Now a minister in Memphis, where he regularly sings at the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church on Hale Road, Green has reconciled a war that had fought within him since his teenage years: ‘I’ve come to understand one can’t live without the other. You’ve got a body and then there’s the spirit, God did the right thing, he put them together and the body needs the soul and the soul needs the body. We have to reconcile our actions and our work only to the man upstairs.’
Merry Christmas. By December 1968 Memphis was a magnet for visiting musicians. Janis Joplin and Sam Andrew (far right) of Big Brother and the Holding Company join Steve Cropper, Dick Dunn, Carla Thomas and Rufus Thomas at Jim Stewart’s party.
© Sam Andrew
JIM STEWART’S CHRISTMAS PARTY
December
As 1968 came to its eventful end, Memphis defied expectations. It had been battered by a divisive rage that few cities in the world could survive, yet it not only survived, it thrived and expanded. An area to the far southeast of the city known as the Mitchell Road sub-region was waving goodbye to its ancient status as arable farmland and came within the jurisdiction of the City of Memphis. So, under the beleaguered control of Mayor Henry Loeb, a small civic restructuring increased the population of Memphis by 20,000 people. It was small but not insignificant, and many seized on the city’s growth as a signal of hope for the future. Remarkably, for all its global success in music and the notoriety that the year had brought, Memphis was still a comparatively small city; the population once estimated at 563,800 now peaked at 541,900. By comparison with Detroit and its northern rival Motown it was tiny, and by comparison with New York, the home of Atlantic Records, it was infinitesimal. But size became a matter of civic pride. Like a boxer confronting a heavier opponent, Memphis not only punched above its weight, it came to dominate all the heavyweight categories of black-inspired music.
Soul was now insinuating itself into almost every other form of popular music, stretching the creativity of rock, pop and even country and western. The city had earned a global status that was most tangible not in a single song nor even in a performer, but in a network of studios that spread across Memphis and deeper down to the South, into Alabama, and the Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals. Stax continued its much vaunted ‘Soul Explosion’, working its studios by day and night, cranking out releases on a daily basis, and testing Al Bell’s thermometer to boiling point. What began as a response to the break-up with Atlantic had now become a feverish era of production in which talent was put to work in a studio that literally never slept. William Bell, the Staple Singers, Ollie and the Nightingales, Johnnie Taylor, John Lee Hooker, Eddie Floyd, Carla Thomas, and the tireless Booker T. and the M.G.’s packed the studio schedules to overspill, and by the end of 1968 Stax were using resources across the city and as far north as Detroit and Chicago, reluctant to let a day go by. A checklist of the studio bookings in Memphis across the latter months of the year is a jaw-dropping sweep across pop creativity: Elvis Presley and his great resurgence; Dusty Springfield’s groundbreaking Dusty In Memphis; Isaac Hayes’ rule-breaking concept album Hot Buttered Soul; escapees from Detroit’s overheated soul rivalry, including Darrell Banks, Mable John, J.J. Barnes and the Dramatics, featuring Ron Banks; and artists from Atlantic who had previously thrived recording in New York such as Wilson Pickett and Sam and Dave, sent to other southern studios by the astute Jerry Wexler to drink an elixir that Manhattan could never adequately concoct. Talent surged to Memphis like iron filings to a magnet. For all its battered reputation in the wake of King’s assassination, it remained a special place in the minds of musicians – R&B’s answer to Nashville, the place where magic could be heard.
Dusty Springfield’s arrival in Memphis was characteristic of Stax’s global reputation. Springfield was an emotionally complex pop singer whose nervous insecurities were legend in the recording industry. Like the Beatles – who had planned to record at Stax’s East McLemore Studios back in 1965 – she was a knowledgeable and obsessive soul music fan, inspired and intimidated in equal measure by the great black singers of the era. On signing for Atlantic, Springfield was enthusiastic about recording in Memphis, believing it to be the modern capital of R&B and a place she felt curiously unworthy of recording in. According to Wexler’s 1993 autobiography, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music, ‘Dusty has to be the most insecure singer in the world. I was criticized for taking Dusty down south – everyone said the south was for R&B, not pop – but I had a hunch. You won’t hear black influence in her voice, yet she’s deeply soulful, her intonation pure. As with Aretha I had never heard her sing a bad note.’ Springfield’s love of southern soul was a generational thing. She had grown up in the Mod-fixated world of British teenage life, seeing black American music not as a passing fad but as a world of distant gods with strange but wonderful names – Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Maybelle and Little Stevie Wonder. When Dusty arrived in Memphis she was not taken to Stax, her first expectation – her dispute with Wexler ruled that out – but to another legendary Memphis studio, Chips Moman’s American Sound Studio at 827 Thomas Street. By all accounts, the process of recording Dusty was painful and elaborate. Her confidence had been battered by the company she was about to keep, and undermined by erroneous comparisons with Aretha Franklin. Some singers would have risen with the tide of flattering encouragement, but Springfield retreated into herself, feeling threatened by a studio environment that had once played host to Aretha, Joe Tex and Bobby Womack. Wexler claims that ‘Dusty was all raw nerve ends and neurosis’, adding with his trademark acidic style that she was nicknamed ‘The Ice Queen’. She refused to sing to a practice track and retreated from any help to sing out loud. Eventually, with the undercarriage of an album recorded as instrumentals, Dusty was whisked back to New York, where she eventually added the vocal tracks to a now iconic album, which included one of her most enduring releases, ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’. Even then, the process was marred by anxiety and lack of confidence; at one point Springfield threw an ashtray at the methodical but well-meaning studio engineer Tom Dowd and vowed never to work for Wexler again.
