Author: Andria Lisle

Last year, David Less lost a bundle in the stock market, so he decided to start a record company. While that may not seem like a logical decision to most people, for Less, it made total sense. “Losing money in the market wasn’t much fun, so this year, I decided to lose in the record business and have a good time doing it,” Less says before backing up to clarify things. “Not try to lose it, of course, but finance a label of my own. Then I can control it and maybe even make some money.”

Less, a longtime veteran of the Memphis music scene, founded Memphis International Records with out-of-town friend and industry insider Bob Merlis. The nascent label makes its debut this month with releases from a generation-spanning trio of local roots-music stars: pre-rock icon Harmonica Frank Floyd, Soulsville queen Carla Thomas, and present-day blues virtuoso Alvin Youngblood Hart. Less and Merlis plan to release six discs a year on Memphis International, signing artists on a per-project basis rather than investing in long-term contracts. The label has a national distribution deal with Rykodisc and offices in Memphis and Los Angeles. Its inaugural releases hit the racks on July 9th.

Less got his start in the music business as a writer, penning columns under the tutelage of Robert Palmer, the late New York Times music critic, and was published in Rolling Stone and Downbeat magazines in their heydays. He clocked late hours at Pop Tunes and spent his free time catching Memphis’ best musicians onstage and off. He’s produced the Beale Street Music Fest and managed Mud Island. He served as executive director of the Blues Foundation for many years and continues to work as a music consultant.

“It never occurred to me when I was growing up in Memphis that there was anything special here,” Less explains. “I thought every town in America had a Rufus Thomas or an Elvis Presley. In Memphis, Reverend Robert Wilkins was my next door neighbor, Furry Lewis swept the streets, and Gus Cannon was a lawn boy. Jerry Lee Lewis’ drummer fixed lawnmowers,” he recalls.

Merlis also caught the music bug early. “I’ve collected records since I was born,” Merlis jokes in a phone interview. He grew up on the East Coast then relocated to Los Angeles for a job with Warner Brothers Records. He quickly moved up the ranks in the company, becoming a senior vice president in communications.

Less and Merlis met a decade ago via the Blues Foundation. “I always thought I’d start a label,” Less confesses. “So when the economy tanked, I called Bob. We each had 25 to 30 years’ experience in the record business, and he’d just left Warner Brothers to open a public-relations firm.” Shortly thereafter, Memphis International was born.

“We’re not here to revolutionize Memphis music. That’s not our goal,” Less says. “We’re self-financed, and we each have other businesses, so we don’t have much overhead. Neither of us takes a salary out. All the money we put in is on the albums themselves.”

Harmonica Frank Floyd’s The Missing Link is the label’s first official release. The late Floyd was a hobo legend, and as a hillbilly bluesman, he was a musical anomaly. Born in the backwoods of North Mississippi in 1908, Floyd took to wandering when he was just 14, entertaining small-town folks for dinner and spare change. He honed his musical skills (Floyd sang and played guitar and harmonica) in tent shows and carnivals, winding his way to Memphis, where he recorded for Sam Phillips. Released on Sun in 1954, “Rocking Chair Daddy” is a percussive romp, part rockabilly, part blue yodel. The record never hit, and Floyd went back on the road.

Fast-forward to 1979, when Floyd — older, yes, but not changed in the least — returned to Memphis to play a series of shows at schools around town, shows fortuitously recorded by Less and Jim Dickinson. The Missing Link is drawn from these late-life performances, which reveal Floyd still in great form (“a true original American beauty,” Dickinson proclaims in the liner notes), hamming it up with suggestive humor and old vaudeville routines between numbers.

Floyd rips through traditional blues tunes (“Howlin’ Tomcat,” “Deep Ellum Blues,” “Sitting On Top Of the World”), folk obscurities (“Moonshiner’s Daughter,” “Sweet Farm Girl”), and hard-driving original compositions (“Shoop-A-Boop-A-Doodler,” “Swamp Root,” “Rocking Chair Daddy”) with equal enthusiasm. Worth the price alone is Floyd’s incredible medicine-show routine, “The Great Medical Menagerist.” The Missing Link shines and stupefies on every track.

“Jim and I have been sitting on that album for 23 years,” Less says. “We didn’t know what to do with it! Frank was an old friend. He came in every year, and we’d have a fish fry for him and set up some shows.”

