Big Road Blues

Show Notes:

For today’s show we head to Memphis circa the 1920’s and 30’s. Memphis was was loaded with talented musicians, many of whom got the opportunity to make records. Way back in 2008 we did a show devoted to Memphis blues of the 20’s and 30’s but one show is not enough to capture the abundance of talent that got on record. Today’s show digs considerably deeper, as we investigate the Memphis blues over four programs.

In the notes to Yazoo’s Memphis Masters, Don Kent writes: “Of all the Southern cities that flourished with traditional blues in the period between the world Wars, none offered more dazzling diversity and top-drawer quality musicians than Memphis. …The size of Memphis, and the pool of talent on which it was able to draw, attracted record companies who sought salable talent to offer their customers. Beale Street, with it’s wide-open vice, gambling and barrelhouses, was an attraction in itself to the rural out-of-towner intent on a good time and, since the early 1900’s, a gathering place for musicians looking for work. There is a pronounced ragtime and country-dance flavor to Memphis blues, in addition to vaudeville, medicine show, jazz and pop influence as well as the different regional styles brought by musicians from other areas. Most of the musicians who established roots in Memphis knew each other, played together.”

Writing at the end of the 1960’s, researcher Begnt Olsson wrote: “Some years ago Beale Street was a rough, tough, gambling, whoring, cutting, musical, living street. Money was spent on cards, woman and whiskey. The liqueur and the music flowed in the many dives along Beale; ambulances howled; men and women were killed. Expensive cars were parked outside the gambling houses.” And as Will Shade recalled: “Beale Street, Memphis-there used to be a red light district, so forth like that. Used to be wide open houses in them days. You could used to walk down the street in days of 1900 and like that you and you could find a man wit’ throat cut from y’ear to ear. Also you could finds people lyin’ dead wit’ not their throat cut, money took and everything in their pockets, took out of their pockets and thrown outside the house. Sometime you find them with no clothes on and such as that. 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.”

Beale Street was created in 1841 by entrepreneur and developer Robertson Topp. In the 1870’s Robert Church purchased land around Beale Street that would eventually lead to his becoming the first black millionaire from the south. In 1890, Beale Street underwent renovation with the addition of the Grand Opera House, later known as the Orpheum. In 1899, Church paid the city to create Church Park at the corner of 4th and Beale. In the early 1900’s, Beale Street was filled with many clubs, restaurants and shops, many of them owned by African-Americans. In 1903, Mayor Thornton was looking for a music teacher for his Knights of Pythias Band and called Tuskegee Institute to talk to his friend, Booker T. Washington, who recommended a trumpet player in Clarksdale, Mississippi named W. C. Handy. Mayor Thornton contacted Handy, and Memphis became the home of the musician who created the “Blues on Beale Street.” In 1909, W. C. Handy wrote “Mr. Crump” as a campaign song for political machine leader E. H. Crump. The song was later renamed “The Memphis Blues” (we open our series of program’s with the Victor Military Band’s “The Memphis Blues”  recorded on July 15, 1914). Handy also wrote a song called “Beale Street Blues” in 1916 which influenced the change of the street’s name from Beale Avenue to Beale Street.

Over the course of these show we dig deep into the music of several Memphis artists/bands who recorded prolifically including Frank Stokes, Furry Lewis, Jim Jackson, Robert Wilkins, Memphis Jug Band, Jack Kelly & His South Memphis, Cannon’s Jug Stompers and Memphis Minnie & Kansas Joe. According to researcher T. DeWayne Moore: “In the 1910s, Stokes often toured with Garfield Akers (as blackface songsters, buck dancers, and comedians) in the Doc Watts Medicine Show, which toured the South during the Great War. …While Stokes sometimes performed in the larger touring companies, such as the Ringling Brother’s Circus, informants more often associated him with the medicine shows that toured around the southern states. …In 1920, after almost a decade on intermittent tours with various medicine shows, Stokes came back to the Memphis area and started working in a blacksmith shop on the corner of Democrat Lane in the small hamlet of Oakville. …On Saturdays in Oakville, he’d play outside the J. J. Arnold Grocery Store, located in the heart of Oakville, where everyone was hanging out. According to his wife Lula: ‘If you was there on Saturday night you just couldn’t get through in no way! The place was crowded as could be…white folks too; they was crazy ‘bout Frank – called him lotsa times ‘cause they wanted him to play fer ‘em. [He] played all those foxtrots and waltzes for ‘em.'”

As Don Kent notes: “If there was any one person who epitomized Memphis blues, it would have to be Frank Stokes, whose diversified repertoire seemed to embody black rural music up to the point of his recording.” Stokes was already playing the streets of Memphis by the turn of the century; about the same time the blues began to flourish. A medicine show and house party favorite, Stokes, either solo, with Dan Sane (as The Beale Street Sheiks) and sometimes fiddler Will Batts, Stokes recorded 38 sides for Paramount and Victor between 1927 and 1929.