Stax’s own celebratory double album Soul Explosion, released in Europe in October 1968, was not simply a compilation of much loved singles but a testament to the extraordinary energy that flared up in the troubled aftermath of the company’s break with Atlantic. It was a showcase of artists that were stretching soul music both backwards and forwards, from rural gospel to urban street funk, and from subtle harmony to rousing unfettered emotions. But it had another motivation, too, a refusal to be done down, driven by a passionate assertion that the small southern studio would not be bullied by New York.
On 3 December, another great resurgence visited Memphis. Television sets across the city were tuned to the ABC network when the now famous Elvis: ’68 Comeback Special was aired. The show reached forty-two per cent of the viewing audience and was the network’s top show that season. For Elvis Presley, it was a powerful statement that the King was back, and that his saccharine days as a matinee movie star were in the past. It was now nearly twenty years since Presley’s career took off at Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios at 706 Union Avenue, the place that ignited the epic history of rock music. It was Elvis’s nefarious manager Colonel Tom Parker who came late to the conclusion that the movies – or more accurately a string of homely and over-sentimental Hollywood romances – had negatively affected Presley’s career. After long periods of regression and declining record sales, Parker was eventually talked into reconnecting Presley with his Memphis roots. Back in January, NBC announced plans to produce a TV special for the 1968 Christmas season. It would be Elvis’s first television appearance in more than eight years. The big innovation was to break with the now familiar and schmaltzy log-fire Christmas spectacular, long associated in the minds of Americans with the crooner generation – Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Bobby Darin. The original idea was to tell a story, and working against the grain of Colonel Tom Parker’s innate conservatism, t
he programme-makers and newly installed sponsors, the Singer Corporation, favoured a more dynamic approach. A young and in-demand director called Steve Binder was brought on board. He had previously directed the TV series Hullabaloo but had also directed the 1965 T.A.M.I. Show – Teenage Awards Music International Show – a charitable foundation that pioneered what was in effect the first generation of pop music videos. Rehearsals began in June 1968, and although there was talk of moving the entire project to Memphis, the studios won the day and Elvis moved into his new home – a star dressing room on the NBC lot in Burbank, California. In initial conversations with Presley, the directors were taken by his genuine concern about the spate of assassinations, and the low opinion that many people now had of Memphis. After a conversation specifically about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Binder commissioned songwriter Earl Brown to write an inspirational song for the finale, which became the triumphant ‘If I Can Dream’, a song redolent of the imagery of Martin Luther King’s powerful sermons.
One night in late June, Binder passed Elvis’s dressing room and overheard him laughing and jamming with the so-called Memphis Mafia – a loyal gang of friends who had known Elvis over the years. According to most reports of the Elvis: ’68 Comeback Special, it was then that Binder had the idea to add a jam session to the television event, in which his original side men Scotty Moore, D.J. Fontana and Charlie Hodge would eventually join him on stage. Rather than return to the rich vein of gospel singers back home in Memphis, where Stax had the Emotions, Jeanne and the Darlings, and the Soul Children on their books, and Hi Records had recently contracted the still unknown Ann Peebles, director Binder dug into his own recent past. He had directed an episode of T.A.M.I. featuring Marvin Gaye, who had been backed on the day of filming by the Blossoms, an LA-based gospel soul group featuring Darlene Love, Fanita James and Jean King. And so it transpired that it was Jean King who would sing the gospel refrain from the Negro spiritual ‘Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child’, in a powerfully emotional section of what was to become Presley’s triumphant comeback. Clad in black fifties-style leather biker gear, and in fighting-fit condition, Presley invoked the first threatening years of Memphis rock ’n’ roll with ‘Hound Dog’, ‘All Shook Up’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’. The 1968 television special has rightly been seen as the greatest comeback ever, rescuing Presley’s reputation from a tired and has-been singer to a colossus who stormed back to the summit of the pop charts.