Carla Thomas & Friends’ Live In Memphis comes next in the Memphis International catalog. Recorded early last year at the Art Village on South Main, the record is a reunion of sorts for Thomas and soul veterans William Brown, Bobby Manuel, Ronnie Williams, Dan Penn, and Spooner Oldham. And, on one level, it’s a sentimental journey: Many of the musicians hadn’t played together, or even seen each other, in decades. But Live In Memphis is more than a postcard from the past and even more than an aural snapshot of the event it captures. This album is a celebration, a jubilant salutation to the city’s past and future as Soulsville USA, the capital of Southern soul music.

Thomas’ vocal inflections and buoyant spirit are in perfect form here. From the opening notes of “Lovey Dovey” to the “I’ll Take You There” finale, she demonstrates the talent that took her from a Teen Town Singer to the forefront of the Stax roster. “B-A-B-Y” sounds as good as it did in ’61, Thomas squealing the lyrics over a crackerjack horn section that alternately swoons and soars as it penetrates the mix.

Brown’s performance on “634-5789” is nothing short of phenomenal: He screams, shouts, and works the crowd with ease then effortlessly pulls back to deliver the poignant “These Arms Of Mine.” Thomas, meanwhile, pulls out all the stops for “Gee Whiz,” her signature number. “Stax was our kingdom and Carla was our queen,” Isaac Hayes writes in the liner notes, and on “Gee Whiz,” Thomas shows why she deserves to wear the crown.

Releasing Live In Memphis was a particular coup for Merlis. “I had a date with Carla for one of the early Handy Award shows,” he says. “I picked her up at her mom and dad’s house — it was incredible. Spending time with the Thomas family was like a dream come true.” A Stax fan to the core, Merlis had “Walking the Dog” played at his wedding instead of the traditional march. “That was in ’69,” Merlis recalls. “I’m no longer married, but I’ve still got the memory!”

Alvin Youngblood Hart’s Down In the Alley rounds out the first batch of releases. An exquisite collection of traditional acoustic blues, Down In the Alley was recorded in mono with a vintage RCA DX77 microphone. Hart unsurprisingly excels at this experiment. His voice seems timeless and all-knowing, a portal to the past and the future of American music.

Though Down In the Alley is a straight blues album, Merlis says that he doesn’t want Memphis International to be thought of as a blues label. “Alvin told me not to box him in as a blues artist,” Merlis says. “‘I like Led Zeppelin and Son House,’ he told me, and I think that reflects our label philosophy too.” “We don’t want to be genre-specific,” Less adds. “We’ve created a format called ‘music we like.'”

“If we don’t lose money, we’re doing great,” Merlis says. “That’s my mantra.”

It’s fitting that Etta James is playing Memphis on the Fourth of July. After all, the defiant diva has lived a life defined by independence for 64 years. Songs like “W-O-M-A-N” spell out a lifetime of rebellion, while her autobiography, Rage To Survive, co-authored by David Ritz, tells it like it is: “I wanted to be exotic as a Cotton Club chorus girl, and as obvious as the most flamboyant hooker on the street. I just wanted to be.”

Born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles, James learned independence from the very beginning. Her mother, Dorothy Hawkins, a small-time hustler who left her baby with friends and relatives for months at a time, was just 14 when Etta was born. The whereabouts of her daddy was another mystery. While Dorothy named a handful of men who may or may not have impregnated her, James maintains that pool shark Minnesota Fats — whom she never knew — was her real father.

Living with cousins in suburban L.A., young James was introduced to music at the St. Paul Baptist Church, where she heard Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Sallie Martin Singers belt out hymns. She joined the Echoes of Eden choir before she turned 10, schooled by gospel singer Professor James Earle Hines, who was impressed with the pint-sized talent. “Don’t back off those notes, Jamesetta,” he’d tell her. “Attack ’em, grab ’em, claim those suckers. Sing ’em like you own ’em!”

It was advice she never forgot. At just 14, James auditioned for R&B impresario Johnny Otis with her group the Creolettes. Impressed by the youngster’s deep, husky voice, Otis took her under his wing. The first thing he did was change her name from Jamesetta Hawkins to Etta James. Next, he took her into the studio on Thanksgiving Eve 1953, where she recorded “Roll With Me, Henry” for Modern Records. The song was an instant smash, and James quit school halfway through the ninth grade to go on the road. She was a precocious child — and extremely wild. “I was no Suzy Creamcheese,” she recalls in Rage To Survive. “I was serious about turning little churchgoing Jamesetta into a tough bitch called Etta James.”

