Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  Quinton Claunch has made a similar investment. Carr quit his job on an assembly line making tables when he started performing in clubs thirty years ago; music is all he knows, and he’s made his best music with Claunch.

  And when I’m up close to Carr, his clear love for Claunch and all they’ve done together apparent, I think that what looks from a distance like graft is also the fundamental nature of the record business: Claunch has had success exploiting talent, and Carr has had success from Claunch’s exploitation. They’ve both signed up for another round.

  James Carr today doesn’t see himself as the man who made the Japanese tour, or the man who sang the early hits. He looks in the mirror often, as if seeking to confirm his presence. Coming back from his years of emptiness—which, despite his good days now, are certainly not over—has made him a different person. “Lost in a dream,” he says about the past twenty years. “Way out on a voyage.”

  In the car after lunch, I show Carr a photograph of himself when he was about twenty-five. He looks at it and is silent. “All I am,” he finally says, “is a voice.”

  Then he tells me a story, in the same strong tone he’s held all day.

  “After I was born I went to sleep and I woke up other people,” says James Carr.

  “What do you mean you woke up other people?”

  “Some of them was parading, some of them was performing, some of them was doing actions in movies, stuff like that. So I woke up with them and carried on their duty, their performing. For that short period of time, when I was first born.

  “They put me to sleep, and I woke up then, woke up in midair, in rain, woke up the rain, the rain was hurting, hurting me, yeah it was hurting me, it was hurting, I could feel it. Snow. Stuff like that.”

  He continues. “I was hurting too. I could feel the rain hurting, but it wasn’t really me. I was there, in sight and soul and everything, but my body wasn’t there. My body was at home.”

  Home is where we are, and Carr hits me up for some cash. Then, money in hand, he asks for a ride to the corner store, where he buys a quart of beer. As he exits the store, he pauses and asks me, “Do you want a beer?” I don’t, and I drive him back, to home, where body and soul can rest.

  That ending—there’s more to it. After that meal, we were in my car, still in the diner’s parking lot. I pulled out the album World’s Greatest Soul Singer, which has a portrait photo of him on the cover, and, not thinking too much of it, I asked where the photo was taken. The fall through the looking glass came then. I couldn’t print it while James was alive—he had too much to overcome (I had learned something from my Charlie Feathers experience). James died in 2001, and I hope that sharing this now shows a little of what was going on behind the sunglasses that were clouded in smoke. Myself, I keep going back to it, trying to catch ahold of something.

  ROBERT GORDON: Where was that photo taken?

  JAMES CARR: At a recording studio on Chelsea and Hollywood in Memphis. That’s where I recorded “You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up,” some other songs. I don’t feel like the same person that I was when I had this picture made.

  RG: Do you feel like you’re the same person you were when you went to Japan?

  JC: Yeah, I’m the same person.

  RG: But not the same as this one?

  JC: No. [Pause] Do you believe another person can switch bodies with you?

  RG: I’ve thought about it.

  JC: Do you believe it? Well I do. I believe it.

  RG: Did it happen to you?

  JC: Yeah, at the airport.

  RG: What happened?

  JC: Well, there was a guy there that looked just like me, and I was in New York at the photo company, and they said, “We gonna steal you.” I didn’t say nothing, and somebody I walked by, I walked by, and it looked like something switched us. And uh, and I said, “Gyat damn,” did like that, “Shit.” Then myself started running, said, “You’ll never get this back.” [Laughs]

  RG: Wait a minute. This was in the airport?

  JC: No, I was leaving from the airport. I was on my way to Jamaica. I met them, and the guy that look like I do now. And this guy got money, had his picture on it. Looked sorta like I did. They told me they were gonna steal me, tried to get me not to go, but I didn’t pay no attention.

  RG: Okay hold on, man.

  JC: Because I didn’t know nothing about that kind of stuff.

  RG: So I’m confused now.

