"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.

Serious Jibber-Jabber

On Friday May 24, Peter joined Conan O'Brien for some serious Jibber Jabber (Conan’s online interview show)  about Elvis, Sam Cooke, Sun Records and more.

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?

DICK CURLESS: PORTRAIT OF A COUNTRY SINGER

At 18 I went out in the world. I thought I knew it all. On that tour I was back in my home state of Maine and making $12, sometimes $15 a night. I thought, man, this is the life. This is it….But if I could go back and find that boy, knowing all the things that would happen to him, I’d tell him, ‘Boy, stay and sing with your family. They’re not going to be there very long. Yeah, you stay home and sing. Be happy in your little town.’

– Dick Curless

     I was going to write a blog about Dick Curless – I was going to write a book (well, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration – but I just might some day!), but then a friend of mine sent me this video. It’s pieces from a documentary that Dick’s son-in-law, Bill Chinnock, the other Asbury Park singer-songwriter (as I understand it, Danny Federici and Vinny Lopez started out in his band – but you’ll have to ask Bob Santelli about that), was going to make. The documentary never happened, Bill died in 2007, and as you’ll see, this isn’t even a trailer for the very soulful, not to mention historical film that I’m sure Bill would have made (you wouldn’t believe how extensive the history of country music in Maine is, going back to before the debut of the Grand Ole Opry and incorporating, of course, Hal Lone Pine and Yodeling Betty Cody, parents of the legendary Lenny Breau, whose brother Denny plays on the Dick Curless album that was going to be the occasion for this blog.)

Anyway. As I’m sure you’ll see, much of the video is taken up with the making of the album, and a disproportionate amount of the footage is devoted to an interview Bill did with me at the same studio, Longview Farm, where it had been recorded in 1994. I was just a witness, really – I was there as a fan and to write notes. Jake Guralnick produced, Bob Kempf engineered, Nina Guralnick took pictures, and a very soulful band, led by Duke Levine, with a rhythm section made up of Billy Conway on drums and Mudcat Ward on bass, contributed mightily to the proceedings. But it was Dick, sixty-two at the time and an extraordinary singer whose national hits had never really done justice to his talent, who set the emotional tone for the session, dominated as it was by his almost ethereal conviction that what we were all doing in that room was important.

I’m not going to even try to reproduce my own and everyone else’s feelings here. They come through, I think, in the video, as does Dick’s quiet certitude, his confidence in the musicians, his belief in the enterprise on which we were all embarked. At the same time it became increasingly clear that Dick, who needed to take frequent rests, wasn’t well. There were a number of points in the course of the December session when Dick would announce half-jokingly, “This may be my swan song,” but whether or not we fully believed him (and I don’t think we did), that wasn’t what gave the session either its intensity or its spiritual dimension. That was all Dick. It was the way in which he conveyed his belief in each and every one of us, his unshakeable conviction that there wasn’t a single person in the room who didn’t have something of importance to contribute.

This was all driven home to us by two songs in particular. The first was Dick’s version of “Silent Night,” given a unique twist by Dick’s heartfelt recitation about the selection of the littlest, loneliest, scrawniest Christmas tree (yet another entity whose significance was tied to neither stature nor appearance) on which he got every one of us not just to sing along but to sing along with feeling. (This has never been issued, for better or worse.) On the second, Ivory Joe Hunter’s “Since I Met You Baby” (translated here into “Since I Met You Jesus”), he called for a spiritual offering in the way of a solo from each of the players. This certainly brought the rhythm section up short, but Dick explained that this was always a highlight of his live show, and he had no doubt that every one of them would come up with something both meaningful and worthwhile. “Just give me what’s in there,” Dick coaxed them. “You never know what’s coming out.” “Oh, that’s good,” he would say encouragingly to each of the players in turn, and while the song was actually being recorded, there was at one point a moment of such utter lostness and tranquility that it almost made you want to cry. Even when it was done and everyone was listening to the playback, Dick still was not through. “Oh gosh,” he declared with utter sincerity, “you guys are something else.”