With her platinum-blond hair, smooth, coffee complexion, and hourglass figure, James commanded attention wherever she went. She literally poured herself into her stage outfits, store-bought dresses that she tailored to her voluptuous frame. Men were captivated by the sassy young woman with the sensual voice, but most fellow musicians saw her as one of the boys.

Songwriter Richard Berry, vocalist Jessie Belvin, and guitarist Little John Watson (who launched a second career as Johnny “Guitar” Watson in the ’70s) befriended James and did what they could to help her. Berry wrote her second hit, “Good Rockin’ Daddy,” in ’55, and Belvin provided backing vocals on the number. Watson encouraged her to move to Chicago’s blues-oriented Chess label in 1960.

At Chess, James modeled her delivery after the greats — Lowell Fulson, Amos Milburn, and Ray Charles. The self-penned “All I Could Do Was Cry” was her first hit for the label. Other tunes, including the luscious “At Last,” “Something’s Got a Hold On Me,” and the tremendous “I’d Rather Go Blind,” solidified it: Etta James was a bona-fide soul superstar.

But trouble was on the way. James’ don’t-mess-with-me attitude caused problems first, a recklessness that soon led to a serious drug habit.

“More than booze or weed or cocaine, heroin hit me hard,” James admitted in her book. “I loved it. It took me where I wanted to go — far away, out of it — and in a hurry. The danger was thrilling.” Drugs provided a bond for James and her men friends, and they helped keep her weight under control.

Boyfriends were another problem. She associated with pimps and drug dealers who used her fame and wealth to further their own shady careers. James was often beaten and mentally abused, but she acknowledges that “it was just how it went” in those days. Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin often worked with her on the road, and they were also subjected to similar mistreatment from their abusive husbands. “We were all going through hell with men, but never talked about it,” James wrote. “If there was an understanding, it was silent, hidden in a secret part of ourselves we were too scared to look at.”

James couldn’t hold her world together under so much strain, and it eventually came crashing down around her. In 1964, she was sent to New York’s prison at Riker’s Island for passing bad checks. Four months on the 13th floor of Chicago’s Cook County Jail came next. Leonard Chess sent her to a clinic in California to clean up her act. It was just in time — James contracted tetanus from a dirty needle and barely survived the experience. Down to 148 pounds, and with her hair newly bleached, she returned to New York a new woman. She started snorting heroin again a day later.

In 1969, she was back in prison. She spent her 35th birthday there and didn’t clean up until giving birth to her son Donto soon after. Another family-inspired career turning point came in 1993, when James reconciled with her mother. Her Mystery Lady album, released a year later, was dedicated to Dorothy — and it netted James her first Grammy.

These days, James’ career is going stronger than ever, as her latest release, Burnin’ Down the House, attests. Captured live at a December 2001 House of Blues performance, James rocks her way through a dozen numbers, including the tearjerker “I’d Rather Go Blind” and a punchy, passionate take on “All the Way Down.”

“At Last,” James’ biggest hit, is hands down the highlight of Burnin’ Down the House and a standard she’s sure to perform during her rare Memphis performance at the Lounge. The song, a deceptively simple ballad, would be a fitting finale for a night filled with fireworks. “At last,” James sings with an earthy conviction born from years of pain, “My love has come along/My lonely days are over/And life is like a song.”

Few musical moments sound so free.

“In a town this size, there’s no place to hide.

Everywhere you go, you meet someone you know.

You can’t steal a kiss in a place like this.

How the rumors do fly in a town this size.”

— from “In a Town This Size” by Kieran Kane

Though he was born smack-dab in the middle of Mississippi, in Kosciusko, Charlie Musselwhite grew up in Memphis. So, while his voice is pure Delta — words drip off his tongue like molasses — Musselwhite is, by all accounts, a city boy. From Memphis, he migrated to Chicago as a teenager in 1962 — “like thousands of others,” he says, “after those big factory jobs” — then, five years later, headed west to northern California.

In Chicago, he hooked up with Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson, dislocated Mississippians who’d also made the migration north. Musselwhite played harmonica, and he began sitting in on gigs with the bluesmen until, in his words, “it just got better and better. I decided I should start paying attention. This is my way out of the factory.” He recorded an album in ’67, Vanguard’s Stand Back! Here Comes Charley [sic] Musselwhite’s Southside Band, which — gritty voice, brash harp, and all — launched a career that has spanned more than three decades.

