Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  ERNEST WILLIS: Mississippi Reverie

  The Center for Southern Folklore is in downtown Memphis on Main Street and presents live music (www.southernfolklore.com). Their gift shop is stocked with treasures. I made my first film with the Center, All Day and All Night—B. B. King, Rufus Thomas, and other musicians rising from Memphis’s Beale Street to national prominence. It’s available in HD at www.alldayandallnight.com. When managing the center’s audio library, I heard my first prison recordings, Wake Up Dead Man. Bruce Jackson recorded convicts in Texas prison—some work gangs outside, some individuals in forlorn, echoing rooms. Powerful, and a great intro to the genre.

  I’ve not found a lot of information on Professor W. T. McDaniel, the band teacher whose south side students became soul music artists and north side students jazz players, but there’s this: memphismusichalloffame.com/inductee/profwtmcdaniel/.

  MOSE VINSON: No Pain Pill

  Piano Man, the CD that my liner notes accompany, can be ordered from the Center for Southern Folklore: www.southernfolklore.com/product-page/mose-vinson-piano-man. Mose has a few tracks on the Bear Family label’s The Sun Blues Box, and a 1990 compilation, Memphis Piano Blues Today (Wolf Records), that also features Booker T. Laury, another barrelhouse great (Booker is featured in All Day and All Night). Cinematographer David Julian Leonard has posted footage from the Levitt Shell (formerly the Overton Park Shell); see Mose at www.youtube.com/watch?v=-toYnwdc6e0. Search “Levitt Shell archive” and “Memphis” for footage of Calvin Newborn, Phineas Newborn, Alex Chilton, Mud Boy, and many others.

  THE FIELDSTONES: Got to Move on Down the Line

  There’s lots of great High Water tracks. Roam around www.discogs.com/label/204644-High-Water-Recording-Company and spend some money. Buy any singles that you find. Some favorite groups:

  Fieldstones

  Blues Busters

  Jessie Mae Hemphill

  The Hollywood All Stars

  The King Riders (a motorcycle club’s house band)

  Hammie Nixon

  The Pattersonaires

  The Spirit of Memphis Quartet

  R. L. Burnside

  Junior Kimbrough

  LEAD BELLY: Nobody in This World

  Lead Belly’s Last Sessions is available digitally through Smithsonian Folkways at www.folkways.si.edu/shop. The biography, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, by Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, is a good place to start. If the photo of Martha and Lead slays you (like it does me), find Lead Belly: A Life in Pictures.

  The 1935 March of Time newsreel with Lead Belly and John Lomax can be found here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxykqBmUCwk.

  ROBERT JOHNSON: Hellhound on the Money Trail

  There’s lots of writing on this phantom of the Mississippi Delta. A few recommendations:

  Peter Guralnick, Searching for Robert Johnson

  Tom Graves, Crossroads

  Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta

  Gayle Dean Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music

  Robert Palmer, Deep Blues and Blues & Chaos

  Stanley Booth, “Standing at the Crossroads,” in Rythm Oil

  Greil Marcus, Mystery Train

  For listening, after the Robert Johnson boxed set, find The Roots of Robert Johnson (shanachie.com/genres/yazoo) and float in that pool of lyrics, riffs, and melodies that makes blues authorship perplexing. Some peers of note: Son House (I like the 1965 Columbia recordings), Charley Patton, and Tommy Johnson; the recent American Epic versions of their works are remarkably free of the surface noise that has made such old recordings difficult for the inexperienced ear.

  A last Steve LaVere note: In the 1990s, he released some 1970s recordings he’d made while managing a touring blues troupe. The two volumes of the Memphis Blues Caravan are mostly live tracks featuring the likes of Furry Lewis, Harmonica Frank, Big Sam Clark, Joe Willie Wilkins, and others known in Memphis and surrounding areas. The recordings lack an immediacy, but the range of talent is amazing and the gesture of releasing them was very nice. (Hard to find now, these were once available through the Inside Sounds label, which releases the Daddy Mack Blues Band and others from the area. www.insidesounds.com)

  JUNIOR KIMBROUGH: Mississippi Juke House

  For me, the recording that best captures the sound of Junior’s Chulahoma juke joint is actually by R. L. Burnside, the album Too Bad Jim. Produced by Robert Palmer, the journalist and musician (but not the pop singer), Too Bad Jim gets the feel of that rollicking room. Bob also produced Junior Kimbrough’s Sad Days, Lonely Nights. Start there, and then get real gone in the Fat Possum catalog and the myriad releases from R. L. and Junior. R. L.’s Bad Luck City won’t disappoint; his Come On In is a pretty interesting techno remix, and A Ass Pocket of Whiskey, recorded with Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion, gets edgier, and also gets to R. L.’s tale-telling and dozens-dishing. Dig Junior’s All Night Long, and while tribute records often leave me cold, I found the interpretations on Sunday Nights—from Cat Power, Iggy and the Stooges, Jack Oblivian, and others—a great way to rehear Junior’s songs.

