Guest Blogger Mr C on The Five Royales

The “5” Royales were always at the heart of the discography of my book, Sweet Soul Music. As one of their album titles proclaimed, their music represented “the roots of soul.” Long before the internet made it possible to have the world at your fingertips, Joe and I discussed such matters long into the night. There was never any question in our minds that the “5” Royales should have been one of the first groups inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame – if there were any justice (if James Brown had truly ruled the world, as it seemed for a while he might), they would have been voted in by acclamation. It wasn’t so much the vast influence of their performances and compositions, for which Joe makes so eloquent a case, as the striking originality, the still-startling “presentness” of their music. But let Joe tell you about it – and then just give yourself over to the music. (But don’t forget “The Slummer the Slum,” and “It’s Hard But It’s Fair,” and “Monkey Hips and Rice,” and…oh, once you start, you’re never going to stop.

– PG

Mr C:

“Soul and Swagger” is a bold and declarative title for the new Rockbeat five-CD set, The Complete “5” Royales (1951-67).  It’s also cool and entirely appropriate.  Soul and Swagger is pink-tinged and packaged in a user-friendly, 45-sleeve-size bound book, a design model used in the gorgeous The Complete Motown Singles series.  To even a casual fan, it looks like something to own.  

And of course it is, if only as an absorbing history of a group that had hits in the ‘50s hardscrabble rhythm and blues world but who also remained vital “voices in the shadows” (a 1963 single by the group is appropriately called “I’m Standing in the Shadows”), their remarkable talent and influence unduly unheralded.  

For, ironically, some of the “5” Royales’ greatest songs (composed by the group’s all-everything, linchpin guitarist Lowman Pauling), are best known through the interpretations of others:  "Dedicated to the One I Love" (a massive pop hit for both the Shirelles and The Mamas and Papas), “Think” (a hit twice, in two different versions by Royales’ acolyte James Brown), and “Tell the Truth”, plucked by Atlantic-period Ray Charles.

 But now, with “soul and swagger”, the “5” Royales themselves are back…bad as they want to be!

 A thumbnail sketch of the group has them planted in their hometown of Winston Salem, N.C., a regional gospel favorite originally known as the Royal Sons. A demo made its way to New York City’s Apollo Records, an independent with tentacles in black gospel music.  Two Royal Sons’ singles were released, but Apollo was looking for rhythm and blues (think of the teenage Solomon Burke).  The Sons, seemingly without protest, made the switch.  Thus were the “5” Royales (changed from mere “Royals”) born.  Within a year, the group had a smash, Pauling’s catchy, stop/start, jump blues “Baby Don’t Do It.”  And off they went.

Singles followed, hits were bunched at the beginning, and a sound evolved, kicked off in the session following up the first hit. The song is a Lowman Pauling original, “Help Me Somebody,” the singer is the Royales’ formidable tenor, Johnny Tanner, a treasure of a vocalist who puts his heart and burrows his soul into the gospel-drenched, world-weary plea, with the group draped around him in support.  It’s a seminal soul moment, you can hear the voice-to-come of the Atlantic Ray Charles right there.  Of course there is no real birth-of-soul sunburst necessarily, it came in bits and pieces from all over.  But the “5” Royales became a cornerstone, their minor-key, intense laments a big jumping-off point for James Brown and a cast of millions.

In 1954, with their career cruising along at a steady hum, the “5” Royales switched labels, moving to r&b powerhouse King Records.  It’s a move that should have catapulted the band to even loftier heights.  But here the story oddly stumbles.

 The hits didn’t come.  New York sessions with session ace Mickey Baker replacing Pauling on guitar didn’t click.  And a steady output of singles yielded little magic.

That changed in February of 1957, when bang, Lowman Pauling re-emerged, his guitar suddenly thrust forward emphatically, with thick, rich bursts of obbligatos and penetrating solo blasts that became the core of the new “5” Royales sound. “Think” was recorded that day, as well as doo-wop delight “Tears of Joy”.  In the months to follow, “Dedicated (to the One I Love)”, “Say It”, “Tell the Truth”, “Slummer the Slum” and so many more tumbled out. Yet with all of this creative flowering and signature music being created, outside of “Think” the music was scarcely on the radio.  By 1960, even with such transformative songs as “I’m With You” and “Wonder When You’re Coming Home,” the “5” Royales were slipping off the charts, and it was the Shirelles and James Brown who were recasting Lowman’s music.  In a last-ditch effort, Sam Cooke gave them a song, “Why,” a generous gesture but one that yielded no commercial result.

The 1960s saw the “5” Royales slide from record company to record company: Home of the Blues, Vee Jay, Smash, Todd, Hi, and others. Even the inspired production efforts of Willie Mitchell and James Brown came up bare.  With soul music exploding (and Steve Cropper using Pauling’s licks to shape an entirely new tributary of Memphis R&B), the band inexplicably could find no beachhead. Finally Tanner left.  Pauling soldiered on, mostly with longtime group pianist Royal Abbit by his side. But by the end of 1967, this foundational ensemble was no more.  On December 26, 1973, working as a janitor at a Brooklyn synagogue, Lowman Pauling passed away, no doubt having heard JB’s third resurrection of “Think” on the radio that year.

One wonders if after all the years on the road, all the songs and all the shows, the words to one of his signature songs might have passed through Lowman’s thoughts:

       Think about the sacrifices, that I made for you

       Think of all the times, that I spent with you

       Think of all the good things, that I done for you…

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.

Guest Blogger: Eli 'Paperboy' Reed on Roscoe Robinson

photo by George Korval

PETER GURALNICK:

The first time I heard Eli play, he was doing impassioned versions of Elmore James songs, with wild slide guitar and heartfelt (but very young – he was only 18 or 19) vocals.

The next time I saw him, his playing was just as impassioned, but his singing was of an entirely different order. He explained how it had happened. After serving an apprenticeship in the Chicago church (various Chicago churches), he had come under the influence of Roscoe Robinson. 

I had known Roscoe for almost a decade at that point. I had met him when I first started working on my Sam Cooke biography. He and Sam had been fast friends and rivals in competing teen gospel quartets, and Roscoe was as full of pep nearly fifty years later as I imagined he and Sam must have been when they first met. Today, at 85, I don’t think Roscoe has lost a step, and Roscoe and Eli have been performing together off and on for the last five or six years. Well, look, let Eli tell you about it. But don’t miss the incredible performance at the end – Roscoe singing, Eli playing, and the whole world spinning on its axis.

Just remember one thing: ROSCOE ROBINSON BELONGS IN THE ALABAMA MUSIC HALL OF FAME. Vote early and often.

ELI REED:

Roscoe Robinson is sitting on my living room couch in Allston, Massachusetts. He has been there for a few hours and it isn’t getting any more comfortable for me, or for him. The night before, we played our first show together at the club Johnny D’s Uptown, in Somerville, Massachusetts, and it went remarkably well. Now we are supposed to be on our way to Brooklyn for the next show; the only problem, my band is late. Very late. One hour goes by, then two, then three, and the band has still not arrived. I am nervous, and he can tell. Roscoe takes this time, not to be frustrated with me (though it’s clear that he is) but to impart some wisdom on my young mind: “You got to learn to control your people, otherwise they’ll never respect you,” he says, and I try to take it in, but really I just want to get the hell out of there.

    The previous day, I had met Roscoe Robinson for the first time. There aren’t too many singers out there who have his sort of pedigree. He’s sung with both sets of Blind Boys (Alabama and Mississippi), recorded for Trumpet, Chess, Wand and Sound Stage Seven just to name a few of the legendary labels, and has been making records for more than SIXTY years. He was the hand-picked successor to Archie Brownlee, perhaps the greatest Gospel shouter in history. He’s a legend in the world of both Gospel and Soul. I was a little nervous.

    At the time, I was barely 23 years old, and I fancied myself a Soul singer. I had done my time in some juke joints in Mississippi and some churches in Chicago, but I thought I knew a whole lot more about singing than I actually did. A friend had arranged for me and my band, The True Loves,  to back up Roscoe at some shows he had put together, first in Boston and New York and then in Chicago the following week. I decided to build a tour around these shows; we would play the first two shows with Roscoe, then tour our way out to Chicago and meet Roscoe there for the final show. This would be the first time that we would play outside of the northeast.

    After thinking long and hard about what music I should play in the car (I settled on the Swanee Quintet), I went to pick up Roscoe at the airport. He was dressed immaculately in a bright blue, double-breasted suit (I learned later on to expect that) and, at 79, he carried his own bag and had no one helping him.

    Hearing the Gospel music playing in the car surprised him; he seemed slightly incredulous of me, this young white kid, and how I might know about this music. Roscoe is a keen observer, and he’s certainly not one to show all of his cards right away. It took me a while to realize that he liked me from the start. Later that day he led a rehearsal with my band, carefully correcting everyone’s parts and making sure they did things the way he wanted. He was all business, and because of that, the show went well.