  JC: I heard him telling me they’ll be waiting on me at the airport. Going to Jamaica. Mm hm.

  RG: And there was a photo studio.

  JC: No, this was in New York.

  RG: The guy who looked like you?

  JC: Yeah.

  RG: He said he was going to steal you away?

  JC: Yeah, he said, “We gonna steal you.”

  RG: He told you that in the airport?

  JC: No. Yeah, he told me that at the airport too, but they hadn’t done it then, you know.

  RG: Where did they do it?

  JC: When I got back to Memphis and passed by this barbershop. No, it was in Miami. There was three of them, it was two of ’em. And they called me down, said, “Come’ere.” I was upstairs at the hotel. I came down, they had on suits like mine. One of them hollered, “Switch ’em.” And they switched us. I said, “Gyat damn.” That hurt my feelings, because he didn’t feel too good. Then again, it happened when I was on my way to somewhere, and I come walking down Florida Street, passed by the barbershop and they switched us. And I was really sick then, whoever it was was sick. I said, “Gyat damn.” Then I heard them say, “Put this in ’im, he won’t be sick.” So they put it in me and I wasn’t sick. But I just couldn’t make it, and I would walk down the street and I turned around and went the other way. I think it was a woman, though.

  RG: That they switched you with?

  JC: Yeah.

  RG: So when they switched you, did you ever switch back?

  JC: Not since I’ve been looking this way, I never switched back. But they said they’d be waiting on me.

  RG: Wow, man, that’s a pretty wild story.

  JC: It’s hard to believe, but it happened.

  RG: So when they switched you, they left your voice with you?

  JCL Yeah. Seems like that’s all I am, a voice.

  RG: I want to go somewhere and let you tell me that story again. In order. Is that all right?

  [He nodded, and we drove to the apartment that James shares with his sister. A sheer curtain covered the large window, but it was gloomy inside. We sat in the living room.]

  RG: So when did this happen, about how long ago?

  JC: It’s been about, um, it’s been a pretty good while. That’s the reason I stopped singing for a while, ’til I got myself back together.

  RG: So when they switched, what did they switch?

  JC: Body.

  RG: Why do you think they wanted you?

  JC: Their body was running down, I guess. Something wrong with ’em, I guess. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I wish I knew.

  RG: Who do you think it was?

  JC: I can’t say.

  RG: Do you have an idea?

  JC: No.

  RG: Do you think something similar happened to Roosevelt [Jamison]?

  JC: No.

  RG: But you think the Roosevelt you’re dealing with now is not the same one you used to deal with?

  JC: No, they just know one another. I don’t know if they brothers or what, his son or what. I don’t know. But anyhow, they knew one another before I met them.

  RG: Is Quinton still Quinton?

  JC: Well, there’s two of them.

  RG: Two Quintons?

  JC: Uh hm. You can tell when you get around the real one because more money is involved and he seem more important in every way. But, around this one, it seem like he’s just trying to find something to do, something to get into.

  RG: The real one’s got a real feel for what you do and can get songs done and stuff for bigger money, a
nd this one kind of fishes around?

  JC: I really don’t know what he do. We talk a lot. We go out and have a sandwich or something, mess off the time. Don’t mess with women. Every once in a while we might go out to the hotel or something, meet a woman, but it seem like the other one be with me then. [Long pause] Want to look at a little TV?

  RG: I got to get going. So that switch, man, I’m going to be thinking about that.

  JC: I don’t let it worry me too much. Might not get myself together, might die this way. It’s hard to tell.

  RG: What does your sister think about it?

  JC: She don’t know. I ain’t never discussed it with nobody. You’re the only one I’ve discussed it with. I don’t know why I feel like talking about it.

  RG: What was the cause of the switch?

  JC: Lost in a dream.

  RG: That’s the way the past years felt?

  JC: Yeah. Lost way out on a voyage. All I do is look in the mirror these days.