  There’s lots of great hill country recordings. And many of those are on the Fat Possum label. I’ve had remarkable luck with Fat Possum. The records they produce are usually edgy and raw, and they’ve become a repository of gritty Americana. Hill country artists to look for: Fred McDowell (his You Gotta Move on Arhoolie is a favorite; Amazing Grace is stirring), Asie Payton, Joe Callicott, Kenny Brown, Lightnin’ Malcolm, and Cedric Burnside (that’s R. L.’s grandson).

  These are some notable Fat Possum blues artists not from the hill country: Cedell Davis, Elmo Williams and Hezekiah Early, Jelly Roll Kings, Paul “Wine” Jones, Robert Belfour, and T-Model Ford.

  I came late to Willie King and missed Bettie’s, his red-dirt joint near Alabama. Willie plays dancing blues with, oddly and wonderfully, a jam band, groove-heavy feel. Get Jukin’ at Bettie’s or any Willie King you can find.

  Shout-out to Spike Priggen and Kevin Salem, then in the band Dumptruck, who left the Aikei Pro in time to meet Junior Kimbrough and introduce me to him. Shout-out to Monsieur Jeffrey Evans, who had just moved to Memphis and came on that fine trip to Junior’s with Belinda. And always a shout-out to Belinda Killough Gordon! Her better recollection about fruit beer, in the quote you’re about to read, leaves my essay factually incorrect. Since her suggestion, I now remember at that later visit, or I have Photoshopped it into my memory, drinking several Kool-Aids with the patch of sunlight at my shoulder. The fact is lost, the blur remains. Print the blur!

  “When we got to the shack, in the middle of summer in the middle of a cotton field,” Belinda wrote me, “it was blindingly light outside and extremely dark inside. I remember the vat of pure grain alcohol punch. I remember dancing a lot with other people there. At one point I went out to use the bathroom in the field and then I lay on top of the Caddy’s hood and listened. I know we stayed at least twelve hours there. The music just kept churning over and over.”

  CHARLIE FEATHERS: The Onliest

  Over the years, I’ve come evermore to appreciate the power and beauty of Charlie’s voice. Get With It collects early material and, though out of print, is worth chasing down. That and everything that Norton Records sells on Charlie at www.nortonrecords.com. And the Elektra / Nonesuch Charlie Feathers. And Peter Guralnick’s profile in Lost Highway.

  JAMES CARR: Way Out on a Voyage

  One last James Carr story: For several years in the mid-1990s, I wrote the scripts for the annual Handy Awards (now the BMAs—the Blues Music Awards: blues.org). During the Blues Foundation’s nadir, the show was in a small theater on Beale Street; that year I was also a stage manager. When the finale began, I stepped outside for fresh air and a moment to unwind. I smiled as I heard James Carr over the PA system. Except, I realized, there was no PA system. On the balcony of the empty bar next to the theater was James Carr, singing with no microphone to the empty street below. Roosevelt appeared, said he’d placed James there to serenade the departing blues fans. I brou
ght James from the balcony to the theater’s stage; he did not hesitate, he commanded a mic and stepped into the light.

  James Carr and Robert Gordon departing for the stage next door. (Courtesy of Trey Harrison)

  Some favorite tracks: “To Love Somebody,” “Forgetting You,” “You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up,” and “The Dark End of the Street.”

  OTHA TURNER’S FIFE AND DRUM PICNIC: Let Us Eat Goat

  Otha Turner lived to be ninety-five, dying in late February 2003. One of his daughters, Bernice, who lived next door and was central in his life, died the same day after a long battle with breast cancer. The church in Como, near Gravel Springs, was packed for the double funeral. Afterward, the procession to the gravesites was led by thirteen-year-old Sharde Thomas, playing a fife made by her grandfather.

