Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  … Sometimes you find them throwed out of winders and so forth, here on Beale Street. Sportin’ class o’ women runnin’ up and down the street all night long … git knocked in the head with bricks and hatchets and hammers. Git cut with pocket knives and razors and so forth. Run off to the foot of Beale and some of them run into the river and drown.

  Pee Wee’s was the name of a—the name they used to call ‘em was joints; some people used to call ‘em honky-tonks—that’s where I learned to play the blues, at the honky-tonks, which was originally called the joints. Some people called them saloons. Pee Wee’s was wide open in there in them days, and they had crap games in there and runnin’ policy games, bootleg whiskey, and everything like that. Come on down there used to be a place on Beale Street called the Monarch and that was a crap-shootin’ joint.

  There used to be a man there, they called him Bad Sam. He got into a shootin’ duel there one time. Shot a man who was causin’ bit of trouble, and the man fell downstairs. But he raised up enough to shoot back at Sam, so both of them fell; one went one way and the other went the other way and both of them died. I dunno, there was so much excitement down there on Beale Street it’d take me a year and a day to tell you about all that excitement.

  Background:

  Robert Crumb illustration

  of the Memphis Jug Band

  BOBBY “BLUE” BLAND: LOVE THROAT OF THE BLUES BY ROBERT GORDON

  Rolling into 1947 Memphis like a cotton boll loosed from the back of a field truck, Bobby “Blue” Bland was raw talent ready to be refined. Rural folk—black and white—had been tumbling into Memphis for generations. Some, like the crop they raised, were looking to be ginned; others, for gin.

  In Rosemark, Tennessee, about thirty miles northeast of Memphis, Bobby Bland was raised on spirituals and field hollers. A family friend often drank hard lemonade on the Bland porch, strumming the guitar and singing Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Boy Crudup, Walter Davis, and Big Joe Williams. The radio played country music—Roy Acuff, Eddie Arnold, Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You,” and Red Foley’s hymns. Taking a Jew’s harp and a tin can, Bobby sang at the country store. “My mother said, ‘No, I’m not going to keep you out here; we’re going to Memphis,’“ Bobby remembered. “And that’s why I got a chance.”

  Memphis was everything Rosemark was not. Bobby’s mother worked behind the stove at the Sterling Grill, just off Beale Street. Bobby, seventeen and maturing into a quiet, simmering sexuality, learned every song on the jukebox there. “All the musicians coming through would stop at Mrs. Bland’s place,” Bobby said, his speaking voice mellow and silty, both in conversation and in song. B.B. King was a regular customer there. “I idolized him,” Bobby continued, “and I still do. This was before B.B.’s first record came out. We were on Amateur Nights together on Beale Street.” Beale’s Amateur Night was dawning with stars—B.B., Rosco Gordon, Johnny Ace, and Bobby. Rufus Thomas was the host. They were all learning their way around a stage.

  In 1948, Memphis radio station WDIA began programming black music for a black audience, further energizing the African-American entertainment world. B.B. King was one of the earliest radio hosts, his growing popularity evident in the increasing crowds at clubs farther and farther from Memphis.

  “I said, ‘B., why don’t you let me help you with your stuff?’ to drive or whatever.” Bobby smiled at the memory. “So he’d take me with him to small towns near Memphis if I didn’t have anything to do—which was all the time. I learned a lot just standing around.”

  Bobby approached Rosco Gordon, and later Junior Parker. Bobby was chauffeur, valet, friend—the guy who liked to drive and didn’t drink—and he continued to make the most of his opportunities. “Rosco, at all those juke joints, he’d come straight off the stage and head right to the gambling room in back. Do little tricks with the dice—roll them and they stay together, just like soldiers. It’s dangerous if somebody catches you. I’d be over in the corner, out of the way of the dancing. The guy with the corn liquor would be back there if you needed a shot, and the houseman called all the bets and held the money. They had some big people to settle any argument that would happen. We all were hicks.”

