Memphis Slim and Mickey Baker ca.1968: “Rockin’ the House,” “The Animal in Me,” “I’m Lost Without You

Think of it this way. Well, let me give you the way Jerry Lee Lewis thought of it. Speaking of Haney’s Big House, the “colored” juke joint in Ferriday, Louisiana, where as a young teenager he first heard the great blues pianists Memphis Slim and Sunnyland Slim, and B.B. King, and Bobby “Blue” Bland, he said: “It was like, kind of – this may sound stupid to a lot of people, but, looking back, it would kind of be like strolling through heaven.” It was, he said, as if they were all “giving birth to a new music that people needed to hear. Rock ‘n’ roll – that’s what it was. That’s what I was listening to. Even in church.”

And here we have Memphis Slim and guitarist Mickey Baker, two handsomely middle-aged gentlemen embarked on a longtime expatriate life and dressed to the nines in 1968, rocking out and giving us all a glimpse of that same slice of non-denominational heaven. (Just for the record the first selection, “Rockin’ the House,” originally cut by Memphis Slim in 1946, is the one I’m talking about, but the others are nice, too.) Take this as a tribute to them both and as a timely memorial to Mickey Baker, who died recently in Toulouse, France, and is best known for his 1957 pop hit, “Love Is Strange” (a duet with Sylvia Vanderpool, as Mickey and Sylvia) and for his many guitar instruction books.

And just as a bonus, check out this little video about Memphis Slim’s (real name: Peter Chatman, and author of the ubiquitous blues standard “Every Day I Have the Blues”) family home, on the corner of College and McClemore in Memphis, just across from the old Capitol Theatre, which became Stax Records, which today is the Stax Museum and Music Academy, another uplifting museum site (like the Lewis Family Museum in Ferriday) that everyone should carve out at least a day to visit.