  I felt as helpless hearing this story then as I do reading the transcript now. He needed more help than I could give him, more than Quinton Claunch or Elliott Clark could give. He needed health care, dependable doctors, and reliable medications.

  However, and though it’s a stretch, more than two decades after the fact, I see a logic to James’s madness I’d never considered: James Carr contributed powerful art and important songs, and when his talent faltered, America dumped him. Unable to keep up, he was “switched,” spat by the side of the road. His recordings live on, forever youthful, while James ages. Many soul stars make their best records in their later years, but America didn’t give James that chance. He died of lung cancer before he turned sixty.

  OTHA TURNER’S FIFE AND DRUM PICNIC

  Otha Turner’s fife and drum picnic is what you’d want to see if you could go back in time. When I feared that to find work I’d have to leave Memphis, the experience I knew I’d miss most was the summer fife and drum picnic. There were two, both in Gravel Springs, Mississippi—a town small enough not to be on most maps. One picnic was in July behind L. P. Buford’s crossroads store—I’ve lost my flyer pulled from a pole on a desolate gravel road that announced, “There will be drumming.” The other picnic was around Labor Day in the nearby side yard of fife player Otha Turner’s farm. These picnics seemed ineffable even when standing in the middle of one, like trying to touch an echo.

  Otha’s picnic was decades running. His farm, with its leaning tarpaper shack, the small barn behind, a large garden for personal crops, a white horse with its tail swishing—it was like a movie set of a small independent farm. Neighboring trailers and homes were far apart, and at night in Otha’s holler, dark quiet encircled everything. When Otha played the fife—he called it a “fice”—it was just a change in the air, his breath through a piece of bamboo pushing into the dust and night that hung so close. It was like a bird’s beautiful chirp, an ascension, a dawning, and when the drums fell in, sticks beating on animal skins, the simple music assumed massive power, making listeners fall in the line that falls behind the piper, to dance with Gabe, the archangel.

  Otha Turner and the barn behind his house. (Courtesy of Yancey Allison)

  These notes accompanied the first album by Otha Turner and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band. Many people assume all of Mississippi music sounds like the blues made famous in the Delta, but the north Mississippi hill country has a distinct tradition. Music is the aural expression of place, a geyser emitting sound instead of water. Time was, the way a person sang a song—“61 Highway,” “Joe Turner,” or any of what we call “folk” songs—was like a spoken accent; it told where in the area they lived. The vast, alluvial Delta sounds very different from the nearby hill country, where the land is stony and arable only in patches instead of huge swaths. Driving through the Delta, the long tilled rows and the limitless horizon have a way of suggesting Robert Johnson’s forlorn blues and Son House’s piston-fired guitar strokes. In Tate and Panola counties, Mississippi, it’s dust and trees, and the fife and drum sound seems sprung from them. (In Junior Kimbrough’s Marshall County, they drone.) And this is not your Revolutionary or Civil War martial music, even if the instrumentation is similar; the black rural fife and drum sound evokes an African connection like no other American music.

  As Jim Dickinson’s sons, Luther and Cody Dickinson—the North Mississippi Allstars—grew up, they helped organize the picnics. Soon there were three stages—a flatbed for the electric bands, a porch stage for the acoustics, and the parched middle for the fife and drum. Otha wore a wireless lavalier microphone so the fife sound was amplified, piercingly pure in that night air. Guests paid a cover charge, which assured Otha’s family was getting some real return on all their effort.

  My passion dimmed after two gun incidents, both at the L. P. Buford’s location, not Otha’s. The first was at nighttime. Suddenly two men were in a tussle, their forearms locked and forming a tall triangle, a pearl-handled pistol atop like a Christmas tree star. The man on the right was trying to bring his forearm down 90 degrees so the pointed barrel could kill. The man on the left worked hard to keep that arm up, and the opposing exertions swung them circular, like clumsy dancers. Locals separated the men. Time moved thickly through the scuffle. I don’t recall a shot fired, but the party was over.

