27.VF Interview, 6; Siggers Interview. (back to text)
28.Kelley Interview. I want to express my profound appreciation to Carl Ellan Kelley for discussing her father with me; to Erma Franklin for agreeing to help me contact Ms. Kelley; and to Brenda Corbett, CLF’s niece, for calling Ms. Kelley before I did to introduce me to her on behalf of the family. The actions of these three Franklin family women typify the type of access and support I have been given by the Franklin family in the research for this book. Their commitment to an honest and thorough study of their exceptional father’s (or uncle’s) life and career has moved me personally and greatly aided my historical work. (back to text)
29.Kelley Interview; Hubbard Interview, 36; Black Interview (telephone). Mrs. Black was the only church member I found who was active in New Salem in 1940 and old enough to understand such events. (back to text)
30.Lizzie Moore Interview, 14. (back to text)
31.CLF, The Inner Conflict. (back to text)
32.Erma Franklin, “Memories of the Franklin Family,” 1, CLFP. (back to text)
33.Corbett Interview, 6-7; VF Interview, 4-5, 11, 12, 18, 42; Franklin, Aretha, 3-4; RF Interview, 18. (back to text)
34.Interview with Reverend B. T. Moore Sr. by author, 13-14 (hereafter cited as B. T. Moore Interview); VF Interview, 4; Hooks Interview, 4, 32; interview with Reverend Jasper Williams Jr. by author, 1-3 (hereafter cited as Jasper Williams Interview). (back to text)
35.For more discussion of this point see Boyer, “Contemporary Gospel,” 23-27; Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues, 154-55, and passim; Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come, 31; Jones, “An Interview with Henry H. Mitchell,” 92; Walker, “Somebody’s Calling My Name,” passim; Spencer, Sing a New Song; Neal, “Any Day Now,” 151-52. Neal writes: “At the pulsating core of their emotional center, the blues are the spiritual and ritual energy of the church thrust into eyes of life’s raw realities. [T]hey are, in fact, extensions of the deepest, most pragmatic spiritual and moral realities.” “Any Day Now,” 152. Reverend Rubin Lucy is quoted in Rosenberg, Can These Bones Live? 62. (back to text)
36.VF Interview, 13-14, 38; Black Interview (telephone); Rogers Interview, 27. (back to text)
37.Hosea Woods, “Fourth and Beale” (1929), in Taft, Blues Lyric Poetry, 320; Waters, “Memphis Man” (1923), in Taft, Blues Lyric Poetry, 288; Bessie Smith, “Beale Street Mama” (1923), on Smith, The Complete Recordings, Vol. 1; Handy, Father of the Blues, 101; Lee, Beale Street, 13; Escott, Good Rockin’ Tonight, preface (n.p.), 1. (back to text)
38.For a more detailed analysis of the complex racial classification of Jews and other European immigrants in America, see Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. (back to text)
39.Lee, Beale Street, 13, 62-3; Capers, The Biography of a River Town, 231-32; Frank Stokes, “South Memphis Blues” (1929), in Taft, Blues Lyric Poetry, 259. T-Bone Walker wrote “Stormy Monday” and first recorded it in 1942; it has since been covered by most major blues and blues-influenced rock artists. See Dance, Stormy Monday, 62, 90, 156-58, and the artist himself on Walker, Stormy Monday. For an account by a white Memphian of the midnight shows at the Palace, see Coppock, Memphis Memoirs, 211-15. (back to text)
40.Donelson Interview, 26; Black Interview (telephone); Guralnick, Lost Highways, 57, 60; Jon Pareles, “Rufus Thomas Dies at 84, Patriarch of Memphis Soul,” New York Times, December 19, 2001. Waters is quoted in McKee and Chisenhall, Beale Black and Blue, 233. (back to text)
41.In the early 1950s CLF had achieved the rank of a thirty-third degree Mason, the highest possible and one that took considerable time to reach. See CLF’s Masonic membership cards, CLFP. On the origins of the black Masons and Odd Fellows, see Salvatore, We All Got History, passim. Ellison’s comment is from a review of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma; the review was written in 1944 but not published until Ellison included it in Shadow and Act, 315-16, twenty years later. (back to text)
42.Donelson Interview, 28; McKee and Chisenhall, Beale Black and Blue, 68; McBee, “The Memphis Red Sox Stadium,” 153-57, 159-60, 162. (back to text)
43.Lee, Beale Street, 153-54, 157; Nager, Memphis Beat, 178-79; George, “Lucie E. Campbell: Baptist Composer and Educator,” 40. (back to text)
44.Mahalia Jackson, Movin’ On Up, 60-63; Duckett, “An Interview with Thomas A. Dorsey,” 5; Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues, 197-98 and passim; Ward-Royster, How I Got Over, 62-63, for a discussion of gospel guitarist Rosetta Tharpe. See also Boyer, “William Herbert Brewster,” 213-14, who stresses the “similarities,” but not a “real relationship,” between the musical structures of classic blues and gospel. (back to text)
