It Came From Memphis: Updated and Revised
392
It Came From Memphis: Updated and Revised
392eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781734842265 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Third Man Books |
| Publication date: | 02/09/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Peter Guralnick has been called “a national resource” by critic Nat Hentoff for work that has argued passionately and persuasively for the vitality of this country’s intertwined black and white musical traditions. His books include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. Of the first Bob Dylan wrote, “Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe. This book cancels out all others.” He won a Grammy for his liner notes for Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club and wrote and coproduced the documentary Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll as well as writing the scripts for the Grammy-winning documentary Sam Cooke/Legend and Martin Scorsese’s blues documentary Feel Like Going Home. He is a recent inductee in the Blues Hall of Fame. Other books include an acclaimed trilogy on American roots music, Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going Home; the biographical inquiry Searching for Robert Johnson; and the novel, Nighthawk Blues. His latest book, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, has been hailed as “monumental, panoramic, an epic tale told against a backdrop of brilliant, shimmering music, intense personal melodrama, and vast social changes.” He is currently working on a biography of Sam Phillips
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, and was met with critical acclaim. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Read an Excerpt
When night settled on the town in 1949, Memphis, despite its big city aspirations, was as quiet as a distant country crossroads. Citizens sighed in the glow of their American happiness. In November of that year, after months of test patterns, Memphis's first TV station began filling homes with the warmth that radiated from their newfangled sets. We the People, Circus Animals, and the puppet show Kukla, Fran & Ollie all confirmed that life after World War II was good. In the older medium of radio, 1948 had been a watershed year. In late October, the city's sixth station, WDIA, confronted the audience's lack of interest in yet another place on the dial playing country, pop, and light classical. With nothing to lose but their failing year-old operation, owners Bert Ferguson and John Pepper enlisted Nat. D. Williams, a nationally-syndicated black Memphis journalistv, as host of a forty-five-minute afternoon show. The response was so overwhelming—including the obligatory bomb threats—that by the summer of 1949, WDIA became the first station in the United States with an entire cast of black disc jockeys. The impact was enormous. The bullets of World War II had recognized no color, and the movement toward civil rights was fomented by the returning serviceman and their demands for equality. In an era of condoned, organized racism, WDIA became a community bulletin board, a public institution that celebrated instead of insulted forty percent of Memphis's population. I remember when the black ambulances could not haul white people, says Gatemouth Moore, the station's first gospel programmer. "They had a white company, I'll never forget, called Thompson's. I was on my way to the station, and when I come around the curve there was the ambulance from S. W. Quall's with the door open, and there was a white lady laying in the ditch, bleeding. And they were waiting for Thompson's to come and pick her up. Quall's couldn't pick her up. I guess I waited thirty or forty minutes and still no ambulance. They tell me that the lady died. So I came to WDIA and told the tale. I said, 'Look here.' I said, 'Black folks put their hands in your flour and make your bread, they cook the meat, they clean up your house, and here's this fine aristocratic white lady laying in the ditch bleeding and they won't let black hands pick her up and rush her to the hospital.' And the next week, they changed that law where a black ambulance could pick up anybody. I got that changed on WDIA." In a few years, WDIA would be the most powerful station in Memphis, but the repercussions of its format were felt immediately. WHBQ, an older station also in financial straits, put economics before apartheid and when "the mother station of Negroes" went off the air at sunset, WHBQ began broadcasting rhythm and blues. Not ready to hire a black personality, they relied instead on one of their dulcet- toned announcers, Gorden Lawhead. He named the program after a Broadway play, "Red, Hot & Blue," but it was none of those. Lawhead epitomized the white radio announcer of the era, as innocuous as its pop music: Perry Como's "Some Enchanted Evening," Evelyn Knight's "A Little Bird Told Me," Gene Autry's "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Lawhead neither understood nor appreciated R&B. In the spacious night, after parents retreated to the soothing murmur of TV, the baby boomers found comfort in their radios. They kept the volume