Musselwhite, however, maintains that those early days in Memphis influenced him the most, and he reinforces the sentiment on his latest album (his 26th), One Night In America. Here, he’s taken 12 seemingly disparate songs and used them to build a story — his story — of childhood in Memphis. “All the tunes capture the feeling of the times I remember from the ’40s and ’50s,” Musselwhite says. “It was all I knew.”

While the album provides an aural snapshot, it helps to drive by his old house and really get a sense of the place. Musselwhite grew up on tiny Manhattan Avenue, a block off Summer Avenue in northeast Memphis. The run-down neighborhood behind Leahy’s Trailer Court — Baltic Street, Pacific Avenue, Gracewood Street — still reeks of blue-collar life: crowded working-class bungalows surrounded by the seedy urban sprawl of secondhand furniture stores and acres of used-car lots. It’s an area that, on the surface, hasn’t changed much in the last 50 years, a neighborhood that exerts a tight hold over its people. It’s hard to imagine a teenager here with big dreams of any sort.

Yet this is a town where poor boys are known for making their fantasies reality, and even in the neighborhood behind Leahy’s, there were a few who made it: rockabillies like Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, who also resided on Manhattan Avenue, and Johnny Cash, who lived a block north on Tutwiler.

“Where I grew up,” Musselwhite remembers, “music was everywhere” — on the radio, at revival meetings, downtown on street corners, in houses and clubs. And just across Cypress Creek, there was a black neighborhood. Despite the prevalent racial divisions of that time, the area held an inexplicable fascination for Musselwhite.

One of Musselwhite’s first friends was a black boy named Clydell who, like young Charlie, played the harmonica. It was difficult for the two to get together, and Musselwhite relates a story that, half a century later, still burns him: “One day I made the mistake of going into the grocery store where Clydell worked to talk with him. It never occurred to me that I was getting him into trouble or doing something wrong, but they called him in the back. The lady who owned the place marched up the aisle with her arms folded, and she really told me off: It wasn’t right for me to be friendly with black people, and I’ve got my place and he’s got his place. I was stunned. I sure didn’t mean to get him into trouble,” Musselwhite says softly, and suddenly his version of “In a Town This Size” takes on a whole new meaning.

Musselwhite still managed to learn some music from Clydell and from Furry Lewis and jug-band impresario Will Shade, who lived at the east end of Beale Street. “I’d ride the bus downtown, sit around someone’s house drinking and playing music,” Musselwhite recalls. “I’d get 78s from the Salvation Army and the used-furniture stores, and I naturally gravitated toward blues. It just seemed to make so much sense to me. It was how I felt. When I heard that, I understood it, that feeling.”

“The beauty of the blues,” he explains, “is how it can adapt itself to anything. Twelve bars and three chords is one of the most convenient ways to play, but that doesn’t have to be the end of it.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Musselwhite samples blues, country, hillbilly, and rock-and-roll on One Night In America and effortlessly melds these styles, his own early musical education providing the common ground. He has help: Guitarists Robben Ford, G.E. Smith, and Marty Stuart, bassist T-Bone Wolk, and drummer Per Hanson work together to supply the rootsy base, while Christine Ohlman and Kelly Willis provide sweet accompaniment to Musselwhite’s rust-coated vocals and acoustic harp riffs. Musselwhite’s most famous childhood neighbor is represented here in a rousing rendition of “Big River.”

“I used to see Cash driving by all the time in his Thunderbird,” Musselwhite recalls. “Johnny seemed like he was one of us and was singing about the life we knew.”

Ivory Joe Hunter is here, too, and Musselwhite’s shuffling version of the local R&B star’s country-soul weeper “Cold Grey Light of Dawn” is superb. Jaunty lyrics aside, it’s one of many dark and lonely moments on the album. The solitary mood continues in the original numbers “In Your Darkest Hour” and “Ain’t It Time?,” songs that Musselwhite admits are about himself or friends he knew. The gospel standard “Rank Strangers to Me” also gets the lonesome touch. “I grew up feeling like that,” Musselwhite says with a laugh, while his take on Jimmy Reed’s “Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby” provides a hard-rockin’ finish.

