. There are any number of high points, including
“outside” songs by Jesse Winchester (a beautifully rendered “All Your Stories”)
and John Leventhal and Rosanne Cash’s “Walking on a Tightrope.”But the two songs that continue to resonate the most for me,in
addition to the title track, are the touchingly tender “I Will Take Care of
You” and the song that closes the album, the closest William has ever come to a
spiritual composition (although all of his music, certainly, is spiritual in
its own way), “People Want to Go Home.”It
started out with an idea that William had about a train ride, “but then we
switched it around so it was more about the person than the ride itself –
because I realized that as you get older (and I’m getting there), you want to
know that there’s something there for you. People want to go home when they’re
tired, they want to go home and rest.” It’s a quietly eloquent, almost
folk-styled hymn, reminiscent in a way of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”
but with a strong voice of its own. When I ask William if he might ever think
about actually recording a gospel album, there is a momentary pause. “Well, you
know,” he says, “that’s kind of close. Of course that’s where I started. My
mother, before she passed, wanted me to do a gospel record for her, but I never
did. Who knows, maybe I will get around to it someday.”
About
this deeply soulful, deeply introspective album, though, there is no question. “We
took our time on it,” William says, “and I’m glad we did. We accomplished what
we set out to do.”
William Bell’s new Album “This Is Where I Live” will be released June 3 on Stax/Concord. This post is adapted from the liner notes by PG.
In the course of creating videos for the enhanced e-book versions of Feel Like Going Home and Lost
Highway, and Peter’s other books—we left some unexplored threads. This story
about Charlie Rich was too good to leave out, so Robert Gordon and Laura Jean Hocking and
I put together this short video that tells the story of the
song that came out of the book.
—JG
It’s pretty hard to say one thing or another is
the biggest thrill of your life — but for Charlie Rich to surprise me with a
song that had been inspired by the feeling he got from reading my book — well,
that was a pretty big thrill!
The whole story’s pretty much here— I’m not sure
if I say it outright, but I loved Charlie and Margaret Ann from the moment I
first met them, at the Vapors, out by the Memphis airport, in the spring of
1970. It was a relationship, I soon came to learn, that was based on total
honesty, and it was one that continued up till Charlie’s death in 1995, and
then for the fifteen years until Margaret Ann died. I wish they could have been
here to be part of the conversation — but at least their good friend, Roland
Janes was (Roland was everybody’s good friend) — not only to
put me in my place but then to show me the kindness that was such an
ineradicable part of his nature. That kindness played a huge role in helping us
make Charlie’s last album, Pictures and Paintings, in 1992. Check out
Roland at the beginning of the video — and then just sit back and dig the
music.
Merle
Haggard was probably the greatest singer-songwriter I’ve ever seen. The only artist
I can think to compare him to is Sam Cooke, who like Merle possessed the gift for
writing songs that were at once both deeply personal and universally applicable
to the human condition. Merle’s were a lot more mournful, it’s true (think “If
We Make It Through December,” “Things Aren’t Funny Any
More”, “I Can’t Be
Myself When I’m With You” – not to mention “Mama’s Hungry Eyes”) – but they
were no less expressive of the kind of unnameable yearning that none of us can escape, and no less eloquent in their empathy for people from all walks of life, the ability to bring to life circumstances and events that
only in their emotional impact (but totally
in their emotional impact) resemble the singer’s own.
Like Sam Cooke, too, he possessed a voice unmatched in its expressiveness,
its seemingly effortless conveyance of nuance not only in his own music but in
his brilliant interpretations of others, particularly two of his greatest
heroes, Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills. His impeccable musicianship, the extraordinary
band that he assembled and added to over the years (what else could they be
called but the Strangers) ensured that he was able to present his music the
only way he could conceive of it, just as he heard it in his head. When I first
met him in 1978, he told me he was about to publish a book of poems called A Poet of the Common Man (don’t look for it, it never came out –
but I’ll bet it would have been great), along
with two novels he was working on, one of which he said would be a comedy-mystery. He was a man of limitless imagination,
someone who found order in his art, and yet at the same time he seemed not only
to thrive on, but to create, chaos
all around him. (“You know, I’m a strange kind of person,” he told me, “the
more that’s going on, the more life I’m able to be involved with and learn
about, the more it seems to replenish my well of ideas.”)