  In addition to Otha’s two albums (both on Birdman Records: www.birdmanrecords.com), he’s heard on a Sugar Ditch 45 and several compilations. Mississippi Delta Blues Jam in Memphis (Arhoolie Records) is a great cross-section of area musicians recorded in 1969; Otha and his neighboring fife star Napoleon Strickland are included. A decade earlier, Otha directed Alan Lomax down the road to Fred McDowell and Fred is here, solo and accompanied by Johnny Woods. (Furry Lewis is also here.) Dive into the Arhoolie Records catalog—their compilations are a great way to hear a variety of artists: www.folkways.si.edu/arhoolie. A few others of note: I Have to Paint My Face; the two volumes of Mississippi Delta Blues: Blow My Blues Away; and Country Negro Jam Session. The Testament Records classic Traveling through the Jungle: Fife and Drum Band Music of the Deep South is a great primer. A ten-minute film on Otha, Gravel Springs Fife and Drum, made in 1972 by Judy Peiser and Bill Ferris, is here: www.folkstreams.net/film,59.

  Here’s an interesting crossroads. Luther met Otha at the Center for Southern Folklore’s Music and Heritage Festival. That’s where Luther and Cody, young teens, first backed their dad on stage—Jim Dickinson and the Hardly Can Playboys. Luther, exploring the crafts area, went to the one man burning an open flame—and began talking to Otha Turner, watching him make a fife. Turns out, they lived near each other and Luther began visiting Otha, hearing his musical ideas, absorbing what Otha had to teach. Luther’s interest shifted from national trends to the excitement of his own backyard.

  Before Otha died, he’d mentored not only Luther Dickinson and Sharde Thomas but also R. L. Boyce. R. L. played drums in his band and became a great hill country guitarist under Otha’s tutelage, now with several records of his own.

  MAMA ROSE NEWBORN: Useless Are the Flowers

  Good luck finding Calvin Newborn’s book, As Quiet As It’s Kept! His music is more readily available; both discs on the Bandcamp website can be sampled before purchase. His 1978 collaboration with Hank Crawford, Centerpiece, is a jazz-blues classic. Stanley Booth has a great piece on Phineas Jr., “Fascinating Changes,” in Rythm Oil. Look for the 1962 Phineas episode from Jazz Scene USA; the performance of “Oleo” is breathtaking.

  Jazz great Herman Green—who played a decade in Lionel Hampton’s band and had brushes with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and even caught Louis Armstrong’s attention—has a few CDs in his own name. See if you can find Worthy of Note or Best of the Green Machine. Herman kicks it with FreeWorld, a jam band that blends Memphis and New Orleans with San Francisco. Their playing with Herman is literal old school meets new (freeworldmemphis.com).

  TOWNES VAN ZANDT: All the Federales Say

  My favorite Townes Van Zandt recordings are the ones least produced and least populated; so much of his early work has powdered sugar all over it. Start with Live at the Old Quarter—it comes with the jokes and patter, and in 1973 many of these songs were still new. The Nashville Sessions is from the same period, but in a studio with a relatively spare band. There’s lots of later live recordings—Roadsongs is with a good band, light touch. Catch Heartworn Highways for a 1975 live hang; the documentary Be Here to Love Me is a warm, wistful way in and gives an overview of his life.

  JEFF BUCKLEY: Northern Light

  Jeff only lived to finish one album—Grace. I like the expanded edition with the bonus CD of various songs—traditional, country, MC5, and more. Live at Sin-é, which is Jeff performing in the corner of a coffee shop, gets me. Plus, you get some of his between-song raps—it’s a lot like the weekly gigs we’d hear at Barrister’s in Memphis. The newest release is the oldest recordings; titled You and I, it’s Jeff solo in a studio, learning his way around good recording equipment and discovering his voice. The album he was making when he died, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, is much more than sketches, though it’s built from unfinished material. The documentaries, they make me sad.

  BOBBY BLUE BLAND: Love Throat

  Bobby Bland made great records all through his career. Even the early, gritty ones have a sophisticated air with the big band behind him. Most any anthology of his Duke recordings will be good; there are two double-CD packages of the Duke stuff and no wasted tracks. Also not to be missed is Two Steps from the Blues, his 1961 debut LP. Several of the songs were previously singles, but this collection established him for crossover success. (It’s one of songwriter Dan Penn’s favorite albums.) Bobby had a great later career with Jackson, Mississippi’s Malaco Records. Bobby Blue Bland: “Live” on Beale Street gives a good taste of his Malaco work; in addition to the audio, there’s a DVD.