    The next day, while we were STILL waiting for the band to arrive, I decided to sit at the piano and sing some Gospel tunes, and that’s when we really started to get along. He laughed and shouted and joined in as I fumbled my way through Alex Bradford and James Cleveland tunes, and after a few minutes, we both forgot about how late the band was and we got the spirit. It was the beginning of a friendship that I cherish to this day.

    The show in Brooklyn was great (though the drive was harrowing, with Roscoe critiquing my driving the whole way), and so was the one a few days later in Chicago. Each time we performed with Roscoe, I learned more about how to work a crowd, how to create dynamics within a song and how to build to a climax, only to bring it down to a whisper seconds later. Roscoe’s singing ranged from powerful Gospel fire (“Leave You in the Arms of Another Man”) to smooth R&B crooning (“A Thousand Rivers”) to stomping Soul-for-the-dance-floor (“That’s Enough”), his status as an elder statesmen shining through it all.

    I may have learned more, though, just sitting and talking with him in the dressing rooms. We talked about music, of course, but also about how to be a good manager, how to maintain a relationship while on the road, how to keep your voice healthy and how to keep your shoes from getting scuffed in your suitcase (put them inside your socks!)

    After we finished that tour, Roscoe and I kept in touch, speaking over the phone regularly and continuing our conversations about music, life, and love. I brought him up to Brooklyn again for our first annual Brooklyn Soul Festival (he killed as usual), and when the band and I were traveling through Birmingham we brought him on stage as a special guest and he brought the house down. The morning after that show he picked me up in his own car (still driving at 83) and took me out to breakfast.

    In the summer of 2012, I asked my longtime girlfriend to marry me and, unbelievably, she said yes. One of my first calls was to Roscoe to tell him the good news. He immediately said, “I’m coming!” and I certainly couldn’t refuse him. While planning the wedding, we got the idea to have Roscoe sing a song during the ceremony.

    When the big day came in September of 2013, Roscoe arrived, dressed as sharp as ever (upstaging me as usual). The song we chose for him to sing was one he had written during his time with The Blind Boys of Mississippi, “Sending up My Timber.”

photo by Clean Plate Pictures

    There’s a dream that I dream
    Of my heavenly home
    And I know, that I’m going there some day
    That’s why I’m sending up my timber, everyday.
    
    The song is about how you need to live a good life to “send up your timber” and build yourself a home in heaven, but my wife and I felt that it could be applied to how to build a successful marriage and a “heavenly” home together.

    It meant the world to me that Roscoe, the man who taught me so much, not just about my craft but about how to be a better man, was the one singing those words on the happiest day of my life. After the ceremony was over, Roscoe found my wife and me in a quiet moment and attempted to thank us for having him there, but I stopped him. Before he could thank us, I had to thank him, for everything that he had done for me and for being a part of such a momentous occasion. I am proud to call Roscoe Robinson my mentor and my friend, and I can’t wait for the next time we sing together.

http://www.elipaperboyreed.com/

Waylon, Willie and the Boys

http://youtu.be/Zt-b7B3gK7I

I’m giving a talk – well, it’s a conversation, really – on “How Waylon Jennings Changed My World” at the Country Music Hall of Fame on January 25.

This video shows some of the reasons why.

One of a series of five segments from a 1984 TV special called “The Door Is Always Open,” it exhibits all of the qualities of raffish good humor, self-deprecating charm, soulful expression, and plain-spoken truth that first drew me to country music – and it is curated by Waylon, who provided me with a personal introduction a decade earlier. It’s all in tribute to Sue Brewer, den mother to several generations of Nashville singer/songwriters, who managed George Jones’ club, Possum Holler,  but whose home served as both creative exchange and refuge for every one of the performers featured here, up until her death in 1981.

Waylon proves to be the most sardonic (make that “most genuine”) of genial hosts, introducing a beardless and thoroughly engaging Willie Nelson (“We used to go by Sue Brewer’s house,” Waylon says, “and listen to Willie smile”) who opens with a vibrant “I Gotta Get Drunk,” then seconds just about everyone else on guitar, including Faron Young on “Hello Walls,” Willie’s first #1 country songwriting hit. In addition, you get Roger Miller’s irrepressible energy, contagious good humor, and inimitable sound effects (Roger Miller is one of the few artists who could be accurately described as having arrived, purposefully, from another planet), all accompanied by the appreciative laughter and encouragement of every country music legend in the room.

This is what I encountered when I first met Waylon Jennings in 1974 – well, not so much the irrepressible humor but the individualism, the embrace of life (the embrace of the future), the appreciation of eccentricity, the denial of category that has marked every great American artist from August Wilson to Merle Haggard, from Howlin’ Wolf to Mark Twain. It was the beginning of the so-called “Outlaw Movement” – but that wasn’t what drew me to Waylon or the music. It was, rather, his existential embrace of the moment so perfectly exemplified in his collection of Billy Joe Shaver songs, Honky Tonk Heroes. It was that same celebration of everyday reality, without any need  for adornment or prettification, that I had first found in the blues.

I remember seeing Willie Nelson at Fan Fair around this same time, just after Red Headed Stranger came out (not long after his other great “concept album,” Phases and Stages) and being just as mesmerized. Neither Waylon nor Willie was selling anything but the truth. “Country music is just as serious as any other kind of music,” Waylon told me then, speaking of a proposed national television appearance. “They wanted me to do ‘We Had It All’ sitting on a horse. I couldn’t do that shit. I told them to fuck themselves. To them [country music] ain’t nothing but a goddamn joke.”

This was the new world I sought entry to. It seemed like everything was possible. (“I think right now that the country’s in the best shape for the future that it’s ever been,” said Waylon, “because the kids are thinking and worrying about things that never even occurred to me when I was a kid.”) If you want a quick run-down on some of that raw, undiluted feeling, check out this video series. You’ll get everything from Hank Williams Jr.’s witty take-off on his own renunciation of respectability, “All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down” to the painful beauty of Mickey Newbury’s “Sweet Memory” to Webb Pierce’s shattering “There Stands the Glass,” branded by his peers as “The National Anthem.”

Traditional country, folk country, outlaw country, classic compositions by Harlan Howard (“Busted”) and Kris Kristofferson (“Sunday Morning Coming Down”) – just set aside any preconceptions, these are performances and performers that defy categorization or idealization. They are simply proudly, defiantly, and irremediably themselves. Just like they should be.

Saturday, January 25, 2014 : 1:30pm

Special Program: Peter Guralnick in Conversation with Robert Gordon

Museum admission or Museum membership required for program admittance. Due to limited seating, a program pass is required for your complimentary seat. Passes will be available for pick-up at the Museum two hours prior to the start of the program, on a first-come, first-served basis. Your pass does not guarantee you a seat after the program begins.

MEMBERS ONLY:Call 615.416.2050 or email Reservations@CountryMusicHallofFame.org to reserve your program pass in advance. Reservations will be accepted until 48 hours before the program, or until the program is at capacity. Your pass does not guarantee you a seat after the program begins.

Read more: http://countrymusichalloffame.org/calendar/view/2383?month=01&day=25&year=2014#ixzz2r85QUt60

Guest Blogger: Mr. C on Al Green

I met Joe McEwen (a/k/a Mr. C) in 1970 when Jake and Alexandra and I were selling tickets to a Lightnin’ Hopkins concert at the door. Jake was 2, and Joe was 18 or 19. “Did you mean what you said in that Solomon Burke article you wrote in Rolling Stone?” Joe said, without bothering to introduce himself. “Yes,” I said. We’ve been friends ever since.

Recently Joe came across this amazing Al Green clip and dropped by to tell us about it.

– PG 

Mr C:

Al Green didn’t share peanut butter sandwiches with his grade school classmates.  “I’ve always been a loner,” he tells interviewer Ellis Haizlip. 

“I was always the fellow that was alone, by myself.”  

 This little bit of revelation is spoken without irony or pretense. In this remarkable performance/interview on the Soul! TV show aired on January 3, 1973, Al Green seems unburdened by the crush of success that has suddenly thrust this once lonely schoolboy into the guy that now everybody wants to know. He talks, but mostly sings, with full band and by himself, guitar in hand. Despite his owndisclaimer, Al is in great voice and fully engaged, seeming to enjoy Soul!’s inviting setting. For an hour, we’re absorbed by the full flowering of the mercurial Al Green.

Soul! was a PBS black culture hour, the brain child of Manhattan sophisticate Haizlip. It aired from September of 1968 to March of 1973, a Thursday night show that originally featured King Curtis as house bandleader. Guests ranged from Apollo stars like Joe Tex, Jerry Butler, and the Manhattans, to an array of such political and literary lights of the era as James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Shirley Chisholm, and Julius Lester among others.  It was ambitious and understated, a television show that succeeded without the flash of the moment.  A small audience sat, café-style, at small tables, while Ellis Haizlip directed our attention. Looking at Soul! 40 years later, it’s wondrous that something as special and well-crafted as this managed to exist.