I guess that would be one way of looking at it – but Merle
was a man beset by demons that he couldn’t always control, publicly or
privately. I remember one time seeing him play for an auditorium full of people
who kept cheering him wildly, even as they could barely hear his voice coming out of the PA system. Any number of technical fixes were proposed, both
from the audience and onstage, but it soon became evident that Merle simply
didn’t feel like performing that night (this was not the only night I saw this
happen), as he stood at a disdainful distance from the mike and
the soundman kept raising the the sound level until the feedback became almost
painful. A couple of times he would move in a little closer and say, “Is that
any better?” as the crowd yelled
enthusiastic encouragement – but then he just stepped away again.
You got the feeling that he was mocking both the audience
and himself, as he responded to a request for “Okie From Muskogee,” perhaps his
most famous song, a call for a return to a mythic past in which Merle himself
could never have lived (it depicted a land where no marijuana was smoked, “and
the kids all respect the college dean”), whose origins as a goof on
middle-American political correctness, would immediately become apparent to
anyone who ever set foot on Merle’s bus. It didn’t matter: the audience
continued to cheer lustily, and Merle continue to look thoroughly disgusted
with himself, like a man trapped in a world he had never meant to make. Just
for the record: Merle canceled the rest of the tour the next night.
But then there were the nights on which his face was wreathed in smiles, when he was carried away by the music and would spend as
much time encouraging his fellow musicians to surpass themselves as he did
claiming the spotlight for himself – in fact, the spotlight never entered into
it at all. That was what you heard on the best of his songs, the most inspired
of his recordings, where even Merle’s black moods were transmuted into a tender
regard for all the multifarious sources of his inspiration, all the diverse people
and places his imagination was able to take him to. There – in the songs – he
seemed able to set aside all of the insecurity, all of the anger, all of the
looming fears and resentments, and place them at the service of his art.
He liked to talk about the songwriting sometimes, about the
role that art played in his life (check out the enhanced eBook edition of Lost Highway for an insightful
meditation on the range and ambition of his writing). He always made the
distinction between formulaic songs like “Swinging Doors” and songs that
created their own reality, like “Footlights,” “Leonard,” “Shelly’s Winter
Love”). He would always sing the songs the people called for – he owed it to
his audience, he said – but the others he sang for himself.
Things
I learned in a hobo jungle
Were things they never taught me in a classroom,
Like where to find a handout
While thumbin’ through Chicago in the afternoon.
Hey, I’m not braggin’ or complainin’,
Just talkin’ to myself man to man.
This ole’ mental fat I’m chewin’ didn’t take a lot of doin’.
But I take a lot of pride in what I am….
I never been nobody’s idol
But at least I got a title
And I take a lot of pride in what I am.
He did. And there is no one who deserved to
more. But remember (sometimes it’s hard): that’s not Merle who grew up in the
hobo jungle, that’s Merle casting his poetic eye on the world and, at his best,
always finding a place in it for himself.
The last time I saw Merle in concert, he was
playing the Ryman with his then-19-year-old son Ben, who had taken over as lead
guitarist for the Strangers a couple of years earlier. Ben proved to be a
virtuoso performer, incorporating all the outstanding licks from all the
outstanding lead guitarists, from Roy Nichols and James Burton to Redd
Volkaert, Grady Martin, and then some, as Merle’s face reflected undisguised
pride. But that, of course was not the point – at least not the whole point. This
was one of the few shows that I ever saw, maybe the only one, where Merle confined
himself to electric guitar pretty much exclusively. (Merle had learned to play
fiddle in his thirties to be better able to interpret Bob Wills’ music.) But
not just electric guitar – he got into a guitar duel with Ben which I’m sure he
would have been perfectly willing to concede he could never win, as they traded
stinging licks, and Merle was as engaged in every song as I’ve ever seen him. “A
lot of people may not realize it,” says his ex-manager Tex Whitson, “but Merle
would have been happy just playing guitar.” And now, in his own way, he was
realizing that ambition.