“I saw Jimmy Reed at the Cadillac Club,” Musselwhite recalls. He then exclaims, “You know, Memphis has destroyed more history than most places in America ever had. They almost destroyed Beale Street and would have if somebody hadn’t thought about making money. They had not an ounce of compassion for the music or the people. That was a real wonderful neighborhood,” he says, and then immediately corrects himself: “It was actually pretty awful — poor and run down — and I spent a lot of time down there and saw a lot of poverty. But, instead of tearing it all down, they could’ve fixed it. It didn’t change the situation to tear it down.”

Oddly enough, it’s a cover of a Los Lobos song that best sums up his childhood memories: “A quiet voice is singing something to me,” Musselwhite croons in a gravelly voice, “an age-old song about the home of the brave in this land here of the free.” Its driving beat compromised by a blast of downhearted lyrics, the song captures all the ups and downs of the working-class neighborhood behind Leahy’s — “One Time One Night” in Charlie Musselwhite’s Memphis.

It’s been almost half a century since guitarist Scotty Moore reinvented rock-and-roll with Bill Black and Elvis Presley down at 706 Union Avenue. In those days, Sam Phillips’ Recording Service and Sun label were hardly tourist attractions. Even locals scarcely glanced at the small storefront on the west side of town, and had anyone noticed the activity going on inside — bluesmen like Howlin’ Wolf and Ike Turner coming and going, wannabe singers recording acetates for $3.98 plus tax, and hillbilly groups like Moore and Black’s Starlite Wranglers trying to catch Phillips’ ear — they would’ve shaken their heads and walked on, hardly aware that within those four walls a revolution was under way.

When Phillips put Elvis (who, in the beginning, was one of those $3.98 customers), Scotty, and Bill together, nothing jelled until the group took a break. Elvis was fooling around on his guitar when the blues song “That’s All Right, Mama” popped into his head. “All of a sudden,” Scotty told author Peter Guralnick, “Elvis just started jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and I started playing with them.” Sam Phillips stuck his head out of the control room to ask the trio what they were doing. “Back up,” he said. “Try to find a place to start and do it again.”

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Elvis, Scotty, and Bill inspired countless would-be rockers, from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on through Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. Yet until the Stray Cats came along in 1979, no one took what they did — the sound, the style, the lyrics — and reinterpreted it so literally. Formed in the midst of the mainstream punk/new wave movement, the Stray Cats — Lee Rocker and his pals Brian Setzer and Slim Jim Phantom — took rock-and-roll back to the ground floor with their songs about fast cars and faster women, house parties, street rumbles, and cool characters galore.

For the Stray Cats, all natives of Long Island, Memphis was their mecca — home of not just Sun Studio and Elvis Presley but also Dorsey and Johnny Burnette and Paul Burlison (the original Rock and Roll Trio), Charlie Feathers, and Jerry Lee Lewis. But Presley, Black, and the Burnette brothers were dead by the time the Stray Cats came on the scene, and despite occasional flickers from Feathers and Lewis, Memphis rockabilly was forgotten. When Lee Rocker finally found the nerve to look up Scotty Moore, he discovered that this hero, too, had abandoned the Bluff City in 1964.

Back in ’57, Moore and Black had resigned their positions backing the world’s biggest rock-and-roll star after Elvis refused to bump their salaries up from a paltry $200 a week. Moore began engineering and producing around Memphis, working for the Fernwood label (where he produced a Top 10 hit, Thomas Wayne’s “Tragedy”) and at Sam Phillips’ new studio at 639 Madison Avenue, just around the corner from Sun. But in early ’64, after he recorded his own instrumental album — The Guitar That Changed the World — Phillips let him go, and Moore headed straight to Nashville.

Soured, Moore hung his guitar up for 24 years. But he continued to work behind the scenes as co-owner and engineer at Music City Recorders. He opened a tape-duplicating business and bought a print shop. Moore was a hardworking businessman when Rocker called him in ’94. The Stray Cats had broken up the previous year, but Rocker had a new band, Big Blue, that was set to record in Memphis. “I came down there and we just hit it off,” Moore says. It marked a career high for Rocker, who was ecstatic about working with the legendary guitarist.

“Scotty put his guitar in the car and drove over to Memphis,” Rocker recalls. “We were recording at Kiva [now the House of Blues Studio], and he came in and did two songs with us — ‘Little Buster’ and Jimmy Reed’s ‘Shame, Shame, Shame.’ It was just incredible!”

