Guest Blogger: Mr C on Designer Records

By Mr. C.

The artists on the recently released set, The Soul of Designer Records, are true voices in the shadows.  They’re the “little people,” in the phrase that Boston record store entrepreneur Skippy White (“Mass. Records: Home of the Blues”) once used to describe the underheralded underclass of ‘60s soul singers.  The “little people” who recorded for the Memphis, Tennessee, Designer label, were church singers, locals from the Memphis area or pilgrims from Cincinnati, Detroit or South Carolina, who came to one-time Jerry Lee Lewis guitarist Roland Janes’ Sonic Studio to record a 45 rpm record, something to sell on the weekend programs that they played in churches, auditoriums, wherever they might find a venue for their music.

“New talent needed all the time!” read the opening of a Designer Records ad, and new talent was the thirst for Designer owner Jesse Corbett Graham, who opened shop in 1964, fishing for hits in the rockabilly and country pond. He christened himself J.C. Wooten first, and spontaneously nicknamed himself “Style”….Style Wooten, a jack of all trades who soon, with the help of Roland Janes, found his calling in black gospel music.

Style’s concept was cash and carry.  For $469 (or less depending on circumstances), a custom record was pressed, usually 25 or 50 copies, with Janes providing the studio and as often as not most of the musicians.  As the ad stated, “We furnish our recording staff…"  Once word got out, Sonic Studio became a hotbed of Designer gospel sessions.  As Janes is quoted in the liner notes, "See, these gospel guys, man, were doing it for the love of what they were doing. They used to get in their cars – maybe two or three carloads of them, say, from Detroit – and they’d come down south and work down here all Friday night and Saturday and Sunday, they might miss a day’s work, probably two days. They were doing it ‘cause they loved it, man.” As for Style: "He felt that he was performing a service, and he was…He didn’t cheat nobody, he treated everybody right.”

The Soul of Designer Records is four CDs of custom 45s, 101 songs, packaged in a record-album gatefold.  Some of the artists, like the Soul Superiors of Detroit or the Shaw Singers, used Designer as a springboard for other records and further career advancement.  Most of these artists disappeared back home to the local church, with a box or two of records as a physical document of faith, a moment of glory for the parish to hear.

My favorite moments here come out of unexpected borrowings from radio hits of the day: James Brown, Dyke and the Blazers, Ollie and the Nightingales are each annexed, as are Tyrone Davis (the Foster Brothers crib the unmistakable guitar line from “Can I Change My Mind”) and Little Junior Parker (the Dynamic Hughes Gospel Singers neatly graft the opening guitar notes of “Mystery Train” as the hook for “Beautiful City”). There’s an emotional, uptempo cover of the Staple Singers’ “Why Am I Treated So Bad” by the Spiritual Harmonizers of Senatobia, Mississippi, and even a crude but highly compelling Jimi Hendrix guitar nod by Elgie Brown.  The real standout for me, though, is a pair of songs by Joe Townsend, recorded with solo guitar, and, it seems, live in church. Townsend, who must be from Mississippi, with a few changes in words, could very well be taken for an early label mate of Muddy Waters at Aristocrat Records. The guitar is thick, the voice empowered, and the line between gospel and blues blurred.

The Soul of Designer Records is the music of Skippy White’s “little people.”  But the power of voice, soul  and inspiration, recorded by Roland Janes and given a home by Style Wooten on Designer, is as big as it gets: a heart full of love and a forever shout through the universe.

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!

Blog: Blind Willie McTell

But nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell  –Bob Dylan

Dapper, articulate, sophisticated in his presentation of material ranging from blues to ragtime to spirituals to a breezy form of recitatif that could pass for the rap of its day, Blind Willie McTell would be the stuff of legend even if his own improbable tale of artistic and commercial survival did not warrant a romantic myth of its own.

I first encountered his music among the very earliest of my blues discoveries around 1959, at age fifteen, thanks entirely to the great good taste of writer/producer/ethnomusicologist Sam Charters, who included McTell’s 1928 masterpiece, “Statesboro Blues,” on the Folkways/RBF anthology, The Country Blues, which accompanied the book he had just written of the same name.

Propelled by McTell’s ringing, delicately accented twelve-string guitar, “Statesboro Blues” is an epic tale of dislocation and commonality (“Brother got ‘em, friends got ‘em/I got ‘em/ Woke up this morning, we had them Statesboro blues/I looked over in the corner/Grandma and grandpa had ‘em, too”) familiar to most contemporary listeners in the Allman Brothers’ inexorably anthemic version. Here, though, it is presented with such charm, such casual beauty, such utter lack of predictability that it surprises every time. There’s a plaintiveness, too, not normally associated with the blues, not just in the high, slightly nasal voice that delivers the lyrics with uncommon precision but in the lilting, melodic approach to a number that possesses inarguable authenticity as “deep blues”

“Statesboro Blues” was recorded at McTell’s second recording session for the Victor Recording Company, in October of 1928. He returned to the studio on October 30 the following year for a new label, with a brisk new ragtime focus, and with a new name as well, Blind Sammie, intended among other things to hide his recording activities from his previous label. This session came one week to the day after the first of the seismic shifts that marked the beginning of the Great Depression, and for many of the downhome blues singers who had benefited from the broad-based prosperity that fueled the blues craze of the 1920s, it marked the end of any commercial recording career. Blind Willie McTell, however, continued to record for the next quarter of a century, cutting records as Georgia Bill, Barrelhouse Sammy (The Country Boy), and Hot Shot Willie, among others. In 1940 he recorded a tantalizing session for the Library of Congress, that came about only because folklorist John Lomax’s wife spotted “a Negro man with a guitar” at a Pig ‘n’ Whistle stand (another of Blind Willie’s latter-day sobriquets was Pig ‘n’ Whistle Red) and Blind Willie agreed to record some numbers, since business at the drive-in stand was slow that night. The result was a mélange of folk songs, rags, spirituals, pop, and pre-blues material, interspersed with monologues revealing not just a photographic memory but an analytic approach to the “history of the blues, life as a maker of records,” his own extensive education in blind schools in Georgia and Michigan, and exactly where and for whom (and under what names) he had previously recorded.

By the time this session was finally released on LP,it had been firmly established that Blind Willie McTell was dead. In fact he had died at almost the same time that Sam Charters’ book and record, The Country Blues, were released. For my friend and me, who had discovered the blues initially through Charters’ work, mundane reality was not so easy to accept, particularly in the face of Blind Willie’s persistent refusal to disappear. Indeed his voice had surfaced once again just as his death became widely known, with a 1961 album, understandably entitled Last Session, recorded five years earlier for an Atlanta record collector. The record was not without its disappointments, revealing some degree of deterioration due to age and drink, but it included characteristic moments of brashness and beauty delivered with all of McTell’s familiar insouciance and wit. Since then, nothing – at least nothing bearing any resemblance to resurrection – so that might very well be the end of the story. But then again, who knows? Blind Willie McTell may yet reemerge, exhibiting that same winning combination of invention and self-delight, that same ability to put across the deepest of blues, the wittiest of social satires, with an enthusiasm that can transport the listener, like the best of Charles Dickens, like all great art, to a world of the artist’s own creation.