Memphis Blues Again

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.

Pictures from Life’s Other Side

Ever since attending the “Celebration for Young Americans,” Lee Atwater’s Rhythm and Blues Presidential Ball, in 1989, I have been meaning to write about it. I kept extensive notes at the time (I mean, it was such an amazing experience!), and I always thought I would include it, under the title “My Adventures Among the Republicans,” in the anthology I’m still planning to put together

Well, circumstances change, and Rhythm and Blues Foundation founder Howell Begle, who produced the original concert and then saved the film footage from 1000 deaths, was finally able to put it out, first as an hour-long PBS special earlier this year, now as a two-hour DVD released by Shout!Factory.

I wrote this as my contribution to the liner notes for the DVD.

Maybe someday I’ll release my own untruncated version. But I think this represents the essence of the experience in all its glorious confusion and beauty.

In any case watch the concert in either format (check out the link at the end) and dig the music. And be thankful that Howell Begle rescued it from the literal dustbin of history.

The phone calls must have started coming in December. Would I be Lee Atwater’s guest at the “Celebration of Rhythm and Blues” that was being planned for the inauguration of the first President Bush?

At the beginning it was all pretty low-key, as I deflected each request politely but without hesitation. The caller was a friend of a friend, a low-level operative in the Republican Party, evidently – and while I had no interest in parading my self-righteousness, I knew there was no way in hell I was ever going to attend.

Gradually the calls became more insistent, but if anything, that only reinforced my sense of – well, I would be pussyfooting around the subject if I were to simply call it “resolve.” This was one of those rare moments when I had no question that I was Doing the Right Thing, however insignificant, however ineffectual in the greater scheme of things my refusal might be.

Then Lee called himself. I tried to be equally deflective, if no less disingenuous. Maybe we could meet in Harvard Square some time for a cup of coffee if he happened to be coming to Boston. Had he read my novel, Nighthawk Blues? Well, that turned out to be something of a miscalculation. I mean, what were the chances that he would turn out to be among the 2000 or so readers (tops) who had found their way to my single published novel? He appeared to be genuinely affronted.

Read it? he said. He then proceeded to recite a brief précis before delivering an enthusiastic appreciation of its principal character, a cantankerous old bluesman who, like Howlin’ Wolf or Big Joe Williams, for me represented the Life Force.

“Come on, are you kidding?” Lee said with indignant enthusiasm. “I’ve read everything you’ve ever written.” And then proceeded to prove it as he reeled off a list of publications even I might have forgotten, including a 1967 interview with Buddy Guy that had appeared in Crawdaddy. “You know,” he said, without so much as figurative wink, “the two of us are a lot alike. We’re just two white guys trying to make it in a black world.”

Well, all right. I very much doubted that I could fully subscribe to that. But I must admit, he got my attention. That was when I began to reconsider my position and, after checking with my father to make sure he didn’t feel I would become part of the Republican Big Propaganda Machine by agreeing to attend (“I mean, Pete, they don’t even know who you are,” my father said cheerfully), I finally relented. And that was how I came to be a guest at the “Celebration for Young Americans” (its proper title), put on almost under cover of night by the Committee for the American Bicentennial Presidential Inaugural, at the Washington Convention Center in honor of the inauguration of President George H.W. Bush.

It would be impossible to describe just how surreal all of this really was. Wandering around the cavernous Convention Center the afternoon of the concert, encountering old friends and acquaintances like Delbert McClinton, Mac Rebennack, Carla Thomas, William Bell, and Willie Dixon, each wearing an expression of incredulity on his or her face that as much as said, What are you doing here? In Willie Dixon’s case the incredulity was underscored by a big Jesse Jackson for President button that required no further elucidation. Over the course of the afternoon and evening I encountered figures like Roger Ailes, Strom Thurmond, and ultra-conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie – now, please don’t imagine I’m claiming any real acquaintance here, but I did get to meet and observe them in their native habitat. I even got to meet the newly elected President. I was sitting in a box with Miss National Teenager and her parents, who in my mind’s eye (and very likely in real life, too) were eyeing me with thinly veiled contempt, when Lee came over and said, “Would you like to meet the President?” What could I say to an invitation offered so graciously? I had met Jimmy Carter in passing at his inauguration in company with James Talley (James had given a wonderful Woody Guthrie-esque performance), and President Carter had started talking to James about John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This wasn’t that kind of meeting, but it was, as I say, very gracious, and I chalked it up to one more element of my education, it was all part of My Adventures Among the Republicans.