Moore was familiar with Rocker’s work. “I had seen [the Stray Cats] two or three times on television. I kept wondering why they were playing that stuff so fast,” he laughs. “Lee’s a great bass player. The stuff that he does is right in the groove. We’ve been working together ever since.”

Though a 30-year age difference separates the two musicians, it’s obvious that they enjoy working together. “We do some of the stuff that Lee’s recorded, of course some Elvis tunes, some different blues, Carl Perkins,” Moore says. “What I’m real proud of is how the music’s held up over all these years. This is still what people want to hear.”

And the two are excited to bring their act to Memphis and the Gibson Lounge. “I don’t know, offhand, when I last played in Memphis,” Moore says. “I’m looking forward to playing the Lounge. That’s how I like playing, in a real small room. We’re gonna be in your face!”

Moore should feel at home in the Gibson-operated club — he’s been playing Gibson guitars since 1952. “I played a Fender Esquire for a little while, when I was in the Navy,” he says. “But when I started playing standing up, it wasn’t comfortable, which is why I switched to Gibson.” Although he currently plays a Chet Atkins Country Gentleman model, Moore played an ES-295 when he was with Elvis. A few years ago, Gibson issued twelve Scotty Moore signature guitars, “a modified ES-295,” he relates. “There’s one in the Rock ‘N’ Soul Museum [in Memphis], but I want to design a guitar from scratch.”

“In fact,” says Moore, lowering his voice conspiratorially, “the Country Gentleman I’m playing — I made a few changes on it. I made it feel good — like an old pair of house shoes or like cuddlin’ a girl up in the cradle of your arm.”

When, at the end of our conversation, Scotty Moore declares, “I’m glad I’m still playing,” it’s obvious he means it. “I didn’t realize until I started back how much fun it was,” he says, taking a deep breath. “When I’m playing with Lee, I feel at home on stage. I have a lot of time to make up for.”

Lee Rocker and Scotty Moore

The Lounge

Saturday, February 16th

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Local Beat

by CHRIS HERRINGTON

From the Motor City to the Bluff City, Detroit’s Chef Chris and His Nairobi Trio took home the big prize at The Blues Foundation’s International Blues Challenge finals last Sunday at The New Daisy Theatre.

The culminating event in the Blues Foundation’s BluesFirst convention, this battle of unsigned bands — which has previously hosted eventual blues stars Sean Costello, Susan Tedeschi, and last year’s winner, Memphian Richard Johnston — saw roughly 50 blues acts from all over the country (and a few from overseas) compete, each sponsored by one of the foundation’s member blues societies.

Chef Chris and His Nairobi Trio, sponsored by the Canada South Blues Society, stood out on a night when some of the other five finalists seemed accomplished but generic. Eschewing flashy solos and show-off indulgences, this lean, mean four-piece offered lovingly deconstructionist takes on classics like Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” and Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” alongside highly original originals. The band — its name taken from a skit on the old Ernie Kovacs television show — also demonstrated a singular sense of style to go along with their endearingly oddball music. The drummer looked like Tommy Lee’s little brother; the bass player sat down the whole time and barely moved; the guitarist was decked out in a leopard-print fezz and a red feather boa; and leading the way was the gargantuan Chef Chris (an actual chef, apparently) with his shiny brown suit, shinier red boots, yellow polka-dot tie, cowboy hat, and massive goatee.

The band ended its set with a drawn-out story song in which Chef Chris detailed the herculean task of making crawfish gumbo for his sweetie (“I get all kinds of cayenne pepper/I like to see my baby sweat when she eats the gumbo”). The song culminated in the double (though “double” seems too restricting) entendre chant of “Eat the tail/Suck the head,” which could have been an obnoxiously winking punchline in other hands but was transformed into something like awe or bewilderment or mysticism by Chef Chris. It even drew a standing ovation from much of the crowd. The whole thing was sublimely weird — with the David Thomas/Crocus Behemoth-like frontman leading the way, this band must be what Pere Ubu would have sounded like as a bar-blues band. Kudos to the judges for giving them the big prize — $1,000, 1,000 CDs, studio time at Ardent, booking and media consultation, and appearances at several blues festivals, including this May’s Handy Awards — over more traditional entrants.