Furry Lewis started performing on Beale Street in the late teens, where he began his career. Lewis’s recording career began in April 1927, with a trip to Chicago to record for the Vocalion label, which resulted in five songs. In October of 1927 Lewis was back in Chicago to cut six more songs. Lewis gave up music as a profession during the mid-’30s, when the Depression reduced the market for country blues. At the end of the 1950’s blues scholar Sam Charters discovered Lewis and persuaded him to resume his music career. Gradually, as the 1960s and the ensuing blues boom wore on, Lewis emerged as one of the favorite rediscovered stars of the 1930s, playing festivals, appearing on talk shows, and recording.

Born in Hernando, Mississippi in 1890, Jim Jackson took an interest in music early on, learning the rudiments of guitar from his father. By the age of 15, he was already steadily employed in local medicine shows and by his 20’s was working the country frolic and juke joint circuit, usually in the company of Gus Cannon and Robert Wilkins. After joining up with the Silas Green Minstrel Show, he settled in Memphis, working clubs with Furry Lewis, Gus Cannon, and Will Shade. The 1920s found him regularly working with his Memphis cronies, finally recording his best-known tune, “Kansas City Blues” and a batch of other classics by the end of the decade. He also appeared in one of the early talkies, Hallelujah!, in 1929.

Robert Wilkins was another prominent Memphis bluesman who, like Lewis, was originally born in Mississippi but made his fame in Memphis. Wilkins’ early performing life included touring with small vaudeville and minstrel shows. In 1928, he met Ralph Peer of the Victor label and was invited to cut four songs. Vocalion recorded eight new songs the following year. In 1935 he cut four more sides for Vocalion and shortly afterwards joined the Church of God in Christ and became a minister. Wilkins was rediscovered in the 1960’s and performed and recorded gospel material along with the blues. In 1964 he recorded the wonderful Memphis Gospel Singer for the Piedmont label as well as a handful of other recordings.

The Memphis Jug Band was one of the most popular musical groups of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s and arguably the most important jug band in the history of the blues. Born in Memphis in 1894, Will Shade (also known as Son Brimmer) was the founder of the Memphis Jug Band.  After performing around Memphis and touring with medicine shows for a few years, Shade formed the group in the mid-1920’s after being inspired by the records of the influential Louisville jug band, the Dixieland Jug Blowers. Between 1927 and 1934, the Memphis Jug Band made over some 80-odd sides for Victor, Champion, and OKeh, achieving considerable fame and commercial success. In addition to the sides cut under the Memphis Jug Band name, we also play sides by those who worked with the band, cutting sides under their own name but usually backed by members of the band. The group also worked with several female singers including Shade’s wife, Jennie Clayton, Minnie Wallace, Memphis Minnie and the magnificent Hattie Hart.

Singer/guitarist Jack Kelly was the front man of the South Memphis Jug Band, a popular string band whose music owed a heavy debt to the blues as well as minstrel songs, vaudeville numbers, reels and rags. He led the group in tandem with fiddler Will Batts, and they made their first recordings in 1933, cutting some two-dozen sides between August 1 and 3rd for Banner and ARC. Kelly recorded again in 1939. Throughout the forties and fifties Jack Kelly remained playing in Memphis finally teaming up with harmonica player Walter Horton. In 1952 they recorded two numbers for Sun records as Jackie Boy and Little Walter.

Gus Cannon learned early repertoire in the 1890’s from older musicians, notably Mississippian Alec Lee. The early 1900’s found him playing around Memphis with songster Jim Jackson and forming a partnership with Noah Lewis, whose harmonica wizardry would be basic to the Jug Stompers’ sound. In 1914, Cannon began work with a succession of medicine shows that would continue into the 1940’s. His recording career began with Paramount sessions in 1927 cut under the name Banjo Joe and also made sides with Blind Blake. In 1928 he began recording as Cannon’s Jug Stompers, cutting over two-dozen sides with the group through 1930 for Victor. He returned in 1956 to make a few recordings for Folkways Records and made some college and coffee house appearances with Furry Lewis and Bukka White. In 1963 the Rooftop Singers had a hit with “Walk Right In” and in the wake of that recorded an album for Stax Records in 1963. He cut a few other scattered sides before his death in 1979.

For nearly 30 years Memphis Minnie was, along with Big Bill Broonzy and Tampa Red, was one of the giants of the Chicago blues scene. Between 1929 and 1953 she recorded some 200 sides for a variety of labels. When she was seven years old, the Douglas family moved to Wall, Mississippi, just south of Memphis. She began to run away to Memphis’ Beale Street with some regularity. Guitarists Frank Stokes and Furry Lewis…both provided advice and inspiration to Minnie in her early days in Memphis. Minnie’s duets with Kansas Joe drew as much inspiration from the guitar teamwork of Frank Stokes and Dan Sane, who recorded as the Beale Street Sheiks, as from her own early ‘partnership’ with Willie Brown.” Robert Wilkins also recalled Minnie from these days and recalls teaching her a few things. On Beale Street she played with local musicians such as Jed Davenport, the Memphis Jug Band and Jack Kelly. Her marriage and recording debut came in 1929, to and with Kansas Joe McCoy, when a Columbia Records talent scout heard them playing in a Beale Street barbershop. The duo’s relationship with Vocalion began in February 1930 and would last nearly a decade with a few interruptions waxing dates for Okeh, Decca and Bluebird.