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?