  “I came out of the cotton field, too,” said Rosco, who died in 2002. “Who do you think called the radio station and wanted to know who I was and if I would be back, eh? These were my fans from the cotton field.” Rosco had built his audience through a stint on WDIA—recruited there from the Amateur Night. He and B.B. both cut their first records in the home of a local bandleader, Richard “Tuff” Green. Tuff Green hung blankets on the wall, counted off the beat for his Rocketeers, and cut “Three O’clock Blues” behind B.B. and “No More Doggin’“ with Rosco. Both became more than regional hits.

  Rosco recounted one night when Bobby drove him to a gig in Arkansas. “Bobby started singing and said, ‘I got the voice, but my timing’s bad.’ I said, ‘All you got to do is say one, two, three, four, sing, two, three, four, shut up, two …’ So this night, I was dicing—if you didn’t have money to shoot dice with me, I’d give you some—and I put Bobby on the stage. That night nobody came to get me because Bobby sang all night.”

  Bobby had once bragged to B.B. that he could sing everything his friend had recorded. “B.B. said, ‘Good, Bob, I love that, but you got to get some identification of your own.’ And so I would take that softness of Gene Ammons and Nat ‘King’ Cole and some things from Billy Eckstine and make one thing out of it. Out in the country there wasn’t no music like that. In Memphis, I had the man put those records on my mother’s jukebox. I listened to Tony Bennett; he had so much feeling it would remind you of a black person who’s been hurt. And Perry Como, ‘The Lord’s Prayer’—nobody else phrases it like he does. I studied Nat ‘King’ Cole from front to back to upgrade my speaking ability and singing qualities. I’m not saying that it’s perfect now, but it’s a long way from Rosemark.”

  Ike Turner had already cut the landmark rock & roll single “Rocket 88” when Bobby met him in the 1950s. Turner was regularly finding and recording artists for Modern Records, a Los Angeles label with a Southern presence. “Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland,” Ike said. “His mother had a soul food restaurant and she told us her son could sing. We took him out to Tuff Green’s house and recorded him.” In 1952, Bland was signed to Memphis’ Duke Records, run by WDIA’s station manager. Before he could find his own style, he went into the army. Upon his discharge in 1955, he went to Houston, where Duke Records had relocated. There he met the trumpeter and musical arranger Joe Scott, who became his musical tailor. “Joe Scott guided me on how to approach a note and how you find the spots to enforce, the selling points in a song. The word has to be said exactly right. Joe Scott said, ‘If you’re going to get any kind of attention, you’ve got to let them know your feelings and have them feel it the same way you do.’ He said, ‘Everybody has a problem just like you do, and if you can conquer that particular thing in your singing, well then, it’s all left up to the listener.’“

  “Beale Street was heaven for the black man. You’d come up from the Delta and go to Beale Street, don’t owe nobody, no nothin’. I told a white fella on Beale Street one night, I said, ‘If you were black for one Saturday night on Beale Street, you never would wanna be white anymore.’“—Rufus Thomas

  Invigorated, Bobby “Blue” Bland cut “Farther Up the Road” in 1957, “I’ll Take Care of You” in 1959, and in 1961 both the album Two Steps From the Blues and the song “Turn On Your Love Light.” A clean, cool ladies’ man, he developed the signature love throat—a guttural squall of unequal parts groan, shout, and belch—that punctuates his songs. “I got the idea for the sound from Reverend C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s father. I played a sermon that he had, ‘The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest,’ over and over and over. They build bigger cages for the eagle as it grows, but when her wings hit the cage, they have to turn her loose.” It’s a powerful image, a climactic moment in an archetypal sermon. The story is a meditation on increasing powe
r meeting the limits of the larger world it grows to inhabit. With each limit overcome, the world yields a new, larger vista. Franklin was preaching about the pain and the exhilaration of growth, about opportunities and obstacles.

  “THE RIVER’S INVITATION”

  By Percy Mayfield

  I’ve been

  All across the country

  And I’ve played in every town

  Cause I’m trying to find my baby

  But no one has seen her around

  Now you know which way I’m headed

  If my baby can’t be found.