Throughout it all there were two constants. The first was Lee’s unfailing enthusiasm, which I saw overcome even the most intransigent resistance of the most skeptical of the musicians – well, it wasn’t just his enthusiasm, it was his courtesy, his graciousness, his respect, and (just as with his expressed regard for my writing) the genuine deference he paid to both their person and their art.

The other constant was the magic of the music. Now this was not, as you might imagine, the most responsive of audiences. If there was clapping, it came – unintentionally – on the off (the “proper” one and three) beat. If there was applause it was generally tepid, even after the most passionate performances. But for whatever reason — and Howell Begle, whom I met for the first time that night, has always theorized it was the respect with which they were treated (not excluding either pay or amenities) and the ceremoniousness of the occasion – the musicians almost to a person seemed to rise to the occasion, and the performances almost without exception were inspired and self-contained in a manner that transcended their surroundings. (“I’ve never felt so much a part of things,” said one artist, referring specifically to the thrill of sharing an experience like this with so many of his peers.) But you can be the judge of that for yourself.

     I continued to see and hear from Lee over the next eighteen months or so, even after he got sick with a brain tumor that would kill him at forty, just two years after the Inauguration. I saw him on Beale Street in Memphis with Rufus, Carla and Marvell Thomas and Polly Walker, who with her husband, Cato, was an integral part of the B.B. King story from the beginning. It was the evening of the Republicans’ Lincoln Day Dinner, for which he had hired Marvell to provide the entertainment, and while I’m sure Lee enjoyed himself among his fellow pols, on Beale Street he was truly in his element. He called me when he was forced to resign from the Board of Trustees of Howard University and said what I’m sure he said publicly many times, “You know being on that Board was the greatest honor that could ever happen to me. I understand why those kids protested my appointment – hell, I would have been out there on the protest line if I had been them – but I wish they could have understood how much I could have brought to the school.”

He was nearly as proud when he put out his album, Red Hot and Blue, named for both the Dewey Phillips radio show that announced the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and the barbecue chain in which he was a principal investor and which was the site of the late-hours after-party following the Inaugural Ball. The album was an all-star affair featuring lead guitar by Lee and B.B. King, and guest vocals by Carla Thomas, Chuck Jackson, Isaac Hayes, Billy Preston, and Sam Moore, with profits assigned to various charities explicitly benefiting black youth. “Rhythm and blues is all-American music,” Lee wrote. “It’s the best music this country has ever produced, the most totally American music there is….and we are committed to ensuring that our children and future generations will have a chance to enjoy it as much as we have.”

How to explain it? I can’t. I have been challenged over the years with respect to both my own hypocrisy and Lee’s. There was no way, said one acquaintance, a well-known cultural critic, that Lee could really have appreciated the blues, given not only his political beliefs – which in the end I think were negligible – but his political actions, which were not. Think Willie Horton and the whole Dukakis campaign, which Lee himself recanted for its apparent racism and “naked cruelty” in a public apology in Life magazine shortly before he died.

 When I think of Lee, I think of his intensity and enthusiasm, the inexcusable glee with which he cut down opponents and the undeniable love and respect he showed the musicians and the music. Don’t ask me to square the two – all you’re going to get from me is an inconclusive meditation on the multifariousness of the human experience. “I don’t think anything is more helpful to the body politic or to the people in general than music,” Lee wrote in the liner notes to the album. “Music is harmony and harmony is what we are seeking in politics and in life.”

“It’s a dream come true,” he said on the night of the Inauguration.

Remembering Johnny Shines

An audio excerpt from my 1970 interview with Johnny Shines is included in the new enhanced e-book of Feel Like Going Home. Here’s a brief clip, with Johnny playing guitar as we talk, at the Hotel Diplomat in Boston’s South End.

Once you got past the brilliance of his music, the  first thing that struck you about Johnny Shines was his resolve, his resolve and and a kind of invincible optimism that he could, that he would accomplish anything that he set out to do.