 Like a future album title, Al Green Explores Your Mind, on this January evening it was more a case of Al Green Exploring His Own Mind.  And we get to ride along.

http://www.thirteen.org/soul/jan-3-1973/#.UsqKtvbLf4R

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.

I Still Miss Someone: Roland Janes 1933-2013

Roland, Robert and me

I really loved Roland.

But then so did everyone else who really knew him.

I could try to be clever and say it was for his virtuosity (Roland, a master of mischievous word play, would undoubtedly frown on that), because he was indeed a brilliant guitarist, who provided all those carefully calibrated, arrestingly spontaneous solos and rhythm patterns on so many of the Sun Records classics.

But that, of course, is not what I am speaking of here.

I’m speaking, really, of a virtuosity of spirit, which no one who ever encountered the man could miss. A virtuosity – a generosity of soul that is universally praised, often sought after, but rarely attained. And in Roland’s case, like his guitar playing, it was achieved without visible effort, scarcely ever calling attention to itself.

If you ever visited the Sam C. Phillips Recording Studio at 639 Madison Avenue in Memphis, you would know Roland Janes. He was there managing the studio, engineering sessions, greeting the world, every day more or less for the last thirty years, working with everyone from Charlie Rich to Memphis rappers Three 6 Mafia and Al Kapone to Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, and anyone who might wander in off the street looking to cut a “personal” record, the same way Elvis once did at Sam’s original studio at 706 Union around the corner.

At that original Sun studio Roland played on just about every hit (and, he would be quick to point out with a dry chuckle, on even more misses) that came out on the label from mid-1956 on. He arrived with Jack Clement and Billy Lee Riley that summer, going on to play the blazing double-whammy solo on Riley’s “Flyin’ Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll.” But it was, really, with Jerry Lee Lewis’ arrival at the tag end of the year that he would cement his place in rock ‘n’ roll history. How many times have you heard Jerry Lee’s exuberant shout, “Ro’ Boy,” as he exhorts the otherwise nameless guitarist to take yet another perfectly conceived, perfectly concise solo? It’s for his musicianship most of all, of course (along with his own short-lived but influential Rita label and his Sonic Recording Studio, one of the principal progenitors of the Memphis garage-band explosion of the ‘60s), that Roland was named to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame just last month.

But forget that. I mean, don’t forget the music – don’t ever forget the music. But forget the brilliant solos, and forget the accolades (as Roland said about fame, “I never really cared about any of that”) if you want to try to understand the spirit of the man.

Anyone who stopped by the studio, I don’t care for how long, could not miss that spirit. He was such a kind man. He was such a smart man. He was such a decent and committed man – and by “committed” I don’t mean to suggest anything like the quality that politicians often cite when referring to their own inflexibility. I mean, he was committed in the same way that Sam Phillips proved himself to be over and over again in the studio, committed to bringing out the best in you, committed to exploring the you of you, whoever you were, however you presented yourself, however sophisticated or unsophisticated your tastes. Not that Roland was above kidding around with you. Sometimes after a particularly bad pun, Roland might simply engage you with a quizzical look, as if to say, I hope you got that, it wasn’t really that hard. But mostly he was in the business of encouraging you to be the best “you” you could possibly be.

I’m not sure when I first met Roland – it must have been over thirty years ago - in the studio, of course – but there was no end to our meetings and, given Roland’s nature, I’m sure there will be no end. I remember when we were recording the Charlie Rich album, Pictures and Paintings, in 1991, it was Roland, who was second engineer on the session, who  was, really, the key to its success. It wasn’t that Charlie didn’t have a lot to say; as Sam Phillips always said, it was almost as if he had too much to say, but given his deeply introspective nature too often it stayed bottled up inside. It was hard for Charlie – he had an intrinsic fear of letting go (he would tell you it was “anxiety panic disorder”), but even though Sam’s sons, Knox and Jerry, were present most of the time, and Scott Billington did a wonderfully sympathetic job of producing, it was only Roland who had the capacity to make Charlie feel – I’m not going to say at ease, but at home. And not just because they were old friends and colleagues. And not because of anything special that Roland said. It was just – Roland.

Just like Sam, whom he thought the world of (if Roland was everybody else’s mentor, Sam Phillips was his) he was a teacher – without all the big words that Sam used maybe but with the same sure sense of purpose. Every year his Christmas story provided an illuminating lesson. These were not conventional Christmas greetings – they were not just the usual well-intentioned summaries of family events over the last calendar year. They were more like real-life short stories with a strong moral underpinning. One of my favorites was 2011’s “House of Broken Dreams,” which began, “In my younger days I fancied myself to be a fine guitar player and singer” and then went on to paint a picture of the pawnshop owner who had given him a boost back in those early days. With another aspiring young musician, Roland (or the unnamed protagonist) had rented a room over the pawnshop, which was called “The House of Broken Dreams.” As Roland tells it, the name was something of a misnomer, if only because of the kindness of its owner, Mr. Oscar, a Holocaust survivor. Well, I’m not going to tell you the whole story, it’s more of a meditation, really, but it led Roland to his usual Christmas conclusion: “Let me wish a Merry Christmas to one and all – and to all A GREAT LIFE.”

We shot video interviews for the enhanced digital editions of my books in the studio this past spring. One of the highlights was a conversation with Roland – not an interview exactly, the intention was always conversation. But as we were talking about Jerry Lee Lewis, whom Roland has always cherished not just for his genius but for his fundamentally good-hearted character, Roland evidently decided it was time to turn the tables on me. If this was really a conversation, then he wanted to ask me some questions, too. “Well, how’d you get started, Peter?” he said. “How did you first get into this music?” And while we were at it, he wondered how I had come to write my first book. He imagined I must get quite a bit of satisfaction out of the writing, he said. And then we started talking about the satisfactions to be derived not just from writing or music but from any form of creative engagement.

The last conversation I had with Roland, when he first got sick last month, he wanted to know how the video project was going. I told him it was going great – it was really fun to work with my son, Jake, and Memphis writer and filmmaker Robert Gordon, and it was always great to work on any project with him. “So you feel good about it, Peter?” he said. I told him that I did. “That’s good,“ Roland said. “That’s good.”

Magic & Flying: Doc Pomus

That was the original title that Sharyn Felder gave to the documentary she wanted to make about her father, the legendary songwriter Doc Pomus. The 10-minute trailer that she made consisted of brief snippets of conversation with some of the people he loved, worked with, and influenced: Lou Reed, Little Jimmy Scott, B.B. King, and Doctor John. It could just as easily have included conversations with dozens more – because, as Jerry Wexler frequently said, Doc was the heart and soul, the

conscience,

of the music industry.

 Doc would have eschewed such labels, but AKA Doc Pomus, the wonderful documentary that was eventually made by Peter Miller and Will Hechter (with Sharyn’s full participation) and is just now making its way to a theater near you if you happen to live in New York or Los Angeles, makes the same essential point.

He was born Jerome Solon Felder in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 1925 and stricken with polio at the age of six, compelled to spend the rest of his life in braces and crutches, or in a wheelchair. At fifteen he discovered the blues through the message imbedded in Big Joe Turner’s “Piney Brown Blues”; as Doc frequently said, “It was the transformation of my life.”

He started hanging out in Greenwich Village, listening to Frankie Newton’s band at George’s Tavern, and when the proprietor wanted to throw him out one night for nursing a single beer the whole evening, Doc came up with the perfect alibi. “I’m a blues singer,” he said. “I’m here to do a song.” The song he sang, without any further ado or preparation, was, naturally, “Piney Brown Blues.”

He started singing regularly – in the Village, in Brooklyn, “college student by day, professional blues singer by night.” To hide his new avocation from his family he needed a name. That was how he became Doc Pomus, which served as both an identity and a disguise.

He became a songwriter by the same sort of fortuitous accident that he had become a blues singer: he wrote songs for himself, and then Gatemouth Moore recorded one of his numbers for National in 1946 on a session produced by Herb Abramson and engineered by Tommy Dowd. When Abramson co-founded Atlantic with Ahmet Ertegun the following year, and Dowd became the new label’s chief engineer, Doc became an Atlantic songwriter. A couple of years later his idol, Joe Turner, recorded one of his songs for the label.

 His breakthrough came with rock ‘n’ roll: Ray Charles (“Lonely Avenue”), the Coasters (“Young Blood”), the Drifters “This Magic Moment,” “Save the Last Dance For Me”), Dion “"A Teenager in Love”), Big Joe Turner (“Still in Love”), and Elvis Presley (“Little Sister,” “His Latest Flame,” “Viva Las Vegas”) all recorded songs written by Doc, some by himself, some with a variety of occasional collaborators, but most with his principal songwriting partner of the decade, Mort Shuman. The song for which they are best known, “Save the Last Dance For Me,” remains one of the enduring monuments of the era, and indeed one of the most enduring standards of our time.

When you think of Doc Pomus, though, you don’t just think of a list of songs. Because no matter how extraordinary the songs are, the man compelled no less attention. After being stricken by polio, it was his dream to become the first heavyweight champion of the world on crutches, “a man among men,” as he would always say. This is a perfectly understandable fantasy for a lost, lonely child, but it is in effect what he did become: if he was not the heavyweight champion in boxing, he became a champion of another sort.