  I spoke

  To the river

  And the river

  Spoke back to me

  And it said, “You look so lonely

  You look so full of misery

  And if you can’t find your baby

  Come and make your home with me.”

  I don’t

  Want to leave her

  Cause I know

  She’s still alive

  And someday I’m gonna find her

  Then I’ll take her for a ride

  Then we’ll live our life forever

  In a home among the tide.

  Bobby zeroed in on the concussive sound of larger souls meeting larger cages. It is a vocal ejaculation, equally visceral and ethereal, both more and less than human. It is a common punctuation in African-American sermons—perhaps because American blacks have encountered that larger cage more often than most, and have soared. —

  Bobby Bland, like many blues musicians, takes from the church to give to the blues. For him, the love throat becomes an encounter with the sexual and the spiritual, the nexus between what is and what can be. From the tiny roost of Rosemark, Tennessee, he ascended the heights of blues mastery and stardom, conquering, with the help of mentors, all the bars his wings encountered. The love throat sings this ascension, but there is another, more pragmatic reason that he stayed with it: The strange sound drove the ladies wild. And where the wild ladies go, so too go the men. Bobby “Blue” Bland brings us all along.

  RECOMMENDED LISTENING:

  Bobby Bland, The Duke Recordings, Volumes 1-3 (MCA, 1992, 1994, 1996). All of Bobby’s greatest recordings, from 1952 to 1972.

  B.B. King, Classic Masters (Capitol, 2002). Look for this— or any—collection of B.B.’s great early sides.

  B.B. King and Bobby Bland, Together for the First Time … Live (MCA, 1974). Hear the lifelong friendship in their duets.

  Rosco Gordon, Rosco’s Rhythm (Charly, 1997). Includes most of his best Sun Records material.

  ON THE ROAD WITH LOUIS ARMSTRONG BY DAVID HALBERSTAM

  In the summer of ‘55, I took off from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a 1946 Chevy to start my journalistic career in Mississippi. I took with me one suitcase of clothes and a new record player that, if memory serves, cost thirty-eight dollars and four long-playing records—the beginning of my music collection—and my devotion to a certain kind of jazz and blues (surely a hit back then, but hopelessly square today). To this day, for both musical and sentimental reasons, two of those albums remain particularly important to me: Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy and a record with Sidney Bechet and Muggsy Spanier playing duets. In Mississippi, I ended up not on the metropolitan paper in Jackson, as I had expected, but as the only reporter on the smallest daily in the state, over in West Point, in the hill country in the northeast. There was not a lot of nightlife there, and after work I played my records incessantly. To this day I know which song follows which on my albums. I spent almost a year in Mississippi, drawn by my time there into an ever deeper appreciation of the roots of the blues. Then I went on to a bigger and better paper in Nashville, where, with the help of the people at Zibart’s book and record store, my Louis Armstrong collection expanded exponentially.

  In those days I did a good deal of freelancing for The Reporter magazine, now deceased but back then a lively biweekly liberal publication of considerable independence, and a great showcase for independent young reporters like me—indeed some of the seeds of what would eventually come to be known as New Journalism were already being planted in The Reporter. (Actually it was a couple of freelance pieces on the racial crisis in Mississippi that had hastened my departure from West Point; my editor there, Henry Harris, had told me to either stop writing about race for the magazine or leave the paper, and, in time, because I refused his offer, he fired me.)

  One day in March 1957, not long after I’d turned twenty-three and was working in Nashville, I noticed that Armstrong was coming to town for a one-night stand. I thought that hanging out with Louis Armstrong and his band might make a good Reporter piece. I queried the magazine with the idea, got the green light, and arranged with Armstrong’s people to meet him in Atlanta and travel with him to Nashville.