low enough not to attract attention, and the light from the dial brought comfort to the total darkness. A little fiddling with the tuner exposed creatures from another dimension. Many of the local stations vanished with the sun, leaving chasms filled by voices from Mexico, from Nashville, from alien places that played alien music. Pop had a certain glide to it, but this music went thump. Thump thump. It was mysterious how far the sound travelled to reach beneath the cotton blankets. The distance was twice what these future witnesses to the birth of rock and roll realized. Many of these records originated right in their own town, but had to travel to distant radio stations to achieve their popularity. Howlin' Wolf. Rosco Gordon. Junior Parker's "Mystery Train." The music sounded crazy when border radio stations sent it through the reaches of dark night, but that paled beside the frightening live performances by the artists just a few miles away and tanked on bad whiskey. Beale Street was in downtown Memphis, and it was the Mississippi Delta's largest plantation. It was where black people could relax, unencumbered by Jim Crow because few whites patronized Beale. Those that did were mostly the street’s landlords, and they liked to see a busy place. Beale Street and the surrounding neighborhood was the mid-South's African- American commerce center, adjacent to downtown Memphis, the white commerce center. Beale was more compact and always hopping. This is the street where the zoot suit was created, where a single amateur night produced Rufus Thomas, B. B. King, Bobby Bland, and Johnny Ace, and the clubs launched Howlin' Wolf, Hank Crawford, and Phineas Newborn Jr. "Wide open" is the term usually applied to Beale. Gambling, drinking, policy shaking—had a joint on every corner, recalls pianist Booker T. Laury, born in 1914. "They had a restaurant in the front, you get hot dog and fish sandwiches, and ladies in the next room had a little place set aside for a dance hall. Every crap house had a dance hall. On back a little further, they had a dice table, and the men leave the women up there to be entertained whilst I'd play the blues to 'em. The men would be back there shooting a few craps. Every day, that was the routine. The doors didn't close. They stayed open all night. Changed shifts from twelve to twelve." The multitude of clubs on Beale Street established the thriving music scene in the city and, by attracting and nurturing regional talent, was directly responsible for both Sun and Stax Records. The core of venues on Beale spawned other clubs around town and also across the river in West Memphis, Arkansas. There was plenty of work for a large number of bands, orchestras, and soloists, and the constant flow of people in and out of Memphis assured an audience. The variety of styles, the opportunities to mix them together, and the plenitude of venues helped forge the groundwork for a musical aura in Memphis that remains to this day. In 1949, eleven years after Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" demonstrated the power of radio, another voice from outer space chewed up Memphis and spit it back in its ear. Channeling the same spirit that had lain dormant since tuning Robert Johnson's guitar at the crossroads, a white disc jockey interrupted the satiny WHBQ broadcast. "Dee-gaw!" the radio squawked, and it chilled the parents' bones because they heard something different and knew it meant change. "Dee- gaw!" the detached voice drawled, and the kids leaned closer to the speaker. They heard a jumble of words that was like Captain Midnight's code; you had to listen closely to keep up. Dewey Phillips wasn't coming in for a landing, he was taking off. Broadcasting from right downtown "on the magazine—uh, mezzanine floor of the Chisca Hotel," he was no farther away than where a visiting relative or a father's war buddy might stay. Thump. Thump thump. Daddy-O-Dewey. He is best known as the first disc jockey to play Elvis Presley, but the legacy of Dewey Phillips is every attempt by a white Memphis kid to play black music, from the first generation of rock and roll right through Stax Records. His listeners learned not to distinguish between races or genres. He demonstrated that the boundaries of "normal" were arbitrary, and heralded a freedom that society shunned. Many took heart in the realization they might be able, like Dewey, to parlay their own particular weirdness, oddity, or eccentricity into a career. Nowhere else in society was such non-conformist thought publicly condoned. It has taken forty years of corporate rock and roll to rebuild the walls Dewey Phillips broke down. The very fact that Dewey got on the air indicates the force of his character. He was everything that a dee jay in 1949 was not. He had been spinning records in the phonograph department at W. T. Grant's in downtown Memphis, howling over the store's intercom and causing a roo-kus. Rocking and rolling. People, including Sam Phillips (no relation), would come in just to listen to his mad ramblings. Management found that Dewey was unmanageable, but they couldn't argue with the crowds he drew. Something about whatever it was he was doing worked.