The resurgence of Presley brought with it a wave of sentiment to the city of Memphis. Although it had been stigmatised as the city that tolerated segregation and killed Martin Luther King, its citizens liked to tell different stories, wrapped up in nostalgia, in decency and, most of all, in affectionate sentimentality, that it was a city given to charity.
Walter Forrest Jones and his young wife were destined not to celebrate Christmas 1968. Their desperately sad lives brought the most combustible year in the history of modern Memphis to a regretful end. On Christmas Eve, Walter (24) and Glenda (19) left their low-income apartment home at 639 Looney Street and walked towards Thomas Street, to do some last-minute Christmas shopping at a drive-in mall. They left their baby boy, still only a few months old, in the care of his aunt, Glenda’s twin sister Lynda. Presents had been laid out beneath the tree, and festive treats for the family’s first Christmas dinner together were stored in their tiny kitchen. They had makeshift furniture and no table, so the newlyweds planned to eat chicken and roast vegetables on plates perched on their knees, feed their baby when he cried, and then toast the season with a few beers and tangerines.
While walking in the direction of Thomas Street, the couple were approached by two youths demanding money. They had nothing much to give them, except for a few dollars that Jones had rolled up in his coat pocket. Guns were pulled and the young couple were shot. When police and emergency services arrived, they were both lying face down on the sidewalk, shot in the back. Jones was dead and his teenage wife, desperately gasping for breath, was taken to St Joseph’s Hospital on Overton Avenue with a bullet lodged near her spine. She underwent surgery in the same emergency treatment room where, months earlier, the dying Martin Luther King had been taken.
Police launched a city-wide search for the criminals, who they briefly believed were a street gang engaged in a feud with Jones – eventually they conceded that they were no more than opportunistic thieves, who had come across the couple by coincidence. It was a killing with the most desperate of motives – a few crumpled dollars, to which Jones clung desperately in his clenched hand. He died much as he had lived, staring the brutal cruelty of poverty directly in the face. The Memphis Police Department, blamed for so much in the year gone by, were powerless. They searched the sewers and ditches in the surrounding area in vain but never found the gun that had killed Jones and wounded his wife. It disappeared into the dark netherworld of Memphis street crime, probably to be used again in another pathetic hold-up. Conscious that their reputation had been battered by the events of the year, Frank Holloman, the city’s Fire and Police Director, and most senior police officer, instructed every available officer to be put on the case. Holloman, who had served twenty-five years as a Special Agent with the FBI, much of it in the Washington office close to J. Edgar Hoover, was uniquely conscious that the Memphis Police Department were by now implicated in the assassination of King, and more broadly stood accused of undervaluing the lives of its city’s most deprived citizens. Holloman himself brought attention to the crime, urging the local press and his own officers that they had a moral duty to solve it, if only for the surviving widow and infant. The police pushed their resources to the limit and offered a $5,000 reward for anyone furnishing information or descriptions that would lead to the arrest of the criminals. It was the highest sum they were legally allowed to offer. Always the consummate politician, Holloman also used the crime to demand greater police powers, including more permission to ‘stop and frisk’, to search suspects and known criminals, and to apprehend illegal or unregistered weapons before they could be used in a crime. He also advocated a more demanding punishment structure that raised the fines for carrying a concealed illegal weapon from $50 to $1,000.
The Jones killing and the poignant fate of his infant son, who grew up fatherless and with a disabled mother, launched a season of sentimentality across Memphis public life. It was as if the city had a collective need to dwell on bad luck and appraise itself. The daily newspapers were fascinated by the unfortunate infant, and also by the remarkable life of the ‘Muscular Dystrophy Mother’, a black woman from the projects who had been left penniless when her husband abandoned her with five children, all of whom had inherited muscular dystrophy. Fearful that her children might be taken into care, the woman refused to give her real identity to journalists and so became known only by the moniker ‘Muscular Dystrophy Mother’. Holiday Inn, a company that had been founded in Memphis in 1952, and was now a thriving nationwide motel chain, took the opportunity to attract Yuletide publicity and offered the mother and her disabled children ‘a room at the Inn’, an opportunistic play on the Nativity. The gesture brought the motel chain priceless publicity across America, but, for all its cloying sentimentality, the theme of disadvantaged children played out across the holiday season in nearly every walk of life. The Memphis Press-Scimitar launched its annual Goodfellas Campaign, a predominantly white and suburban campaign to donate toys and clothing to the poor. Many of the stories came from the city’s sprawling Southside and areas such as Orange Mound, one of the oldest and most impoverished African-American communities in Memphis. In 1968 Orange Mound was known as the American neighbourhood with the second most concentrated population of African-Americans, behind only Harlem in New York City.
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