When I sent the finished album to Sam Phillips – well, I talk about it in the video, but here’s what I’ve written about it in my biography of Sam. Sam had loved the Charlie Rich album that we had done a number of years earlier – he had been generous and lavish in his praise. But this was his reaction to Dick’s album when I saw him at the Jerry Lee Lewis 40^th Anniversary in Show Business $100 a plate celebration (as it turned out, what you got was a commemorative plate labeled “not suitable for dining” and no food, just a cash bar  – and at the end of at least six hours of inspired non-stop entertainment by the honoree himself, some very wrecked people).

“Now did your son, Jake – now tell me the truth now,” Sam said with that teasing repetition that he called upon for the purpose of both orotund declamation and social discourse. “Now, come on, now, you tell me, did your son Jake” – he paused as if to savor the single blunt syllable of the name, then to my utter astonishment lifted me a few inches off the floor in full view of the Jerry Lee Lewis German fan club – “did he really produce that album­­ on Dick Curless?” I tried to swallow my surprise and assent to the proposition. “Well, you know how much I liked that Charlie Rich album?” I nodded mutely. “Well, this is even better!” And while I suppose there could have been any number of ways to take Sam’s statement, from my point of view there couldn’t have been any way to top it.

Dick died just a few months after the session. He was in the hospital for much of that time, and maybe because both Dick and the album itself had come to mean so much to all of us, no one seemed able to come up with a suitable album title. We just couldn’t think of anything that would do justice to its scope, its grandeur, its human vulnerability. A few days before he died, Dick named it himself with a phrase from his beautiful version of Merle Travis’ “I Am a Pilgrim” that could be taken, I suppose, as both its message and his sense of his own life’s journey. He wanted it to be called Traveling Through.

I really am going to write more about Dick Curless some day – it’s a story with some of the same broad application and fragile delicacy (think Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” – that was Dick’s story) as the album. But in the meantime pick up on this video, and listen to the music. Dick Curless: Traveling Through.

L to R: Peter Guralnick, Dick Curless, Jake Guralnick, Nina Guralnick

HOW 'TRAVELING THROUGH’ CAME TO BE

by Jake Guralnick

In 1994, after making the Sleepy LaBeef album “Strange Things Happening,” Maine native Michael ‘Mudcat’ Ward, called me a few times and suggested we get the same team together to record Dick Curless. It is not uncommon that the end of the recording process has an emotional component, not unlike the last day of summer camp— where everyone’s promises to keep in touch are unlikely to be kept.  But a few months later, at my job at Rounder Records, when I heard the receptionist announce over the intercom that Dick Curless was on line 5 for owner Ken Irwin, I took it as enough of a sign that I should pick up the call.

 Dick was pretending to be after a Merle Travis video that we distributed, and I was pretending to be taking a message for Ken—but our mutual obfuscation was quickly revealed. Dick wanted to make a record, and I asked him to send a demo of the type of stuff he wanted to do. A few days later I received a DAT tape of 5 songs of Dick playing and singing by himself.  All I really knew of him was that he was known for his incredible Truck Driving record – “Tombstone Every Mile” – and that he wore an eyepatch. Both were unimpeachably cool credentials—but did not prepare for me the emotional depth of his singing, and his funky, self-taught fingerpicking guitar. A little research revealed that Josh White was his primary musical influence, and that he (mostly) had not played on his own records since early in his career when he recorded for the Event label.

