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.