  TAV FALCO: Panther Burns Forever Lasting

  We’re close to the bone when discussing Panther Burns, but I’ll restrain myself to a manageable list. For starters, I’d recommend the Sugar Ditch Revisited EP and The World We Knew LP. These are cleanly produced (the first by Jim Dickinson, the latter by Alex Chilton), but you still get that sense of effort that makes the Burns so exciting (that sense of their almost not getting it right). Once you get the hang of it, take a chance with the first EP, She’s the One to Blame; it’s rawer even than the first LP, Behind the Magnolia Curtain, which is also recommended. And look for the tenth-anniversary single with two versions of the Sun Records classic “Red Headed Woman.” Hear what can happen in ten years. Shopping: www.tavfalco.com.

  Tav’s book, Ghosts Behind the Sun, is an autobiography that goes back to Tav’s days as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War (yes, you read that right) and takes us through the highlights of his career, including great profiles of Roland Janes, Charlie Feathers, and others whom Tav has encountered, uncovered, or revivified. Don’t be shy about skipping some of the early pages, but when Tav gets to the University of Arkansas, the story really takes off.

  This interview with Tav focuses on his visual art: openspace.ca/tav-falco-interview-2003. And you can catch the legendary performance on Marge Thrasher’s morning TV show here: dangerousminds.net/comments/tav_falco_and_the_meaning_of_anti-rockabilly_with_special_guest_alex_chilto

  Tav was the godfather of the 1970s and ’80s local scene, so check out some of the bands he spawned: The Hellcats had an EP and an LP, and when they exploded, several members formed the Alluring Strange (they made one album). The Klitz set the precedent, and some of their lost recordings have recently trickled out: www.spacecaserecords.com/spacecase-releases. They sometimes play live—slightly more polished than they used to be, but not a lot.

  JERRY LEE LEWIS: Last Killer Standing

  Alert! The sessions I referenced Jerry Lee doing with Knox Phillips have been released! They are (can I say it?) killer! Jerry Lee Lewis: The Knox Phillips Sessions is worth the price just for the smoking version of “Harbor Lights,” though the Chuck Berry knockoffs ain’t half bad. And “Beautiful Dreamer,” sung by his hoarse, coarse, and tired throat is enough to make you daydream about what Jerry was doing the night before, the week before. It sounds like he’s not slept in a long long time. I’m putting a track on the Memphis Rent Party compilation, but you can check out the whole thing here: www.timelife.com/products/jerry-lee-lewis-the-knox-phillips-sessions-lp

  Another of my favorite Jerry Lee records is an LP titled Ole Tyme Country Music. It came out during the Shelby S
ingleton Sun era, and I emphasize the LP because though the track listing on the CD is similar, the takes are different. These songs are Jerry and Roland Janes playing classics together, and it’s amazing to hear the way they entwine; when so few people could find a place to fit in Jerry Lee’s music, Roland just slid right in. (It reminds me of New Orleans guitarist Snooks Eaglin accompanying pianist Professor Longhair—finding places to fit that are not evident to the naked ear.)

  Michael Tisserand’s “Jerry Lee’s Legacy” in Offbeat is not to be missed. Of the Jerry Lee books available, go for Hellfire, by Nick Tosches. It’s more about the myth than the man, but what a myth!

  CAT POWER: Kool Kween

  The Greatest remains my favorite Cat Power album, but I can’t separate the music from my joyful memories around the making of it. There are several full concert videos of her live shows with the Memphis Rhythm Band on Youtube. Her albums before and after capture her evolution and explorations as an artist. She is a seeker.

  JERRY McGILL: Very Extremely Dangerous

  The man of mystery, of multiple names, of lost recordings. Meet him in Stranded in Canton, the documentary I made from William Eggleston’s footage, then live with him in my documentary made with Paul Duane, Very Extremely Dangerous. VED includes a CD of Jerry’s recordings, available at store.fatpossum.com/products/very-extremely-dangerous. If you find more recordings, please let me know via my website: www.therobertgordon.com. The blog where Jerry found Joyce: boogiewoogieflu.blogspot.com/2008/07/jerry-mcgill.html.