I went to the three Rounder owners, and asked them if I could record Dick Curless. To their eternal credit, there are certain records that Rounder made that never had a chance of turning a profit but that seemed like they were important to do for historical posterity.  This was one, and they agreed to a small budget. I wrote Dick a letter outlining how I wanted to produce his record—probably most impressing him that I wanted him to play & sing live on all the tracks.  We went back and forth—I wanted to use the rhythm section of Mudcat and the very soulful Billy Conway (best known as the drummer for Morphine) from the Sleepy sessions. I also had recently met Duke Levine—who seemed like the absolute perfect guitarist for this session. Dick agreed to all these players and had only one thing he insisted on: that he bring Denny Breau to play guitar. Denny was the younger brother of Lenny Breau—and they were both the sons of Hal Lone Pine & Betty Cody— Wheeling (West Virginia) Jamboree regulars, RCA recording artists, and an Opry touring act. And Lenny had played in Dick’s band as a teenager. Although, I couldn’t really see where Denny fit in—we had Duke to play lead, and Dick’s incredible acoustic—I agreed, figuring Dick wanted Denny there to make himself more comfortable. Turns out I was wrong—Dick brought Denny because he thought Denny needed it (he was in some sort of rough patch in his personal life), and Denny was more than essential to the sessions.

The engineer for the Sleepy record, Bob Kempf, struck an incredible deal with Long View Farm—a very famous residential studio in North Brookfield, MA where the Rolling Stones had once rehearsed. Amazingly, Dick had played his first professional gig at a Grange Hall in the very same North Brookfield.  And when I brought in Tim Bowles, a friend of Duke’s from Worcester, to play steel for a couple of days, it turned out Dick had been friendly with Tim’s father—a singer on the New England circuit with the familiar name of Buck Owens (not THE Buck Owens, but a New England touring act with a coincidental name). We all lived, ate and worked together for a few days—the band scrambling to learn and rehearse the songs in the few takes before Dick’s performance began to flag. I have a running recording of the sessions, and if I listened I’d no doubt hear Dick, after delivering yet another devastating vocal that had us nearly in tears in the control room, saying, “Was that alright, Jake?”

R&B The Transition Years

From the Sweet Soul Music Discography: R&B-Transition Years

This is a playlist I originally put together in 1986 as a kind of introduction to the Discography section of Sweet Soul Music. But I only imagined it – I never actually listened to it straight through. Here it is slightly revised and available through Spotify (and I’m sure you can recreate this on MOG, RDIO, or ITunes).  I can’t guarantee that every recording is the original – but it sounds pretty good to me. And in a funny way I find myself appreciating it so much more now than I once might have – even though these were always songs that I admired without reserve.

I think maybe I just wasn’t as open to wistfulness and melancholy in those days – in some ways I’ll put it down to the education that Elvis and Sam Cooke have provided me with. But, you know, when you really get down to it, it’s probably just life. Nat King Cole’s “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You” – at one time I might have dismissed it as just a little proper, just a little sentimental. But now I hear Oscar Moore’s guitar solo, Nat’s piano, that voice, and there’s no hold-back in my engagement. I’m with Sam Cooke, I’ll take Nat King Cole as my tutorial model any day. Same with Charles Brown’s “Drifting Blues,” with Oscar Moore’s brother Johnny giving his name to the group and playing the beautiful guitar lead. Or the subtlety and heartache of the Prisonaires “Just Walking in the Rain.” It’s not that I didn’t appreciate them way back then. But I appreciate them so much more now.

Is mellowness all? Certainly not. Dig Guitar Slim’s “The Things That I Used to Do,” one of the rawest, most tore-down commercial blues of all time, which also marks the debut of arranger and pianist Ray Charles’ hard r&b sound. Or songs like Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight” – everyone knows what that led to. Or Louis Jordan’s seminal “Let the Good Times Roll,” which left its mark (like so much of Jordan’s groundbreaking work) on James Brown, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, and Sam Cooke, just for starters. And, of course, where would we be without the Dionysian spirit of Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis, or Bob Dylan and Billy Joe Shaver in their untrammeled poetic years? (None included here – just a few points of reference.)