He maintained his perspective. He maintained his humanity. He maintained his no-bullshit sense of compassion, his omnivorous interest in everything and everyone that was going on (tell Doc a story, and you’d always get two in return), his commitment to help everyone and anyone who needed it – without forfeiting his right to grumble about it. What was most astonishing about Doc was that he denied no element of his humanness. More than anything else, that may have been the quality that most defined his writing.

What I loved most about Doc – well, I loved everything, really – was his sense of constant engagement. Not just creative engagement either, though that was certainly part of it. I first met Doc the same way that almost everyone else interviewed for the film did: he called me up – in my case, to express his admiration for something I had written. Within moments, it seemed, we were fast friends, within minutes we were off to the races, caught up in a dialogue which for me will go on in my mind’s ear for as long as I live.

I certainly can’t claim any credit. If it had been left to me, I might have just sat there for hours, for days maybe, a timid acolyte in the presence of the legendary songwriter. But Doc didn’t permit that. He quizzed me, he grilled me, he voiced his enthusiasms, he sought out mine – he conveyed this incredible life force, this pure energy and love for people and ideas that I’ve rarely encountered in so undiminished, so undisguised a form. “Peter, you got a minute?” he would say on the phone and then just launch into whatever was on his mind at that particular moment: music, politics, philosophy, friends, it didn’t matter. The dialogue just bubbled along irrepressibly, taking its own natural course but always brought down to earth, and into perspective, by Doc’s inevitable conclusion: “What can I tell you? Just the same old nonsense.” Which, of course, it was and it wasn’t – but it was.

The thing about Doc was that he unfailingly put himself on the line. Not just in his songs but in every aspect of his life. I think that was what I learned most of all from Doc, the notion that you must put yourself on the line, whether for friends or politics or art or merely in expressing your opinions honestly. For Doc there was no holding back. He was passionate – about everything – but he didn’t bullshit himself. And he didn’t bullshit anyone else. Which I think as much as anything else was what sustained his creativity.

In the last ten years of his life Doc wrote some of his very greatest songs, songs that matched, and in some cases surpassed, the quality of his biggest hits. Most were written with Mac Rebennack, AKA Dr. John, his friend, collaborator, sometime lifestyle-debater, above all his “partner.” (“There’s a lot of kind of partners you can have,” says Mac. “Me and Doc was a lot of different kind of partners on some off-the wall level that I hadn’t had with nobody in a long, long time.”)

 With the later songs Doc achieved the kind of profound simplicity that he had been striving for all of his writing life. He knew it, and was proud of it – but he also knew that it wasn’t what went before that mattered, it wasn’t honors or validation (though he liked those, too) that yielded satisfaction: no matter what you have achieved, no matter what recognition may come your way, he would say over and over again – and mean it – it was what came next that mattered, it was the next challenge, creative, personal, it didn’t matter: life was living up to the challenge.

He kept writing almost up to his last breath – on a portable keyboard, with Dr. John, in his hospital room. He kept on reaching out a helping hand to others, too. Towards the end he could honestly say, “I’m doing the same stuff I always did. I’m acting the same way I always acted. The only difference is that now I talk about it. At one time I wouldn’t express my opinions except to maybe my closest friends, because it wasn’t cool to be that animated. Now I don’t hold anything back. I don’t know, maybe it’s just so I’ll get noticed, but I really don’t want to live to see a day where the space that I take up in this world is like some musty closet, some little broom closet somewhere. I want to be able to talk out – even if I’m wrong.”

 Doc did talk out, and he filled an enormous space. He lived and died, as this film clearly shows, surrounded by love.

 AKA Doc Pomus is available on various video and streaming services including Amazon and iTunes

"Call Sam!"

It’s hard to believe Sam died ten years ago.

For me it’s even harder. Because I speak to him every day.

Well, not literally – not exactly. But I am so caught up in his story, in his voice, in his words that it is (they are) literally inescapable. Sometimes he praises me. More often he belittles me (“If you can’t figure this out on your own, then you are one sorry-ass motherfucker”). But mostly he just exhorts me to get on with the job.  

I have been working on my biography for six or seven years now – but, really, I’ve got to say, I think I’ve been building up to it all my life. I first met Sam almost thirty-five years ago. He was fifty-six, and I thought that was really old. (Just to keep everything straight, I was thirty-five.) It was probably the most inspiring meeting of my life. Not only to meet the man behind so much of the music that had shaped my life (blues and rock ‘n’ roll – and, now I’ve got to admit, country, too). But to find him voicing opinions that were – well, inspiring, in the larger sense of the word. His invocations of individualism and democracy and freedom reached out to territory far beyond the bounds of commercial music. (Well, so did his music.) As he said, and as my book, Lost Highway, concludes: “I think that music is a part of a very spiritual aspect of people. I don’t say that there’s a thing wrong with [today’s music], but when you drive so much of the same thing and people get into too much of a pattern – listen, they’re talking about that you’ve got to have, well, what is the trend now? Well, Jesus God, now if there’s anything that we don’t need, it’s a trend.

“One of these days, though, I may not live to see it, maybe you all will, but one of these days that freedom is going to come back. Because, look, the expression of the people is almost, it’s so powerful, it’s almost like a hydrogen bomb. It’s going to get out. I’m not just saying go back to the fifties and this sort of thing. But if it could be worked – and it will be worked – to where just a few like Elvis could break out again, then I would preach, I would become an evangelist if I were alive, saying, ‘For God’s sake, don’t let’s become conformists – please. Just do your thing in your own way. Don’t ever let fame and fortune or recognition or anything interfere with what you feel is here – if you feel you are a creative individual. Then don’t let the companies get this going real good and buy up all the rights of the individual some way or the other. That’s not right. We’ll go back in another circle. Till it gets so damn boring your head is swimming. And I’ll tell you, I hope it’s not too long coming, because of the fact as we go longer and longer into the lack of individual expression, as we go along, if we get too far we’re going to get away from some of the real basic things. All of us damn cats that appreciate not the fifties necessarily but that freedom are gonna forget about the feel. We gonna be in jail, and not even know it.”

Well, all right. I’m still inspired. (And that’s just the condensed version.)

But I’ve got to tell you, after working on the book all this time, I’m no less convinced. Sam, as anyone who ever met him (or listened to him on stage, screen, or radio broadcast) knows, could be a little discursive. But he always had a point; in fact, it would be fairer to say, he always had a larger point. I spoke to him off and on for nearly 25 years, during the last fifteen of which he talked often about his book – well, for the last few years it was going to be our book, which I agreed to gladly – as soon as I was done with my Sam Cooke biography. (“When the hell are you going to finish that damn book?” Sam kept asking. I tried to enhance his appreciation of the other Sam by sending him a tape – mostly of gospel sides – but he was not to be bought off.)

Now to tell you the truth I didn’t think Sam was ever going to get around to his book – our book. Not because he didn’t want to – part of him certainly did, and a bigger part of him thought he did – but mainly because Sam, even in his late seventies, remained a forward-thinking, not a backward-looking) man. What I didn’t realize for the longest time, though, was that, whether by intent or not, Sam was actually writing it.

I’ve got hundreds (and hundreds) of pages of interview transcripts. The ostensible subject of most of the early interviews was Elvis Presley (this was when I was working on Last Train to Memphis primarily) – but Sam was never one to confine himself strictly to the subject at hand, and he introduced elements of his schooling, his upbringing, his perception of race as a child, the role that growing up on a farm at the Bend of the River outside of Florence, Alabama, just before the Great Depression hit, played on his life. But these were sandwiched in between his very sober (I’m talking her about mood) reflections upon the more familiar past, from Charlie Rich and Howlin’ Wolf to the course of Elvis’ early musical development and career.

It wasn’t until we did the documentary, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, in 1999, though, that I realized what was really going on. My friend Morgan Neville, the director and co-producer of the show, knowing Sam’s penchant for prolixity (but not knowing Sam) devised a strategy that he thought might help cut down some on the cost of actual filming. What we could do, he suggested, was interview Sam in a series of pre-production meetings, on audiotape – that way Sam could get it all out of his system before we ever switched over to the far more costly videotape and film.

Well, we did interview Sam, on more than a dozen 90-minute audio tapes, and I watched the beginnings of despair (well, not despair exactly – but I think you get the picture) begin to dawn on Morgan’s face, as Sam talked, it seemed, about just about everything under the sun except those things which would necessarily be the principal subject of the documentary. He talked at length about Silas Payne, the black, blind ex-sharecropper who had exerted such an influence on his life. Also his deaf-mute Aunt Emma, who was the smartest person in the family, maybe in North Florence, and how, like Silas Payne, she had provided him with the truest of role models. He talked about his eighth (maybe ninth) grade teacher, Mrs. Mary Alice Lanier, who spanked the hell out of his hand with a ruler. He was a “mean little bastard” until then, he said (“I was just very, very convinced of things”), but that finally set him off on the right path. He talked (a lot) about going to the superintendent of schools, Mr. Powell, to get Sousaphones for the Coffee High School marching band (Sam was its first captain, as a high school Sophomore) and working with the dapper new band director, twenty-six-year-old Floyd McClure, who wore spats and a Homburg, drove a black 1937 Ford, had played tuba with the Tidy Hill Dance Band in Chicago, and had just as passionate a commitment to the band as Sam did.