If you want to catch a glimpse of Merle as he
was that day, check out the link to the panel he did at the Country Music Hall
of Fame with longtime Strangers Norm Hamlet and Don Markham earlier that
afternoon. He had not been billed on the panel, in fact he didn’t commit to it till
the last moment when he showed up unannounced, taking the place of Fuzzy Owen,
his oldest associate, and looking like someone who had just wandered in off
Lower Broad. Here you’ll see Merle as he rarely presented himself in public:
relaxed, engaged, emotional, and funny, with a warmth and graciousness that
precludes nostalgia but celebrates instead an unconditional embrace of a shared
past. At one point, talking about his ex-wife and lifetime partner Bonnie
Owens, he comes close to tears, but what is most striking is the way in which,
without ever surrendering that keen-eyed gaze, his face continues to be bathed
in smiles. As Merle himself might have put it, quoting from the lyrics of one
of his more upbeat songs, “I can’t say we’ve had a good morning, but it’s been
a great afternoon.”
The
greatest Merle Haggard show I ever saw wasn’t a show at all. It was a rehearsal
at Harrah’s in Reno – not even a rehearsal, a sound check – that went on
for two or three hours. Merle had a twelve-piece “orchestra,” very similar to
this one, made up of former Playboys, the core of Merle’s band, the Strangers,
and a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Mark O’Connor. The show that Merle
did
that night for the public was professional enough but not even remotely on
the same plane. The sound check was music purely for the sake of making music –
and I think they would have played all night (another Bob Wills reference) if
they hadn’t had a supper show to do. Just to show how dedicated Merle can be
when it comes to what he really cares about, he learned to play fiddle just so
he could play Bob Wills music with the great Bob Wills band. To my mind there
could be no better proof of the totality of Merle’s commitment to music: like
Duke Ellington, for Merle the band (whether the Strangers or this augmented
group) was his indulgence, the gigs were his way of paying for it. Merle’s
originals were unquestionably the centerpiece of his work, but here we have
perhaps the greatest songwriter of our time (of any time?), of his genre (of any genre?), singing the songs of one of his musical heroes with just as
much genuineness and pure emotion as he would bring to any song of his own.
Merle was an uncompromising original, but if you want to place him in a broader
context of creativity, think of Sam Cooke, too: an incomparable singer and
songwriter, who always presented his music just as he heard it in his own head.
A great shot of the performers and some of the staff and exhibit curators who worked on the tribute concert, Get Rhythm: A Tribute To Sam Phillips, held at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on August 29, 2015 in Nashville. The concert celebrated the opening of the exhibit, Flying Saucers Rock & Roll: The Cosmic Genius of Sam Phillips, co-curated by Peter and CMHoF curator Michael Gray, currently open and running through June at the Country Music Hall of Fame!
Standing: Abi Tapia CMHoF, Lydia Rogers and Laura Rogers (the Secret Sisters), Kevin McKendree, Billy Swan, Luther Dickinson, (Charles Myers, James Moon, Frank Howard, of the Valentines), Gary Craig, Colin Linden, Charles Esten, Chuck Mead, Nikki Silva (of the Kitchen Sisters), Dave Roe, Mark Collie, Carolyn Tate CMHoF and Michael Gray CMHoF.. Seated:.Eric Heatherly, W.S. Holland, Peter Guralnick, J.M. Van Eaton, Jerry Phillips, Valerie Woodhouse (of the Valentines), Marvell Thomas, Sonny Burgess, Charlie Rich Jr., Davia Nelson (of the Kitchen Sisters) (Photo by Rick Diamond/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum)