And then there’s the gospel infusion: the majestic Faye Adams version of “Shake a Hand” (I wish you could have heard Little Richard mashing down on this for six or seven minutes at the Donnelly Theater in his 1965 secular comeback – with Jimi Hendrix on guitar!). Or Roy Hamilton’s operatic version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic,  “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which established a trend for spiritual uplift until Ray Charles blew the model wide open with his literal translation of the Southern Tones’ “It Must Be Jesus” into “I Got a Woman.” Or listen to the inspirational message of “Please Send Me Someone to Love” from Percy Mayfield, the “poet laureate of the blues” – nothing to do with gospel, really, just a universal (and universally influential) message of social uplift and racial justice cloaked in a graceful metaphor.

Every song here tells a story – each one has its own story. There’s no trend, there’s no stamp – or if there is a trend (and lots of people, obviously were catching on) each song, each artist stands on his or her own with a heartfelt message of exuberance, sorrow, plaintiveness or pain – doesn’t matter, there’s something to suit every mood.

You know, listening to this I started thinking about Solomon Burke (again), who considered himself a kind of cross between Gene Autry, gospel giant Brother Joe May (“The Thunderbolt of the Middle West”), and Ivory Joe Hunter (just dig Ivory Joe’s very soulful, and hugely influential, “I Almost Lost My Mind”).

You can hear everything that Solomon was listening to here – well almost. But I’ll tell you a funny story about “Don’t Deceive Me,” presented here in its original form by Atlanta blues singer Chuck Willis. When Solomon was making Soul of the Blues for Black Top Records, I suggested that he cut “Don’t Deceive Me” – I thought it would be a perfect match for Solomon’s improvisational skills, with its simple, gut-wrenching lyrics and melody and its wide-open space for a sermon. (I was thinking of the remarkable way that Howlin’ Wolf transformed the song in live performance.)

Well, Solomon did record it – and he called me up right afterwards. “You’re going to be really proud of me, Pete,” he said. “I did it just like you always want me to. I sang the song. And every time I started to get off of it, Selassie told me [this was his son, Haile Selassie], ‘Stick to the song, Dad. Remember what Peter said.’” And when I heard his version, it was indeed true. Solomon had stuck to the song, as I had not infrequently urged him to do – particularly when he stubbornly resisted learning many of the new songs that he was recording in favor of what he liked to call “spontaneity.” “Don’t Deceive Me,” for me, was an altogether different case. Or at least it should have been. But this was where Solomon chose to apply the lesson. Which is why you won’t hear any sermon on Solomon Burke’s beautifully rendered, emotionally controlled version of “Don’t Deceive Me.” I guess I’ll just have to take the blame.

March 29: 20th Annual Blind Willie McTell Festival, Thomson, GA.

Peter will give a talk on Blind Willie McTell inaugurating  the Smithsonian’s traveling exhibit, “New Harmonies: Celebrating American Roots Music,” which culminates in the 20^th Annual Blind Willie McTell Blues Festival on May 18.

Where: McDuffie Museum, Thompson, GA

When: March 29, 2013

more info

Jerry Lee Lewis: “Lust of the Blood”

Picture Jerry Lee Lewis as Iago in the rock ‘n’ roll version of “Othello.” You’re just going to have to imagine it. Me, too. Because as far as I know, no visual record exists except for a few scattered publicity photographs.

He played the role in Los Angeles in 1968. The show was scheduled to come to New York next (we had already made plans to attend) – but it never did. According to Jerry Lee, it was because he had grown tired of the actor’s life, six weeks of following the same script night after night was enough, even if, like any Method performer, he never did play it the same way twice. (“I never worked so hard in my life. I mean two hours and forty-five minutes running up and down stairs – it was a mess.”) Very likely the fact that his recording career revived at exactly this time, with three Top 10 country hits in a row, had something to do with it, too.

No matter. As this rehearsal recording clearly proves (there’s another number available called “Let a Soldier Drink” – and I’m not sure that there may not be one more), Jerry Lee inhabited the role, just as he has inhabited virtually every song he has ever sung. Listen to the leer in his voice, listen to the clarity of the message, listen to his delight in the lines. Oh man, I wish I had seen the show.    