Sometimes he was inclined to dismiss this quality as just plain stubbornness – he would say with a grin that he was like an old mule, but you knew that wasn’t it. A mule never had Johnny’s sense of adventure, a mule never possessed Johnny’s wonderful sense of humor, and stubbornness certainly couldn’t explain John’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge, his determination even in his mid-70s, to explore new worlds. Don’t forget: This was a man who ended up in Chicago strictly by accident; he was on his way to Africa, in 1941, because he wanted to find out what it was really like over there. “They teach you in school that Africa’s full of cannibals and savages,” he said, “but so many important things have come from there that I wanted to find out the truth for myself.”

That was the second thing that struck you about Johnny: his passion for the truth and his almost contagious enthusiasm for any subject he was interested in. I don’t know anyone who could have been less of a salesman: Johnny never had any kind of a line – he was always straight with you to the point where he could make a stranger uncomfortable with his honesty, but even so he sold you on anything that captured his imagination just on the strength of his own enthusiasm for it. With some musicians this curiosity and enthusiasm is confined to their music, sometimes not even to that. But John’s took in the whole world.

I was 25 when I first met John, probably a very young 25, and I was in awe of him strictly because of his music. He was out on tour with Willie Dixon and the Chicago Blues All Stars, and I had written a story about the group, but it was Johnny I wanted to interview because I was so knocked out by his singing and playing. I had listened to “Brutal Hearted Woman” and “Evening Sun” and “Joliet Blues” and “Dynaflow” over and over, and I was a true believer, but Johnny wasn’t interested in that. He was 53 years old, and he was like a kid let loose in the world: he wasn’t looking for disciples, he was just interested in everything. Talking about the past, I asked him about hard times, and he responded by speaking about what it was like to live in what he called an “exploratory world.”

“It’s very exciting,” he said, recalling his travels with Robert Johnson in the ‘30s and looking forward to his own new-found career in the late ‘60s. “Say, for an instance you leave here, you go maybe four or five hundred miles, and you don’t know nobody, everything is new to you. It’s really, I mean, if a person lives in an exploratory world, then this is the best thing that ever happened to him.”

That was the world that Johnny lived in right up to the moment he died. He was interested in people. He was interested in how things worked. He loved to read. He loved to fish and hunt. He prized the past, and he looked forward to the future – always. When I first met John over 40 years ago now, I never dreamt that we could actually become friends, this was Johnny Shines after all, Johnny Shines, one of my idols – but because he was Johnny Shines we became friends right away. With John it was friendship or nothing. He could readily accept differences of background and personality, politics, philosophy – he actually appreciated the differences – but if you wanted to be a friend of John’s, you had to bring something to the party.

Most of all when I think of Johnny, I hear his voice: singing, talking, just chuckling quietly to himself, booming out in that way that could always get you to sit up and take notice. “You think I can sing now?” Johnny said to me one time. “You should have heard me back in the '30s. Back then I could scream like a panther.” But, of course, he could just as easily whisper, too. Sometimes I think he would drop his voice just to make sure his audience – whether it was a single individual or a concert-hall full of people – was really listening. It didn’t matter whether he whispered or he screamed, John was always going to be heard, and his message was always going to get through.

“I’m a Christian man,” he said one time, “but I play the blues. I don’t feel that the blues is dirty. Society decided for us that the blues was dirty. That’s why I almost feel like I got to carry it on. I want to remind people, black people especially, because if you forget your beginnings you can’t do much with the future.” John Shines never forgot his beginnings, and he never lost sight of the future. That was his mark as a musician and as a man.

My Note on Beale: Downtown Blues

One of the great thrills of my life was getting a note on Beale Street in 1999. Memphis had always meant so much to me, long before I ever arrived there thirty years earlier, and Beale Street, of course, was the very emblem of the music and culture I had come to love. Not as much as Sam Phillips perhaps, who had first landed on Beale on his way to  a religious revival in Dallas as a sixteen-year-old in 1939. It was four o’clock in the morning and pouring-down rain when Sam and his brother Jud and three friends from Coffee High School in Florence, Alabama, all members of Highland Baptist Church, drove up and down the fabled avenue in a 1937 Dodge coupé. To Sam Broadway at its most bustling could never have been as busy.

It was not the same for his friends, he realized – to them it was mostly just a place to gawk – but to Sam, drawn not just by the stories he had heard from an old blind sharecropper named Silas Payne but by the true facts and life of a fellow Florentine, W.C. Handy, who had himself arrived in Memphis some thirty-five years earlier (“I had seen pictures of him, I had read about him – look at the courage that man showed when he came to Memphis, a black man trying to make a name for himself in the white man’s world”), Beale Street represented the sum total of everything he had ever imagined. For a boy who had never even been as far as Birmingham, Beale Street and the Mississippi River were nothing less than the spelling-out of his dreams and his destiny.