  Guns in Mississippi. Guns in America. (Courtesy of Yancey Allison)

  The second incident was a summer or two later, in the early 1990s, during broad daylight. Crack was at epidemic levels across America, and part of why I’d left the Northeast was the random violence the drug created in the big cities. Turns out, backwoods Mississippi was not immune. In a very big crowd in the middle of the afternoon in a wide-open field, one local walked up and put a large bullet from a loud gun into the heart of another. My friends were feet away, felt the heat of the flash, said the young man thudded to the ground, instantly lifeless. I was in the rear field, where the music was to resume, and my recollection is not of hearing the gunshot but the thunder of the dispersing crowd’s feet. The party emptied like the kid’s life left his body. It was there, then it was gone.

  Otha’s picnics were nearby Buford’s, and while there’d never been a fight at Otha’s, I’d seen guns there too. Once, shooting night video, I focused on a glinting belt and didn’t realize until the later playback that it was a gun tucked in the small of someone’s back. But at Otha’s, unlike Buford’s, I never saw even a fistfight. I liked to believe this was due to Otha’s standing in the community; it’s what I told myself when I brought my three-year-old.

  My passion also waned when, several years running, multiple documentary film crews descended on Otha’s. The picnic had grown by then, which meant Otha would make more money and probably sell more CDs. (For R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, popularity moved them from the area fields to the world’s stages, rewarding them with increased earnings in their later years.) The larger crowds were fine, the growth had been organic—but the film crews were different. They broke the mood. Their signs advised Otha’s longtime neighbors that they were now on a film set, and that felt like a violation of personal space—who the fuck were they, who’d never been here before, to dictate to the locals? The crews hit trouble when, on the dusty land, in the deep darkness, electricity was not readily available. There was no convenient place for their snack table. Then, the fife would pip from across the field somewhere; the fife performances occurred irregularly, and weren’t scheduled or announced. So the film crews stumbled and shoved and shouted to save their shoots, killing the feel they were trying to capture. Their refusal to listen was loud, their extension cords spread like kudzu vines.

  But am I writing about myself? I’ve brought video cameras to places not usually documented. If I’ve done my work well, with pen or camera, I’ve invited the kind of growth I’m reacting against; am I disdaining my presence at many of the places in this book? Maybe. But I do think it’s possible to become enveloped in the audience, to minimize the intrusion; even a camera—whic
h tends to objectify—can be used with tact. And I hope that has been my way, though I can’t know for certain.

  At Otha’s, when he hit the fife, people would encircle him and the drummers, dancing and snaking with them. Many people took photographs. After the documentary crews, the locals with cameras seemed different, a sea of arms raised over the performers, lenses angled down and peering from all around. The whole tenor was off. The cloak of night was lifted and I felt exposed, angry that their presence had wrecked what had been a beautiful gathering. I wonder how Otha felt.

  At one of those overexposed affairs—within five years the swarm departed and a local feel returned—I tried to buy some hooch from Otha. He kept it in his barn and over the course of the night I’d see him making forays there, returning to huddle close with one of his neighbors. Otha was known for his smooth white whiskey, and in the past I’d easily bought a jar. But this night, when the picnic was filled with so many strangers, he was trusting no one, the fear of being busted as old as the paths into the hills. I was glad when the picnics got smaller. Otha probably made less money, but I believe he enjoyed them more.

  Let Us Eat Goat

  Liner notes to Everybody Hollerin’ Goat, 1998

  A stretch of interstate. You are between two cities. It is night, and quiet, and each rural exit proposes the idea of what’s beyond, or suggests an emptiness far from your own thrumming world.

  On a hot night in late August, less than an hour on the highway south of Memphis, you take an undistinguished exit onto roads so remote their names are not posted and drive less than fifteen minutes from the truckers and the travelers, passing maybe a dozen domiciles on a gravel road before you reach a sunken area off to the right and find yourself in Otha Turner’s backyard.