It was fascinating. Even if all the while Morgan was tearing his hair out. And needless to say, Sam kept talking about all these things (and much, much more) once the cameras started rolling. He would get really caught up in trying to describe his interaction with Wolf, Elvis, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Little Junior Parker – but he would get just as caught up in teaching us the Lesson of the Telephone that went off during a Jimmy DeBerry session – and the fact that you can still hear that telephone on the recording, because, Sam said, “You think I was going to take that telephone ring off the record? It was R-E-A-L, do you get me? Real.”

I miss Sam every day. Occasionally I dream about him. But, you know, I can visit with him any time I like. Which is most of the time. And if I run out of steam occasionally and don’t feel like visiting any more, for all of Sam’s vehement protests, I can always shut off the tape recorder, the computer – the whole process – if only for a little while, until I go back to work the next day.

I wrote this at the request of my friend Trevor Cajiao, and it first appeared in his magazine, Now Dig This, which bills itself without exaggeration as"100% Rock ‘N’ Roll.“ To find out more, check out www.nowdigthis.co.uk

Guest Blog- A Word from Mr. C: Soul is Alive... The Blues of Sonny Green

A report from the West Coast by Joe McEwen

Singer Sonny Green is the show tonight. He’s the focus and driving wheel behind the buoyant energy flowing through La Louisianne, a Los Angeles restaurant/lounge in the Crenshaw District.  Sonny Green is at ease being the man.

Sonny’s singing style comes from the vocabulary of Bobby Bland and inhabits the gravel end of Bland’s voice.  He sings slow, easy soul songs that tell a story, he is an interpreter of the hits of his contemporaries: Johnnie Taylor, Bobby Womack, his late friend ZZ Hill and, of course, the just-deceased master Bobby Bland.  The sixty or so people around the bandstand know the words and happily sing chorus after chorus, led by the ever-engaging ringmaster. “That’s the Way I feel About ‘Cha,” “Running Out of Lies,” “Stop Doggin’ Me Around” (“That’s d-o-g-g-i-n”) roll off the tongues of the assembled, as Green strolls the floor, dancing, jiving and collecting tips. 

Familiar faces are introduced; Dancing Ann, Huey the guitar legend, and all the women “in the house tonight” born under the sign of Cancer. Also brought forth are Hank Carbo and the sharply dressed man, Ed Wheeler, who owns the place and gets  his own time in the spotlight singing an impassioned, heartfelt “The Things That I Used To Do."  Everybody seems familiar.  The place is alive., and the songs suddenly breathe a life much different from the  records.  They become a vehicle for a particular and comforting emotional grounding.  The audience and performer, transplanted from the Deep South (posed as a question by Sonny with a predetermined answer) to Los Angeles have become one.

Many years ago, the great soul DJ, the Magnificent Montague, responded during a taped repartee with Sam Cooke: ” I see tonight you’re trying to gather some material for your soul, through mine.“ Those of us in the audience on a recent Monday night at La Louisianne did just that through Sonny Green.  And at show’s close, we  wandered off into the night, so much the better for it.

Bobby “Blue” Bland

I owe Bobby Bland a real debt of gratitude.

Not just for the time he always graciously gave me (Bobby was the definition of “gracious”), particularly when I was working on the profile of him that appeared in Lost Highway.

Not just for the music he gave the world, which, like Sam Cooke’s, was an extraordinary blend of silky-smooth and deliberately rough. In Bobby’s case – and I guess he was like Sam in this, too, and, obviously, an entire generation of gospel-based soul singers – he took his inspiration from Perry Como, Tony Bennett, and Nat “King” Cole on the pop side and from the gospel shouters on the “rough” side. Particularly Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys and, of course, the Reverend C.L. Frankin, Aretha’s father, from whom he always said he got his patented squall. (Listen to Rev. Franklin’s “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” if you don’t believe me.)

But I said that I owed him something more – and I do.

Bobby “Blue” Bland gave me my vocation.

I first met Bobby when he was appearing at the Sugar Shack in April of 1975. I had published Feel Like Going Home three and a half years earlier. At the end of that book (and you’re going to laugh at me here) I bid a fond farewell to the world of music writing. “I consider this chapter a swan song,” I wrote in the Epilogue, “not only to the book but to my whole brief critical career. Next time you see me [Note the Little Junior Parker reference!] I hope I will be my younger, less self-conscious and critical self. It would be nice to just sit back and listen to the music again without a notebook always poised or the next interviewing question always in the back of my mind.”

I told you you were going to laugh. But I really did quit – for about two years. I wrote another novel. Oh, I might have written a few things about music, but then the devil in the form of Jim Miller, who had recently become Music Editor of the Real Paper, lured me back, first with the promise of my own column, which I called “Jackie Wilson Said!,” then with a request for a profile of Waylon Jennings. Which was followed a year or so later by the opportunity to do a story on Bobby “Blue” Bland.

That’s how I came to spend a week with Bobby when he was appearing at the Sugar Shack in Boston, just after finishing a country album of which he was very proud. I won’t go into the story of that whole week – suffice it to say, it was thrilling, enthralling, fascinating and inspiring, to various degrees and in various turns. But the point of this story is that in the course of that week I experienced an epiphany, a word for which I am frequently rebuked by my writing students – and rightly so.

This particularly epiphany had partly to do with Bobby Bland, partly to do with the Sugar Shack, but most of all to do with me.

It was a rough week for Bobby. The Sugar Shack was a rough club (demi-monde might be a polite way of describing it), and Bobby said at one point that he hadn’t had a good night – a night when the music really set him free – all week. One night I stayed after the show until 2 or 3 in the morning, waiting for a horn rehearsal that never happened, which ultimately resulted in the firing of a member of the band. The club was in a sad and bedraggled state, as clubs tend to be after all the customers are gone (remember, this was in the days when smoking was not only permitted but encouraged, and the air was permanently thick with fog), and the only people left in the room had either long since completed their business or were frustrated by the business they had left to complete.

Anyway, the next day I went for an interview for a teaching position at an exclusive private school outside of Boston. My Boston University teaching gig had run out, and I knew I had to make some more money, if only to support my writing.

Well, I went out to the school – I knew the headmaster, who had been a teacher of mine in another life – and I had a very pleasant, altogether affable lunch, discussing books I loved, like Tristram Shandy, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Confessions of Zeno, and V. It was all very civilized.

But then I went back to the Sugar Shack that night – and, you know, I’m not really sure at this point if the failed horn session preceded or followed my prep school audition, but it suddenly hit me that I would rather spend the rest of my life listening to Bobby “Blue” Bland and waiting for a horn section rehearsal that never happened than spend a minute in an exclusive private school, even teaching books that I loved. And that resolve lasted a lot longer than my retirement notice at the end of Feel Like Going Home.

Bobby, as I say, was a wonderfully gracious man, possessed of a storehouse of keen insights based on what he always referred to as “mother wit.” Check out the fine documentary about him, Two Steps From the Blues, by Paul Spencer, who also made the wonderful Solomon Burke documentary, Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.

But most of all listen to his music, that unexpected blend of the seductive and the apocalyptic. Listen to “Little Boy Blue,” a song that Bobby didn’t sing often in later years, because, as he said, “You can’t just stand up and do it at will. It takes a lot of effort to make it come out – I mean, like it supposed to.” But occasionally, if he was really feeling the spirit, he did do it – and when he did, he definitely made it feel just like it was supposed to.

 Bobby put his whole soul into the music. You can hear it in all his great numbers from his signature adaptation of T-Bone Walker’s classic “Stormy Monday” to one of the most beautiful (and resigned) of racial declarations, “Lead Me On.” I could pick out several dozen of Bobby’s greatest (did I mention “I Pity the Fool”?) – but it doesn’t really matter. Choose your own. But don’t hold back. Let Bobby draw you in, the way he always would. Let Bobby lead you on.

Guest Blogger: Fishing Blues by John Milward

John Milward has a new book coming out this month Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues). The illustration is from the book and is one of many original images by Margie Greve. John’s been writing eloquently about music for years.  Here he examines the genesis of ‘Catfish Blues.’

 Determining who wrote a vintage blues song can be akin to casting a fishing line into very muddy waters. That’s because in the early decades of the last century, blues was an oral tradition, with songs and lyrics and guitar licks passed from one musician to the next. As Dave Van Ronk once said, “Theft is the first law of art, and like any group of intelligent musicians, we all lived with our hands in each other’s pockets.” Added folklorist and song collector Paul Clayton: “If you can’t write, rewrite. If you can’t rewrite, copyright.”
 