  This was during the early part of the great civil rights confrontation that followed the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling that ended state-sanctioned segregation in schools. Martin Luther King Jr. was coming to power, helping to create what would become known as “the movement,” and adding to the legal power of blacks (not yet known as blacks) their moral, economic, and spiritual powers. I was an aggressive civil rights reporter—to me race was the big story of the time—and in those days if The Tennessean did not assign me a story about race, then I would often assign it to myself for The Reporter, using my days off work for the reporting (as I had done earlier in Clinton, Tennessee, the first town to deal with integration in the state). But I did not see the Armstrong piece as a civil rights piece, and as such it was the one time when I was a young man that I missed an important part of the story. Not that I blew the piece entirely—I pulled it off, and The Reporter ran it in May 1957. It was okay, not one of my best articles; I was operating a bit on foreign turf, because I’m a sociopolitical reporter, not a music writer.

  In 1957, it should be noted, Louis Armstrong was probably the most honored and beloved American outside our borders. He had traveled everywhere, playing to large and enthusiastic crowds wherever he went, and he always charmed his foreign audiences, much as he did his domestic ones—his talent and sheer pleasure in what he did were as palpable as his music was accessible. Memory tells me that there was even an album at the time called Ambassador Satch, depicting him in full diplomatic regalia. Yet on that day, on that six-hour, 250-mile trek from Atlanta to Nashville, because his bus did not have a bathroom, we had to stop by the wayside at one point, a place where the foliage was unusually thick, while this most distinguished and joyous American wandered into the bushes to take a leak. Then we continued on our way. And I did not mention that most painful moment in my article, even though in those days I was very careful to look for the racial edge in everything I covered. I still do not know why I left this part out. Perhaps I thought it was in bad taste. Perhaps in some way I thought it was embarrassing to him, one more small but cruel humiliation thrust upon him by the country he loved, and therefore I pulled back from it in some misguided attempt to protect him.

  But to this day when I think about that story and that trip, about my time with him and his band, it’s the first thing I remember: Louis Armstrong getting off his bus to take that leak because there were no restaurants that black people could stop at along the roadside, and pulling in to a gas station was problematic—you could certainly buy the gas, but whether or not you could use the rest room was a very different question. Louis had certainly learned long before that it was rarely worth the ugly struggle that was sure to come with the request.

  A young man’s memories of a trip like that with one of his heroes are remarkably clear. I still remember how much fun it was talking to him: He was pushing Swiss Kriss to me, to keep me regular, as he did with everyone he met, and he kept telling me, in addition, that whenever you come home from a long trip, always call the lady you live with, never surprise her at home. I remember as well how generous his elegant trombone player, “Trummy” Young, was with me.

  Louis Armstrong poses with two Tennessee fans, circa 1957. />
  So this piece is by way of apology, some forty-six years later, and to note that when I hear him singing (on Satch Plays Fats, another of my favorite albums), “What did I do/to be so black and blue,” I still ponder the meaning of those words, and the firsthand lesson I had in the blues that day, and the way he dealt with it all. And I remember as well the price and complexity of his joyousness.

  Sam Phillips (right) opened his Memphis Recording Service in January 1950 to provide an opportunity “for some of the great Negro artists of the mid-South.” Rosco Gordon (left) and Ike Turner were the first of those artists to have Number One R&B hits. Phillips also recorded Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, and Bobby “Blue” Bland, among others, before a nineteen-year-old Elvis Presley cut his first single for Phillips’ Sun label in July 1954.

  “You know, I never had the feeling of categories of music as a whole being necessarily good or bad. Country, symphony, pop music were just fine—I didn’t really care what it sounded like, or what category it might fall into. If you had something distinctive to say, it was up to you to go ahead and say it. But gutbucket blues—that was the kind of music I wanted to hear. And that was the kind of music I set out to record.

  When I started, I had to pursue it singularly, because nobody was going to back me up in the idea that you’re going to bring a bunch of black folks in here and record them. But that was what I was determined to do. And I was prepared to risk everything for it—my job, my family’s future welfare, my own damn sanity—because it was an absolute inspiration that I carried with me. I knew the sound I had heard in the cotton fields, and I also knew that had I not tried to do it, I would have been the biggest damn coward that God ever put on this earth.