45.Lornell, “Happy in the Service of the Lord,” 12-13, 43-44, 123-25; Donelson Interview, 20-22; Simone is quoted in Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 200. The core group of the original Pattersonairs can be heard on their 1984 recording Book of the Seven Seals. (back to text)
46.Brewster, “Rememberings,” 201, 209; Donelson Interview, 20. A few years later, Brewster recalled, “Elvis Presley came here [to East Trigg Baptist], a truck driver,” to absorb the gospel beat, “and now he is the greatest thing.” Brewster, “Remembering,” 112. On Mahalia Jackson’s recording see Goreau, Just Mahalia, Baby, 112, and Jackson, The Apollo Sessions, 1946-1951. On the politics of Memphis see Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR; Doyle, “Gestapo in Memphis”; Jasper, “Minority Vote Helped Ruin ‘Crump Machine’”; Biles, Memphis in the Great Depression, passim; Silver and Moeser, The Separate City, 48-49. Concerning segregation and violence toward blacks, see Miller, Memphis during the Progressive Era, 191-94; Johnson and associates, To Stem This Tide, 33, 70, 73; and the 1940 commentary of Benjamin E. Mays, president of Atlanta University, quoted in Silver and Moeser, The Separate City, 15. (back to text)
47.Donelson Interview, 19; CLF, Without a Song. Donelson knew Brewster “well” across four decades. (back to text)
48.Hubbard Interview, 28-29; Black Interview (telephone); Memphis World, February 25, 1944; Carbage Interview, 30; Donelson Interview, 20-21. On the role of the minister as a preacher in contrast with other duties, see Rooks, “Toward the Promised Land,” 27. (back to text)
49.James Interview, 10. (back to text)
50.National Baptist Convention, Proceedings of the Sixtieth Annual Session of the National Baptist Convention, 1940, 166. The wife of Reverend William Holmes Borders, pastor of Atlanta’s Wheat Street Baptist Church, implored her husband to use church funds for a round-the-world trip in the late 1950s with a self-serving argument that nonetheless contained a kernel of truth about the relationship between pastor and congregation: “Holmes, our people know they’ll never make such a trip themselves. Now, you came out of the same red gumbo Georgia clay that most of them did. You’ll be making this trip for them.” Quote attributed to Mrs. Holmes in English, Handyman of the Lord, 82-83. (back to text)
51.Telephone interview with Erma Franklin by author, November 9, 2001; Memphis World, May 21 and 25, 1943; Donelson Interview, 16-17; Rogers Interview, 16-17; CLF Interview, October 12, 1977, 44-46. CLF’s memory about this event is not fully accurate. While he recalls the horror of the incident clearly, he mistakes the names of some of those involved and places the event as much as a year later. For the basic story I have followed the more contemporary newspaper accounts. (back to text)
52.VF Interview, 28. On the issue of the streetcars and the protest against, and enforcement of, segregation, see National Baptist Voice, June 15, 1943; Memphis World, July 28, 1944; Johnson and associates, To Stem This Tide, 33. (back to text)
53.Clipping, Box 386-1, CAB; Webb, “Michaux as Prophet,” 3-4; English, Handyman of the Lord, 56-57. On gospel groups see Memphis World, April 16, 1943; Lornell, “Happy in the Service of the Lord,” 177. CLF Interview, November 8, 1977, 140-41, and May 3, 1978, 204, contain his recollections of the program. For a broader discussion of black radio during these years, see Savage, Broadcasting Fr
eedom. (back to text)
54.Memphis World, August 20, 1943. On Shirley Graham’s politics at this time see Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois, 385, 498, 526. Within a few years Graham would marry DuBois. (back to text)
55.Memphis World, August 20, 1943. Even a decade later, the radio program continued from New Salem; see Daniel, Lost Revolutions, 130-31. In 1940 a prominent druggist, J. B. Martin, was forced to leave Memphis for fear of his life because of his opposition to E. H. Crump’s political machine. See J. B. Martin to R. R. Church, March 20, 1941, Box 7, folder 12 (copy) and Claude A. Barnett to Wendell Wilkie, January 11, 1941, Box 7, folder 15 (copy), RRC; Memphis Commercial Appeal, November 13, 23, 1940. In 1943 Crump denied A. Phillip Randolph, the civil rights activist and trade unionist, permission to speak at Reverend Roy Love’s Mt. Nebo Baptist Church, under threats of wholesale arrest of the city’s black leaders especially. See “Randolph Denounces Crump Machine in Memphis,” special press release, Box 7, folder 1; and unsigned [Robert R. Church] to Honorable James B. Wright, November 18, 1943 (copy), Box 7, folder 27, RRC; Memphis World, November 5 and 12, 1943. On the fear generated among many black Memphians, see Donelson Interview, 31; Black Interview, 31-32. (back to text)