When I first met him two years later, in the spring of 1970, the role was still clearly in his blood. “You know,” he said to me toward the end of my visit, “a lot of people think if you can make a lot of money, that’s what this life is all about. Well, that can’t be what life is all about, you know? If I can just play my piano and sing – you know, the proudest I ever was in my life was when I got my first record out, hear[ing] it on the radio for the first time.“ He meditated on that for a little while. “Well, life is just a vapor,” he said, winking at me, as if I, too, must surely recognize this Shakespearean allusion. “You breathe it in, and what the heck, it’s gone.“

Remember one thing: if Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan (see the movie, see our earlier Jack Clement blog), then surely he would have to have been at least as much a Jerry Lee Lewis fan. Just ask Jerry Lee, who clearly was impressed with Shakespeare – and the way that the playwright, like every other great artist Jerry Lee has admired, like Jerry Lee himself, really got to the heart of the matter. As for this recording, I think it shows once again why Sam Phillips regarded Jerry Lee Lewis as a genius. Not a natural – a genius. And he was, is, and remains so. 

A Word from Mr. C: Marvin's All-Star Moment

Peter has known FOTB (Friend of the Blog) Mr. C since he was broadcasting on WTUR in Medford. Now he can be heard Saturdays from 12-2 on LuxuriaMusic.com

Having a Las Vegas over/under connected to the length of your song may not be the most comforting entry into performance, much less singing the National Anthem on solo piano at the Super Bowl.  That’s what Alicia Keys was faced with this year, and alone she bravely soldiered on trying to summon some dignity from the whole affair.

Thirty years earlier, Marvin Gaye was introduced at the NBA All Star Game to much less fanfare.  With a click track in the background giving a pulse loosely based on his mega-hit, “Sexual Healing,” Gaye strode evenly to the mike.  Head skewed slightly upward, dressed impeccably in a grey double-breasted suit, with eyes sheathed in opaque, impenetrable sunglasses, Gaye began to sing.  Introspective, gallant and seemingly spontaneous, he began an interpretation as graceful as the athletes lined up in attendance, who smiled and swayed as he sang.  Bombs didn’t burst in the background and U.S. soldiers weren’t standing by. Alone at center stage, Marvin Gaye transformed the potential bombast of the song into a gently parsed hymn - our National Anthem sung as an extremely personal, resolute reflection, part sublime sadness and part quiet triumph.

Great music on TV seems divided into two camps: The Beatles and Rolling Stones on Ed Sullivan, or several Elvis Presley appearances (though a very good argument can be made about the music in his case), which were hugely anticipated Events, where song was almost secondary to just the appearance. Then there’s the unexpected: Howling Wolf on Shindig [1] or this: Marvin Gaye at the 1983 NBA All Star game.  Here, by mid-song the crowd (and many of us viewing), experienced a collective, unmanufactured thrill, a tingle of disbelief…and this became the real event, the transformative, riveting power of great art.  There is something happening here–a pure expression of complex emotion consolidated, into two and a half minutes of song.

–Mr. C

For the full story of how this anthem came to be, check out out Pete Croatto’s piece on Grantland.com

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[1]  Ed note: This blog has been up for only a few months, and we have already linked to this INCREDIBLE video three times. If you haven’t ever seen this… well… just watch it already!

Sam Phillips Talking (Lost Highway Video Companion: Part 5)

This is the fifth in our five-part series. I thought it would be really fun – and it was. As promised, we’re going to combine them all in one giant Lost Highway video playlist.
Next: Feel Like Going Home!

Epilogue

SAM PHILLIPS TALKING

 I’ve got the same problem here as in the last chapter – only more so. So I’m just going to throw together a serendipitously arbitrary (and, suited to its source, unquestionably oddball) selection to show off a little bit of the range of talent that Sam Phillips discovered and produced, from Howlin’ Wolf to – well, just follow the bouncing ball. But remember: this is the merest sampling. We’ll do a really comprehensive selection when the Sam biography comes out. (And just to anticipate another question, I’m working on the final draft now – hoping to finish by the end of the year.)