A vintage 78 rpm disc might give writer’s credit to a particular blues singer, but unless the song was copyrighted, he was unlikely to ever see publishing royalties. Talent recruited for so-called “race records” rarely thought in such terms, and typically took a one-time cash payment (Lightnin’ Hopkins did this throughout his long career). Skip James was paid $40 for the 18 sides he recorded for Paramount in 1931, and his songs weren’t copyrighted until his rediscovery in the early-‘60s. (James came into a late-life windfall when Cream covered his “I’m So Glad” on Fresh Cream; his heirs got serious scratch when “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues” was included on the soundtrack to 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?)
 
Robert Petway recorded “Catfish Blues” in 1941; he was cited as the writer but blues researchers say the song had long circulated around the Mississippi Delta and was in the repertoire (and perhaps composed by) a singer of his acquaintance, Tommy McClennan. Whoever wrote it, however, borrowed a lyrical motif found in a 1928 hit called “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues Part 3” by a medicine-show entertainer named Jim Jackson (“I wished I was a catfish, swimming down in the sea; I’d have some good woman, fishing after me”).

“Catfish Blues” barely caused a ripple commercially, but it was no doubt familiar to one of Petway’s Delta neighbors, Muddy Waters, whom Alan Lomax recorded that same year for the Library of Congress. Muddy brought the song with him to Chicago, and cut it for Chess in 1950 with his ringing electric guitar representing a clear bridge from the country blues to the sound of the city. Muddy moved the “catfish” lyric to the top, added some new words, and put his name on a song whose title he changed to “Rollin’ Stone.” Here’s Waters playing the tune about a decade later, and not long before a British rhythm & blues quintet who idolized Muddy decided to call themselves the Rolling Stones.

Many others have covered “Catfish Blues,” with B.B. King giving Petway writing credit, John Lee Hooker taking it for himself, and Jimi Hendrix citing the song as a traditional. Hendrix undoubtedly learned the song via the Waters recording. “When I was a little kid,” Hendrix told Sharon Lawrence, “I heard a record playing at a neighbor’s house turned way up. That song called to me, and I left my yard, went down the street, and when the song was over, I knocked on the door and said, ‘Who was that playing?’ ‘Muddy Waters,’ the guy said. I didn’t quite understand. He repeated it and spelled it out– ‘M-u-d-d-y.’

“Catfish Blues” was not only a staple of Hendrix’s repertoire– he sometimes called it the “Muddy Waters Blues”– but also the clear inspiration for two classics from Electric Ladyland which confirmed that his roots were deeply sunk in the blues: “Voodoo Chile” and “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return).” Here’s the latter, in which Hendrix casts his line into outer space.

A Word from Mr C: Lost Soul

Mr. C:

Lost Soul was originally a series of albums I put together at CBS Records in the “80s that cobbled together truly inspired CBS label singles that sadly missed their commercial mark.  The Lost Soul concept seemed to fit the final piece of the SWEET SOUL MUSIC discography. 

Looking at this list almost thirty years later, the song selection still seems on the money.  And if CD reissues and YouTube have made them readily available, the navigation compass remains true to the spirit of intent.  Lost Soul stands as a sturdy and lovingly assembled tribute to great voices from the shadows.

For this edition– a special bonus cut!

"Believe in Me Baby Pt.1 +2” (Jesse James/20th Century Fox)  Reworked Little Milton cover to an appreciative audience with an emotional sermon on “the fast life and things like that.”  A 6 minute charging soul drama that ends at peak crescendo. Showtime.

Mr. G:

Joe’s right. It was so great working on Sweet Soul Music and getting these mix tapes in the mail – one after another, close to 40 in all. It was the basis not just for a book but for a lifelong dialogue, one that pre-dated Sweet Soul Music and has never really stopped.

Listening to this mix today – which was never actually a tape, more like an ideal –  reminds me once again of the richness and diversity of the music.

Now don’t forget: you can still see Otis Clay, a 2013 Blues Hall of Fame inductee, who, like Mavis Staples, continues to perform with undiminished fervor, each of them as emotionally compelling (wait’ll you hear Mavis’ new Jeff Tweedy-produced album) as they ever were. And if you like Jackie Moore’s beautifully controlled version of Paul Kelly’s “Personally” (co-produced by William Bell), check out Kelly’s own “folk soul” album on Bullseye, Gonna Stick and Stay, from 1993, or his great Warner Archives collection, The Best of Paul Kelly, with all but one song on both albums written by Kelly himself.

There’s a Sam Cooke component here that I was not fully aware of at the time. I knew that Arthur Conley’s “Let’s Go Steady,” which stands as an explicit tribute to Sam, was written by J.W. Alexander, Sam’s business partner, mentor, and friend. But I’m sure I didn’t know that Bobby Womack’s striking “What Is This?” was produced by Fred Smith, a Kags songwriter and SAR employee (Sam and J.W.’s publishing company and record label respectively), who had great success on his own as songwriter and producer (the Olympics’ “Western Movies” was just one of his many hits, and he worked with Bill Cosby’ for years), and was the owner of Keymen the label on which Bobby’s single appeared.

Maybe what stands out most of all for me, though, is Little Richard’s epic “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got (But It’s Got Me).” As Joe wrote on the final page of the book, it is “arguably the greatest soul ballad of all time. The Mt Rushmore of soul.” And it is. I can remember seeing Richard with Jimi Hendrix on guitar at the Donnelly Theater in Boston in May of 1965 around the time he recorded the song. (I ushered the show!) He didn’t sing “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got” that night. His showstopper was “Shake a Hand,” on which he left the mike and came to the edge of the stage, projecting his voice effortlessly without amplification and imploring the audience to join him. Which, without hesitating for a second, they very soulfully did.

I remember, too, buying that great Don Covay composition in its various Vee Jay versions (it came in two parts, and different lengths, for some reason, on different pressings). I bought it at Skippy White’s Mass Records: Home of the Blues, where I bought just about every soul record that I own, including Jesse James’ gently insistent “Believe in Me Baby” and Aretha’s first Atlantic album, I Never Loved Man the Way I Love You, the night it came out. That’s where Joe got much of his collection, too – but Joe went me one better. I just brought my Paperback Booksmith paycheck to Skippy. Joe went to work for him after graduating from college – and I’m sure it was the best postgraduate course there ever was.

My Travels

Trowbridge’s, Florence, AL (Sam Phillips’ Favorite Hometown Restaurant)

Sorry to have been out of pocket for so long.

One of the biggest reasons is that we (Alexandra and I, with Robert Gordon and Jake coproducing, and David Leonard and Robert shooting) have been doing video interviews for the enhanced digital versions of the various books, which are slated to start coming out in December.

We shot in Memphis, Florence and Muscle Shoals, Nashville, and Chicago – at Phillips Recording Studio, Lauderdale Courts, Audubon Drive, Fame, Stax, and Sun International. Much of the interview material was with me alone, talking about how the books came to be written as well as some of the different approaches that I took to the material (like the huge difference required – just from the standpoint of structure and style  – in telling the two contrasting stories of Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love).

But then we had conversations, too, with old friends like William Bell (straight from the White House celebration of Stax to the Stax Museum itself), Rick Hall, Dan Penn, Jerry Phillips, Roland Janes, L.C. Cooke, and Sleepy LaBeef, among others. It was really fun (with the one unavoidable downside the bittersweet memories of all those now gone), and here are just a few pictures from our trip.

With Roland and Robert at Phillips Recording

Roland, in case anyone doesn’t know, played guitar on every big Sun record from the arrival of Jerry Lee Lewis on. He has managed the Phillips studio for the last thirty years and writes the most wonderful short stories, which he sends out every Christmas. Around the middle of our conversation, Roland announced, “Now I’m going to interview you.” And he did. Robert’s new book on Stax, Respect Yourself, is at this moment just about to go to press

With Alexandra and Jake at 706 Union Avenue

The last time I had been here was with Steve Bing and John Fusco, who was researching the script for Last Train to Memphis at the time. Matt Ross–Spang was just beginning to put together recombinant versions of all the original Sun equipment then. Now he has it nearly assembled, with the equivalent of Sam’s RCA 76-D console and, I believe, two Ampex tape recorders. So for anyone who wants to record just like Elvis did, you can have your chance soon. And who knows, maybe we’ll even start shooting the movie before too long!