56.Johnson, 1943 Year Book and Directory, 10. On the War Bond Committee’s activities see Memphis World, February 23, 1943, and January 21, 1944; McKee and Chisenhall, Beale Black and Blue, 85; W. C. Handy to “Dear Friend Still” [William Grant Still], September 20, 1943, New York City, as reprinted in Southern, “In Retrospect,” 212. On the NAACP activities see Memphis World, April 13, 1943; on the “Double V” campaign see Sullivan, Days of Hope, 134-37. (back to text)
57.On Borders’s sermon see National Baptist Voice, April 1, 1943; Lischer, The Preacher King, 49. Borders’s “I Am Somebody” sermon generated a deluge of requests for transcripts. The sermon was adapted and later used by Reverends Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson and by the soul singer James Brown. (back to text)
4. THE EAGLE STIRRETH
1.Nat D. Williams, Focussing [sic] the News, Memphis World, July 2, 1943; Johnson, 1943 Year Book and Directory, 137. (back to text)
2.Hooks Interview, 5-6, 16; Appreciation Day Honoring Benjamin Lawson Hooks, Minister and Judge Appointee (Memphis, 1965), n.p.; Nat D. Williams, Focussing [sic] the News, Memphis World, June 29, 1943; Hattie Glenn, “Friendship Baptist Church,” Buffalo Criterion, May 22, 1943. (back to text)
3.Memphis World, June 29, July 2, 1943. (back to text)
4.Joshua 1:2 (KJV) (back to text)
5.Laymon, The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary on the Bible, 122-25. (This was one of the biblical commentaries, in its two-volume edition, that CLF used during his career; see CLF Interview, May 10, 1978, 242.) CLF notes his experience with the revival at Friendship in CLF Interview, November 30, 1977, 173. On the meaning of invoking the biblical text within the unfolding experience between preacher and congregation weekly, see Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones, 142; Mitchell, Black Preaching, 56; Davis, I Got the Word in Me, 67-68. (back to text)
6.Memphis World, July 2, 1943; interview with Charlie Thompson by author, 7 (hereafter cited as Thompson Interview); Donelson Interview, 6. On the place of this sermon in the Afro-Baptist tradition, see Spillers, “Fabrics of History,” 84 n. 3, 107; Bengston, “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest,” passim. (back to text)
7.Lyell, A Second Visit to North America, 2:2-4. For a more detailed discussion of Marshall and his church, see Raboteau, Slave Religion, 189-94, 198-99. (back to text)
8.Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 99; Mays, The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Literature, 59. For a powerful and thoughtful analysis of this spiritual experience among Afro-Americans throughout the western hemisphere, see Marks, “Uncovering Ritual Structures in Afro-American Music.” (back to text)
9.CLF did offer another version of this sermon in 1963, one that was dramatically different, both longer and more historically oriented. It was not received as well as the 1953 version and, significantly, it was one of the few sermons CLF actually wrote down before delivering. See CLF’s Jewel version of The Eagle Stirs Her Nest. (back to text)
10.See Exodus chaps. 20-23; Deuteronomy 31:19 and 32:11-12 (KJV). The text of this sermon is the last citation. (back to text)
11.John Lewis’s description of whooping is useful here: “Ah, it’s not just the minister speaking to the congregation but it’s also the congregation speaking to the minister and together they’re reaching to a much higher level. Something is happening there.” Interview with John Lewis by author, 5 (hereafter cited as Lewis Interview). (back to text)
12.I follow here Jeff Todd Titon’s presentation of the whooped sermon in poetic form; see Titon, Give Me This Mountain, 41-45. (back to text)
13.CLF, The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest (Chess version). Years later CLF recalled that a LeMoyne College professor once preached this sermon at New Salem, using the eagle as a symbol of freedom, and suggested that Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington “and all of the well-known blacks that had succeeded” followed in the path of that symbol. See CLF Interview, November 1, 1977, 96-97. What record producer Jerry Wexler once said of the rhythm and blues star Wilson Pickett applied to CLF as well: “Wilson would scream notes where other screamers just scream sound.” Quoted in Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music, 214. For analyses of the chanted sermon and its ritual context, see Marks, “Uncovering Ritual Structures in Afro-American Music,” 64-67; Mitchell, Black Preaching, 120-21; Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones, passim; Rosenberg, “The Psychology of the Spiritual Sermon,” 137-38; Lischer, The Preacher King, 114. On CLF’s performance of his sermons see Kyles Interview, 34; Jasper Williams Interview, 10. (back to text)