Howlin’ Wolf: “Evil”

You knew I couldn’t resist.         

Sam Phillips’ favorite artist, along with Charlie Rich. They were the two, he always said, who had the greatest reservoir of talent (though he would give nobody the edge over Elvis in the way of charisma or Jerry Lee in terms of sheer performing genius). But each of them, he said, possessed a depth – of knowledge and emotion – that couldn’t be measured. The Wolf, Sam said, volunteered scarcely anything when they first met – he would have been very easy to underestimate. And yet, Sam felt, he possessed “a certain element of confidence, he knew he had something to say,”and as they talked, Sam could sense that as much as he might be reading the Wolf, Wolf was reading him, too.“He was highly, highly intelligent,” Sam said, “in many ways the sweetest man you’ll ever know, and the strangest man in many ways, too.”

Harmonica Frank: Untitled (by me), “Ditchin’ Man Blues,” “Shake a Little Shimmy”

Sam recorded Harmonica Frank at almost exactly the same time as Howlin’ Wolf, and Frank’s first single came out on Chess, too – though unlike Wolf, Frank would eventually have his own Sun release, which came out on the same day as Elvis’ first record in July 1954. According to some revisionist thinking, history might have been different had it not been for that confluence of events, but Sam Phillips was under no illusions about Frank’s commercial potential. To him Harmonica Frank was not a great artist but a great original. “Frank Floyd was a beautiful hobo. He was short, fat, very abstract – and you looked at him and you really didn’t know what he was thinking, what he was going to say or sing next. He had the greatest mind of his own – I think hobos by nature have to have that – and that fascinated me from the beginning. And then he had some of these old rhymes and tales and stuff that he had embellished, and some of them were so old, God, I guess they were old when my father was a kid.”

If you weren’t doing something different, according to Sam you weren’t doing anything. And Frank was definitely doing something different. Check out the way he holds the harmonica in his mouth, like a chewed-up old cigar, as he sings. Listen to the eccentric tone and phrasing and the cheerful non-sense of the songs – kind of like a demented Woody Guthrie.

Dr Ross: “Dr. Ross Boogie”

This is a clever video collage (you should recognize the MC from the Big Joe Turner clip) of a Dr. (Isiah) Ross recording derived from “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” once again from 1951 and once again released on Chess. It should be noted that though Dr. Ross was in fact a one-man band, the guitarist on this selection was his friend Wiley Galatin. And it should be further noted that this song pretty much sums up Sam Phillips’ rhythm impulse and the inexorable forces that were leading him from his earliest recordings of Wolf, Ike Turner, and B.B. King to find the path to rock ‘n’ roll. As Dr. Ross proclaimed in a 1954 Sun single, released in the midst of all the excitement about Elvis: “Gonna boogie for the doctor/Gonna boogie for the nurse/Gonna keep on boogiein’/Till they throw me in the hearse.” Or as Jim Dickinson declared in a mantra that has never ceased to have relevance: “World Boogie Is Coming.”

Carl Perkins: “Matchbox”

This is the song that Carl was cutting with an unknown Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, when Elvis walked in and interrupted his December 1956 session – and then joined in for what would become known as the Million Dollar Quartet (if you include Johnny Cash, who was only there for the picture-taking). Here we have Carl a year or two after his departure from Sun, with a performance nowhere near as cleanly chiseled as the Sun sides, and a persona far removed from his latter-day incarnation (see below). But there’s a spark to this that brings to mind some of the desperate drive that Carl depicts in his terrific biography/autobiography, Go, Cat, Go! (written by and with David McGee), and the song itself (a wonderful example of the shared black and white tradition that goes back at least as far as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1927 recording) was by his own assessment, and Sam’s too, about as good as rock ‘n’ roll music could get. You should definitely go back to the original with Jerry Lee firing boogie woogie fusillades at Carl and Carl shooting back with triple-string runs of his own, but this has a crazy concatenating logic of its own. And, of course, you wouldn’t want to miss the hop-skip-and-jump move (delighted or demented?) that signals Carl’s enthusiasm (and that might suggest a little bit of the reason that Carl Perkins could have never have been Elvis – though Elvis could never have been Carl Perkins either), or the great Merle Travis’ (“Sixteen Tons,” “Dark as a Dungeon” – he’s on the far right, playing a very controlled rhythm) appreciation for some of the boogie-woogie fever that his own music has spawned.