With Rick Hall at FAME Studios

A couple of nights after this interview we went with Rick to the Nashville Film Festival screening of the documentary Muscle Shoals, a vivid evocation of the music (produced by Stephen Badger and Greg Camalier) in which Rick was characteristically and irrepressibly himself. In fact, he pretty much stole the show, leaving the way wide open for a sequel focusing on some of the other aspects of the story. Rick’s still-unpublished memoir, Hell Bent For Fame, as told to Muscle Shoals historian Terry Pace and edited by Robert Gordon, is an even more amazing and graphic story, particularly of his early years, growing up in the desolate badlands of the Freedom Hills. He wanted it to be like a combination of Harry Crews and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, he told me when he first began work on it more than ten years ago – and it is

With L.C. Cooke at his home in Chicago

L.C.’s got a new album coming out only 48 years after its originally announced date. Well, that’s not quite true – I mean, not literally true in that it’s not exactly the same album as the one SAR Records would have released if his brother Sam hadn’t died. This one will have some of L.C’s pre-SAR Checker and post-SAR Destination sides as well. But, as you can imagine, it’s very cool – totally cool. There’s one song on it that as we listened to it, L.C. said, “That was probably the best song I ever did in my life – to me. You know, sometimes you cut a song and you listen and you say, I could have done that better. But ‘If I Could Only Hear’ – if I’d have sung that song about 100 years, I couldn’t have done that song no better. And that’s always been my favorite song.” And then we listened to it. Watch for a fall release on ABKCO!

Next up on Our Tour: Thomson, Georgia, Birthplace of Blind Willie McTell

Jack Clement: “When I Dream”

I’m not going to even write about this.

This is the start of Jack’s inspired – even more to the point, inspiring – set at the “Cowboy Jack Clement Tribute Concert” on January 30.

I wrote about it, and included my introductory remarks, in my February 4 post – so just scroll down the website if you want to read more about it. And as a surprising (and truly heartening) update to that post: Jack has just been named as one of the three 2013 inductees in the County Music Hall of Fame.

But see if you don’t find this as heartbreaking as Eddy Arnold did when he heard Jack perform the song in his residency at the Country Music Hall of Fame a few years ago. Eddy Arnold was in tears – and I don’t think there was anyone at the Tribute Concert who was any less moved.

Jack has often been depicted as a Shakespearean clown – maybe even a tragic clown. But here he simply reveals himself as an artist who has never been afraid to bare his soul. Sometimes. At his own discretion.

Wait for the concert film for the full stereoscopic version of Jack’s haunting set (not to mention all the other genuinely moving performances), but for now this will just have to do. And it does.

Blues Mixology

This is a real artifact.

Now ordinarily I don’t believe in artifacts. But I made this mix tape (I don’t know that that’s what we called it then) over twenty-five years ago – Jake says I made it when he got his license, I thought it was when he went off to college (which I like better). I say, Print the legend. But I’m sure Jake’s right.

I don’t want to ascribe any cosmic significance to it. I mean, it’s just a mix tape – and now a very slightly modified Spotify list – compiled on the fly, sort of. But it sums up so many of the things that I was passionate about then – and that I remain passionate about now, mixing in fun and profundity, the well-known and the obscure (at least then), without any more rhyme or reason than to bring together some really great music in the same way that Gregg Geller has always approached the reissue albums that he’s done for Columbia, RCA, and Warner Bros., with all the excitement intact.

I’m sure no one will be surprised by the omnivorous presence of Howlin’ Wolf. (Every time I hear “I’ll Be Around,” I’m reminded of the elderly babysitter, long before the creation of this tape, who peered around nearslghtedly looking for the source of the unearthly sound that was coming from another room and then said a little worriedly  to Alexandra: “I didn’t know your husband sang.”)

Anyway. You’ll note lots of Muddy Waters influence, too. And Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Mister Downchild” was the title source (and the inspiration) for both my second collection of short stories and my fifth novel – unpublished, like the first four, and probably deservedly so. (Sometime in the next few months I’m going to post a blog memoir about “Writing Fiction,” which will serve both to describe the past and, hopefully, to herald the future.)

I guess the thing that surprises me most here is the prevailing influence of Tommy Johnson (“Smokestack Lightnin’,” “I Asked For Water,” “Maggie Campbell,” “Dark Road”), not to mention Robert Johnson, both of whom I was obviously well aware of at the time (I mean, look at the order) but whose ongoing presence, it occurs to me now, gives the lie to the kind of revisionist history which would suggest they were important mainly because they were important to blues collectors. Floyd Jones, Muddy Waters, Johnny Shines, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Nighthawk, Elmore James – these were not collectors. They were disciples, who are here paying passionate tribute to some of the music that captivated them most when they were growing up and continued to fuel their musical imagination and inspiration all their lives.

Another seminal source – and I’ve got to admit, this kind of embarrasses me – was the original Sonny Boy Williamson (John Lee), of whom I was also very much aware but whom I had probably consigned, according to the prevailing wisdom of the day (and with the kind of snobbery to which none of us is fully immune), to the ranks of commercial mediocrity. Kind of silly in that, as it turns out Sonny Boy was the inspiration not only for the second Sonny Boy but the direct source for Junior Wells’ seminal “Hoodoo Man,” much of the other harmonica playing on this collection, and Baby Face Leroy’s great “Blues Is Killing Me,” which I’m sure I heard completely differently at the time simply because it came from the same singer who can be heard wailing with Muddy Waters and Little Walter on the very African-sounding “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” (man, that is still amazing).

Oh well, I guess it just goes to show how parochial (and proprietary) genre enthusiasts of every stripe can be. So all right, maybe the revisionists have something. And further all right, I’m going state right here: John Lee Williamson was something else (get the great album, Blue Bird Blues, that Colin Escott put out on his “Secret History of Rock ‘n’ Roll” series for RCA).   

Anyway, I don’t think you need to know a thing to enjoy this “crazy music” (Buddy Guy title). I get such a kick still out of “Eisenhower Blues,” or the chaotic ride that Hop Wilson’s “My Woman Has a Black Cat Bone” takes you on, or the doomy mood of Buddy Guy’s “Ten Years Ago,” or the hair-sticking-up-on-your head nightmare phantasmagoria of “First Time I Met the Blues.”

Make up your own blues mix – don’t forget Little Walter next time, or T-Bone Walker, or B.B. King, or any of the hundreds of other blues men and women (right down to Billy Joe Shaver and Aretha Franklin) that you might want to put in your mix.

P.S. Soul tape from the same era coming soon!

Roosevelt Jamison, 1936-2013

Quinton Claunch & Roosevelt Jamison August 2012

I’m not sure exactly how I first met Roosevelt.

Probably it was through Quinton Claunch. It was 1981 or 1982. I had started working on Sweet Soul Music, and Memphis – and James Carr, and Goldwax Records, and Otis Redding – were all, of course a big part of the picture. Quinton was co-founder and co-owner of Goldwax, whose biggest star, and probably greatest talent, was James Carr. But James was going through a period of trials and tribulations during which he was virtually incommunicado, and Roosevelt, who had originally brought him to Goldwax, was pretty much his only lifeline to the world. Roosevelt had also written “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” recorded initially by another of his discoveries, and another soul singer of incomparable talent, O.V. Wright, and then, in somewhat circuitous fashion, by Otis Redding in the version that the Rolling Stones picked up and made known to a whole other world on Out of Our Heads.

It doesn’t really matter. The point is, I met Roosevelt, who was working at the University of Tennessee’s Interstate Blood Bank at the time (only one of two or three full-time jobs he was working simultaneously), and once he heard what I was doing, Roosevelt took it upon himself to be my guide.

I don’t know where he found the time – I don’t know where he found the generosity of spirit. But that was Roosevelt – it was his mark in life as well as in music. He seemed to possess an empathy gene, a need to be of service that carried over into every aspect of his life. He was a songwriter primarily, definitely not a singer (his friends told him “to stick to the other end of the business,” he always said ruefully), and with the exception of “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” I’m not sure he ever really profited from the music business – and then only to a limited degree. He had discovered both O.V. Wright and James Carr when they were singing in the same gospel group, the Harmony Echoes, one of a number of quartets that he would rehearse in the back of the blood bank on the corner of Beale and Fourth in the early 1960s. His dream was to bring their talent to the attention of the world (“O God, what is it that Thou has for me to do?” he wrote at the time, seeking inspiration) – and he succeeded. But when I met him fifteen or sixteen years later, O.V. had just died, a victim of drugs at the age of forty-one, and James, two years younger, had himself descended into a fog of drugs and depression.

We started going around. Or, rather, Roosevelt started taking me around – that’s really the point of this story – to a host of his friends who were in large part, like Roosevelt himself, “the story behind the story,” fellow spirits of abundant but insufficiently heralded talent, who looked at me a little like, What are you doing here, but then, since I was vouched for by Roosevelt, never hesitated to welcome me into their homes. I met O.V.’s brother, Eddie Lewis, who Roosevelt assured me sang just like O.V. We went to see the great songwriter and soul singer George Jackson (some of his better-known compositions are Otis Clay’s “Trying to Live My Life Without You,” Z.Z. Hill’s “Down Home Blues,” and Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll,” not to mention the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple”). And, of course, Roosevelt expended a great deal of time and energy on getting me together with James Carr. There were numerous missed appointments, but finally we picked up James at his sister’s and, after driving around a little, finally settled on a little restaurant in South Memphis, where we sat uncomfortably under the harsh fluorescent light.