It was like a beehive, a microcosm of humanity – you had old black men from the Delta and young cats dressed fit to kill. But the most impressive thing to me about Beale Street was that nobody got in anybody’s way – because every damn one of them wanted to be right there. Beale Street represented for me, even at that age, something that I hoped to see for all people. That sense of absolute freedom, that sense of no direction but the greatest direction in the world, of being able to feel, I’m a part of this somehow. I may only be here a day or two, but I can tell everybody when I get back home what a wonderful time I had.

It was at that point that he determined that Memphis would one day be his home.

Well, I can’t match that, obviously – but it meant an awful lot to me. And, however secondary any kind of public recognition may be to the work itself, it meant even more to be recognized by the very city to which I had always aspired to some kind of honorary citizenship.

Frank Stokes was one of the other recipients of the award that day, and although he was not there to accept it (he died in 1955, in his mid-to-late sixties, and in fact made no records after 1929), it was genuinely exciting not only to meet his surviving family but simply to be part of a ceremony honoring one of the greatest proponents of the Memphis blues, past, present, and future. His driving, propulsive beat, frequently complemented by the second guitar of Dan Sane (they were billed as the Beale Street Sheiks), was a forerunner not only to much of the blues that Sam Phillips recorded at his little studio at 706 Union Avenue from 1950 on but to the rock ‘n’ roll that would follow pell-mell in its wake and soon engulf the world. There are many songs that epitomize that ebullient but hauntingly melodic, not to mention unrelentingly rocking (in the best Memphis tradition), sense of style and grace that Frank Stokes exemplified but “Downtown Blues” to me was always the one that captured it best. Even with that old-timey wobble in the voice (and the scratchy sound of an old 78), there is nothing antiquarian about it in the least.

It’s a source that has never ceased to replenish musical inspiration and imagination, but the first time I think I actually heard this particular song was on a compilation album called The Blues Project (it was Blues Project group founder Danny Kalb’s participation on this same 1964 Elektra album that suggested his yet-to-be-born band’s name). To me Geoff Muldaur, possessor of one of the great voices of the blues revival (he may well have been the great blues-revival voice, a torch he picked up again with his transcendent 1998 return to recording, The Secret Handshake) didn’t just capture the spirit of the Memphis blues with his version of “Downtown Blues” - he actually took it a step further in the company of his own brand of latter–day Sheiks, an acoustic ensemble that included John Sebastian (soon to found the Lovin’ Spoonful) and an anagrammatically pseudonymous Bob Dylan (as Bob “Landy”) on treble piano. Well, take a listen for yourself, and see if it doesn’t presage the popular ascendance of the Rolling Stones and the electric Dylan - at least that’s how it sounded to me at the time, and it still does.

Well, I’ve come quite a ways from my Beale Street note. As I tell my students (and as Tristram Shandy never fails to underscore): Prize the digression. But, you know, the funny thing was, I never saw it. My note, I mean. It wasn’t that I wasn’t down on Beale from time to time – but I mean, what kind of egomaniac (or in Sam Phillips’ terms, what kind of ignorant sonofabitch) walks down Beale Street with his eyes cast down in continual search of his own name? I was beginning to suspect the whole thing might have been a sham, maybe my note had simply never been cast – which would have been okay, I mean, I had shared a stage with Frank Stokes’ granddaughter. But then one hot summer day in 2002 I went down to interview the great Memphis photographer Ernest Withers, whose documentation of the music and the Movement are unsurpassed, when what to my surprise, as I reached the threshold of his studio at 333 Beale, I saw my name.

Now I had known Mr. Withers a little before this, not much – but for some reason, contrary to all my natural inclinations, I just couldn’t help but gush out my excitement over my discovery. Yes, nodded Mr. Withers, who was unfailingly kind to me and so many others but was not without his acerbic moments. He was well aware of my note, he said, and I’d like to think he winked at me then, but I really have no evidence to support that conclusion. “You know,” he said without a hint of a smile, “I walk on you every day.” Well, what the hell, it was an honor just to be recognized by Mr. Withers, wasn’t it?