Jerry Lee Lewis: “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On”

I know, I know, this is the most obvious choice, right? But it isn’t, exactly – this is Jerry Lee’s second appearance on Steve Allen after his first, two weeks earlier, broke the record wide open. (If you don’t believe me, note the proliferation of chairs, benches, and piano stools flying back and forth across the stage. In his first appearance, only the piano bench came sailing back, after Jerry Lee, presumably to his host’s surprise, kicked it away as he launched into his ecstatic conclusion.) And, you know, it’s kind of like with the earlier Big Joe Turner selection, it’s not just because it’s an iconic moment, it’s because it’s “the best.” By which I don’t mean that it’s The Best – just that you need to see it for its sheer abandon (to use a Sam word), for its irrepressible exuberance and for its embodiment of the Life Force that Sam was seeking in all of his recordings (and probably found the most perfect expression of in Jerry Lee’s music). And once you’ve watched it four or five times, then you need to spend the next two weeks watching nothing but Jerry Lee Lewis videos – any era – including the first.

Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Eric Clapton: “Matchbox”

I think Sam must have really gotten a kick out of this – I’m sure he did. Here we have another Million Dollar Trio, with Johnny Cash not only singing but taking the lead this time. There are lots of great clips of the original Johnny Cash trio from early in his career (I’m sure we’ll get to those eventually, at least with the video companion to the Sam Phillips biography), but what I think is so cool here – and one of the things that Sam admired most about an artist he found almost as original as Howlin’ Wolf in his sound, with the added originality of his songwriting, too – is the direction, the command, and the graciousness that John displays, as he did on every one of his television shows. Also the freedom. Starting with his duetting with Bob Dylan, his special guest on the very first Johnny Cash Show. It’s hard to imagine something like this happening today (though I don’t know, maybe it does – and don’t forget Tom Jones’ brave musical adventures with all of his guests, from Jackie Wilson to Jerry Lee). Carl is at his gentlemanly best, Eric Clapton (on the show with Derek and the Dominos) is properly deferential but musically unabashed. And Johnny Cash’s hums and shouts of encouragement keep up everybody’s spirits through yet another spontaneous iteration (you’ve got to check out Jerry Lee’s early version on Sun as well) of Carl’s very spirited, very Sister Rosetta Tharpe-influenced classic blues.

 Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

The Rolling Stones, 1965

I first saw the Rolling Stones in person in Worcester, Massachusetts, a mid-sized city forty-five miles outside of Boston, on April 30, 1965. It was at the start of their third U.S. tour, and we were excited most of all by their unabashed love of the blues. All the marketing publicity in the world couldn’t hold a candle to their embrace of a music that my friends and I felt no one else could love the way we did.

As it turned out, though, reputation inadvertently took precedence, at least for a moment, when just as the show was getting under way, you could sense the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the aisle, and all of a sudden a teenaged girl in the row in front of ours was being yanked by the hair out of her seat by an angry man who could only be her father. It was, certainly, an unforgettable image, and the Stones presented their music with incandescent belief, but for me the most indelible moment of this American visit would come three weeks later when Brian Jones and Mick Jagger introduced the Howlin’ Wolf to a national television audience on Shindig!, and mainstream America for the first time saw the real face of the blues. That was epic.