James was having trouble just staying awake, expelling his breath loudly from time to time and largely unresponsive to Roosevelt’s promptings. “This gentleman can do a lot for you, sir,” Roosevelt said. “Do you understand where I’m coming from?” But James simply couldn’t. “Aren’t we friends?” Roosevelt tried desperately. “Sometimes,” said James, not really meaning anything by it. “You know,” said Roosevelt, whose dream always remained, to bring the attention of the world to the beauty he saw all around him, “everyone who comes to your concerts loves you. But there are many questions the public would like to ask. Because you’ll go down in history as one of the greatest blues singers of all time.”

There was no truer friend than Roosevelt Jamison. He was the kind of person who couldn’t see a stray dog without needing to feed him – and I always liked to think I was one of his stray dogs. At the book release party for Sweet Soul Music in Memphis, Roosevelt, of course, showed up, and so did his mentor, Dr. L.W. Diggs, the renowned hematologist and pioneer in the study of Sickle Cell anemia, who, defying the state of Tennessee’s laws of segregation, had trained Roosevelt surreptitiously as a medical technologist in the ‘50s, paving the way for him to eventually take over a supervisory position in the University of Tennessee hematology lab. Dr. Diggs was 86 at the time and, as far as I know, no dedicated fan of the music itself. But his granddaughter, who lived in New York, had read an excerpt from my book in the Village Voice that mentioned both Roosevelt and her grandfather, and he showed up for the party dressed like the only distinguished physician in the room.

Roosevelt hadn’t seen him in a while, and he introduced me to Dr. Diggs excitedly (“You remember, I told you about Dr. Diggs!”), and despite an all-star turn out from the music world (Rufus Thomas, Solomon Burke, Sam Phillips, and David Porter, among others), Roosevelt spent most of his time with his one-time mentor and friend, reminiscing enthusiastically about old times.

I saw Roosevelt many times over the years, and it was always renewing. Perhaps most of all because he was someone for whom the dream would never truly be over.

A Word from Mr. C: A REFLECTION ON CURTIS MAYFIELD, THE IMPRESSIONS AND WE’RE A WINNER

By Joe McEwen

Keep on pushing, move on up, we’re a winner: these exhortations were at the forefront of the content and spirit of the music Curtis Mayfield recorded with his group, The Impressions, in the mid and late 1960s. If his record, “People Get Ready,” captured a more steady, righteous, nose-to-the-moral-grindstone tone, “We’re a Winner,” released in l967, lifted higher and aimed for a more liberating result.

 The music matched the message and performance.  Arranged and produced by Mayfield’s long-time, hugely undervalued creative partner, Johnny Pate, “We’re a Winner” explodes from the opening brass flourish.  A live studio audience, recorded  at Chicago’s Universal Studio, adds a kinetic energy throughout– right from the “Come on sock it to me!” shout-out that follows the two-note horn blast intro.  This record demanded attention.

Still it’s the words that carry the day:

         "I don’t mind leaving here, 

          To show the world we have no fear

          ‘cause we’re a winner

           and everybody knows it’s true

           we’ll just keep on pushing..“

"We’re a Winner,” rose to Number One on the black radio charts that year.  The mood and emotional force it thrusts out, born of the Civil Rights Movement a few years before, was also directly carried forward in the increasingly aggressive speeches of Martin Luther King. 1967 was a tipping point in so much of American society – race riots, Vietnam the war, and the accompanying protests – the basic challenge of ‘what it was and what it is,’ to ‘what could be and what should be.’  The ceiling-breaking liberation that imbued “the message” got so ratcheted up that it had nowhere to go except burst. And it did, quickly.  Still, these many years later the words bang around in my head. How that poetry must have been such an inspiration to the man that authored them.

Sam Cooke’s transcendent “A Change is Gonna Come” was born of the same era, and the same racial striving, as the Impressions records.  Barack Obama has used both  "A Change is Gonna Come" and “Keep On Pushing”, to powerful effect in major speeches.  Currently, a Samsung commercial featuring basketball star LeBron James, in winningly relaxed engagement with family and friends, has “Keep On Pushing” as its music bed. The message of warmth, hope and resolve remains vital and stirring. “We’re a winner, and everybody knows it’s true” is more than a self-help mantra, it’s a primal declaration of basic civil and human rights. Keep on pushing indeed.

Bonus Extra Credit in the College of Musical Knowledge:

Mr. C’s Johnny Pate primer

GUEST BLOGGER- COLIN ESCOTT: LAST TRAIN TO SAN FERNANDO

FOtB Colin Escott (pictured here with Eddie Bond* in 1971) has written the definitive history of Sun Records, Good Rockin’ Tonight, as well as the touring Broadway hit, Million Dollar Quartet (see it when it comes to your home town). Bear Family’s recent release of Colin, Martin Hawkins, and Hank Davis’ revised versions of their epic Sun Blues and Sun Country box sets, will be the subject of a future blog. Like many true historians, neither Peter nor Colin can remember when they first met.

*We’re sorry to report that Eddie Bond, the self-styled Rockin’ Daddy, died on March 20, 2013.

I wrote a by-god Broadway show, Million Dollar Quartet, and one company criss-crosses North America. Usually, the cast handles local media requests, but newspapers occasionally ask for the director, music director, or me. Inevitably, the questions are much the same and the responses trip off our tongues, but sometimes I’m thrown a curve. A lady from the Patriot News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, asked when and where I’d first heard rock ‘n’ roll. The stumbling silence must have been disorienting after the easy loquaciousness of my earlier well-rehearsed answers.

I was six years old in 1956, and we lived in what the British call council housing and Americans call public housing. The houses were hastily built after World War II so that returning servicemen would have a place to raise us. Mr. and Mrs. Edwards lived next door. They were older, but their house had been flattened during the War. Their son, Mike, had a motorcycle, a record player, and five or six records. “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog” vexed my parents more than the others. I can’t say I loved those records, but I’m pretty certain I first heard them coming through the wall. Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” and Tommy Steele’s jaunty but ultimately vapid cover of Marty Robbins’ “Singin’ the Blues” were in steady rotation on the other side. The other record lodged in memory is Johnny Duncan’s “Last Train to San Fernando.”

Donegan and Duncan were branded as Skiffle. American spell-check doesn’t recognize skiffle (even though its provenance is American) and I know just one American, Todd Everett, who professes to love it. What impresses itself upon me nearly sixty years later is how resourceful Donegan must have been to find some of the blues and hillbilly songs he recorded. After buying every ultra low-run British pressing, he went to the American Embassy to hear Library of Congress recordings. In 1954, how many Americans knew the Carter Family’s “Wabash Cannonball,” Hank Snow’s “Nobody’s Child,” and Washboard Sam’s “Diggin’ My Potatoes”? Donegan recorded them all that year. That same year, Elvis Presley magicked the same music into something startlingly new. Donegan sang the faster songs with British vaudeville chirpiness; otherwise, he mimicked the originals quite closely. If only the music equaled the diligence.

Johnny Duncan was an American serviceman stationed in England, who claimed to have worked with Bill Monroe. (Don’t confuse him with the minor league country star of the same name who charted some records in the ‘70s and ‘80s). Originally from Oliver Springs, Tennessee, Duncan married an English woman and stayed. He fell into the orbit of Donegan’s producer, Denis Preston. A cousin of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, Preston launched Lansdowne Studio in 1956. The first Lansdowne hit, Humphrey Lyttleton’s “Bad Penny Blues,” was liberally adapted by the Beatles into “Lady Madonna.” Preston was eclectic. He produced James Cotton’s first solo recordings after the Sun records, and later ventured into Indian-jazz fusion.

A Trinidadian calypso, “Last Train to San Fernando” was a Road March song from the Carnival of 1949 or ’50. Originated and first recorded in Trinidad by Mighty Dictator, it was revived in the States around 1952 by Duke of Iron. Ostensibly, it was about trying to get the last train from Port of Spain back to San Fernando, but after hearing the West Indian versions, I came to believe that a woman was offering herself for one last fling before getting married the following day. Bill Millar derides this interpretation, but calypso is rich in allegory and I’m sticking with it.

Preston was married to a West Indian woman, so she might have played the song to him. It came around again when the American calypso craze of 1956 – ’57 brought many older songs back into circulation. Ray Lang and His Jamaican Room Orchestra released “San Fernando” on American Decca and British Brunswick in 1957. Atlantic Records crooner Bobby Short latched onto it around the same time. Preston could have heard Lang, Short, or the even the Duke of Iron. In the studio, he paired Duncan with some British jazz men. They rapidly came up to tempo on the intro, and slowed down the outro, much as Meade Lux Lewis had slowed down the outro to “Honky Tonk Train Blues.” Guitarist Denny Wright wanted to be Django Reinhardt (nothing wrong with that; I’d be Django if I didn’t have to smoke Gitanes and lose two fingers). As the band jumped to a South American rhythm on the break, Wright played one of the most joyous solos in all popular music. Duncan sang nut-clenchingly high like Bill Monroe. “Last Train to San Fernando” was a cross-cultural collision like no other: calypso, skiffle, tango, jazz, rockabilly, and bluegrass. Duncan did what Donegan didn’t—create something truly new out of something old. Problem was, he never did it again.

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?