14.Ralph Ellison, “Living with Music” (1955), in Ellison, Living with Music, 5-6. See also Henry H. Mitchell’s insightful discussion of the “common characteristics between black preaching and jazz improvisation” in Jones, “An Interview with Henry H. Mitchell,” 92. (back to text)
15.CLF Interview, October 12, 1977, 44; Buffalo Criterion, January 15, 1944. CLF mistakenly dates the gift of the suit to a time before Jenkins’s death. (back to text)
16.Memphis World, January 28, February 25, 1944; Mission Board of the B. M. and E. Convention of Tennessee, First Inspirational and Evangelistic Regional Meeting, n.p.; Donelson Interview, 33. (back to text)
17.Buffalo Criterion, March 25, 1944. CLF remembered this moment differently, and erroneously, decades later. He recalled that some at Friendship “opposed me in ways, or my methods, but they were not overt.” Most in the congregation, he accurately recounted, “liked me as a preacher but they also had to feel that I was an asset to the church.” CLF Interview, November 30, 1977, 172-74. (back to text)
18.Nat D. Williams, “Focussing [sic] the News,” Memphis World, July 9, 1943. On black migration see Grossman, Land of Hope; Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land; Trotter, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective. (back to text)
19.On Friendship see Buffalo Criterion, April 10, 1943; Memphis World, February 26, 1943; CLF Interview, October 14, 1977, 60-61; CLF Interview, November 30, 1977, 170-71. Jenkins’s ministry in Buffalo is recounted in the Buffalo Criterion, January 16, January 23, February 13, February 20, March 27, April 10 and 17, May 22, and June 12, 1943. See also Memphis World, February 26, 1943. (back to text)
20.On the harassment of blacks during World War II, see Johnson and associates, To Stem This Tide, 33, 73; Memphis World, July 28, 1944. On Randolph in Memphis see Robert R. Church Jr. (unsigned copy) to Honorable James Wright, November 18, 1943, n.p., Box 7, folder 27, RRC; A. Philip Randolph, “Speech at Memphis, Tennessee, First Baptist Church,” and A. Philip Randolph, “An Open Letter to E. H. Crump,” April 6, 1944 (copy), Box 4, folder 44, RRC; Memphis World, November 5 and 12, 1943; March 28 and April 4, 1944; Tucker, Black Pastors and Leaders, 135-43; Black Interview, 31. On Jenkins see Buffalo Criterion, February 26, 1943. (back to text)
21.Carbage Interview, 9; Hub
bard Interview, 36-37; Lizzie Moore Interview, 14. (back to text)
22.Buffalo Criterion, June 3, 1944. Placing the demands of career over family was anything but unusual among ministers. Thomas A. Dorsey, the famous gospel blues composer and performer, left his wife near childbirth in Chicago to preach a revival in St. Louis. The indescribable pain he endured following the death of both wife and child while still in St. Louis he ultimately transformed into the haunting power of his well-known hymn “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” See Dorsey’s introduction to his and Marion Williams’s version of the hymn on Dorsey, Precious Lord. (back to text)
23.The population of Buffalo in 1940 was 575,901, of whom 17,694 (3.1 percent) were black. Of these African Americans, about 88 percent (15,549) lived in the Lower East Side neighborhood. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, vol. 2, pt. 5, Population: Characteristics, 136-37; Childs, The Political Black Minister, 52; Kraus, Race, Neighborhoods, and Community Power, 43-48. A decade later, the city’s population had increased minimally to 580,132, but black residents had more than doubled to 36,645, of whom some 79 percent (29,127) lived in the neighborhood. Despite the increase, black residents still accounted for only 6.3 percent of the city’s population. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Decennial Census of the United States, 1950, vol. 2, pt. 32, Population: Characteristics, 32-52; Imse, Metropolitan Buffalo Perspectives, 7; Reid, The Negro Baptist Ministry, 3; Kraus, Race, Neighborhoods, and Community Power, 44. The social and cultural milieu of Eddie Wenzak’s bar is sensitively evoked in Klinkenborg, The Last Fine Time. (back to text)
24.See Buffalo News, November 10, 1930, and March 20, 1939; Buffalo Courier-Express, January 18, 1947. (back to text)
25.CLF Interview, November 30, 1977, 170-71, 175-76; VF Interview, 17; interview with Edward Lee Billups by author, 13-14 (hereafter cited as Billups Interview); Michigan Chronicle, September 5, 1964; National Baptist Convention, Proceedings of the Sixty-fifth Annual Session of the National Baptist Convention, 1945, 240. (back to text)
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