Second Place went to The Tyree Neal Band from Baton Rouge, featuring lead singer/guitarist Neal, the 19-year-old nephew of contemporary blues star Kenny Neal. The band’s tight urban groove was spiked by Neal’s solo-heavy (and, in this reporter’s opinion, snooze-worthy) repertoire, which helped him win the night’s Albert King Award for most promising blues guitarist. Third Place went to the Boston-based Nicole Nelson Band, where the powerful pipes of the 23-year-old Nelson made up for her mostly forgettable band. Nelson’s set-closing rendition of the early Wilson Pickett classic “I Found a Love” was a highlight.

Among the other finalists was this year’s Memphis entrant, The Handy Three, sponsored by The Beale Street Blues Society. The Three — singer-guitarist Mark Lemhouse, bassist Scott Bomar, and drummer Stephen Barnett — offered a very solid set that paid homage to the jug-band and country-blues heritage of Beale Street’s early years. The other two finalists — Indianapolis’ Smokehouse Dave and The BBQ Kings and the Charlotte-sponsored Fat Daddy Blues Band — were in the white-guys-pretending-to-be-the-Blues-Brothers mode of contemporary blues bands. — Chris Herrington

It was 50 years ago last August that Sam Phillips first heard Howlin’ Wolf moanin’ the blues on radio station KWEM. He was immediately — and irrevocably — struck by the music: “This is for me,” he proclaimed, as related in an interview with music historian Colin Escott. “This is where the soul of man never dies.” Four decades later, Ole Miss student Matthew Johnson stumbled across a Wolf cassette for $1.99. “Howlin’ Wolf really grabbed me,” Johnson says. “He sounded so violent, so murderous.” Inspired, Johnson took his $4,000 student loan and started Fat Possum, the North Mississippi blues label. His first release, R.L. Burnside’s Bad Luck City, sold just 713 copies and, as Mike Rubin noted in a 1997 Spin article, the fledgling label “was almost roadkill.”

Fast-forward another decade: It’s 2001, and Fat Possum is thriving in the new century with 42 releases under its belt. While the label lost two of its guiding forces to death along the way — producer Robert Palmer and bluesman David “Junior” Kimbrough — it’s rolled with the punches, and after a few shaky years in the mid-1990s, everything appears to be back under control.

At Fat Possum, of course, under control doesn’t mean in control.

Take, for example, T-Model Ford. Clocking in at just under 80 years, the Greenville, Mississippi, growler is as famous for his murder rap as he is for his grinding, stream-of-consciousness blues style. Add a pint of whiskey and a few women to the mix and it’s likely the situation will combust. When asked about the circumstances surrounding the sessions for Ford’s latest, She Ain’t None of Your’n, Fat Possum producer Bruce Watson laughed: “Well, that was when T-Model stabbed Spam [his drummer and long-time friend]. Spam had told Stella [Ford’s girlfriend] a lie about goin’ with a school bus driver, and T-Model didn’t like it.” Stella stuck by her man, but T-Model and Spam quit playing together for awhile.

Ford’s third album for Fat Possum is a sparse affair, partially constructed from earlier sessions with a few new tracks tossed in for good measure. Spam clip-clops happily along on “Junk” and “Wood Cuttin’ Man” (a primitive rewrite of “Crosscut Saw”), but it’s the thick, off-balance “Take A Ride With Me” that really gels. Sam Phillips once said, “You didn’t just want a guy who could play, you needed to feel his soul.” You can definitely feel T-Model Ford’s soul on this number — it descends on the listener as dark and shapeless as a thundercloud. The cut represents Ford at his best — ageless and sinister.

Then there’s Hasil Adkins. Sam Phillips had a chance to sign the West Virginia rockabilly wild man back in 1961, when Adkins sent Phillips a demo of his first single, “Chicken Walk.” Adkins had his own one-man band — One of the Greatest Shows on Earth, Haze Adkins and his Happy Guitar — formed after hearing Hank Williams on the radio and making the false assumption that Williams was playing all the instruments. Phillips sent back a rejection form letter, as did every other label at the time. But Adkins persisted, releasing 15 singles on his own, including the seminal (“She Said,” unearthed by the Cramps years later) and the bizarre (“The Hunch,” which renders in graphic detail Haze’s homegrown dance craze). A compilation and several releases on the Norton label introduced Adkins to a generation of new fans, including neo-rockabillies, punk rockers, and Johnson and Watson at Fat Possum, who decided to cut their own record with Haze. The unrefined white hillbilly fit right into their aesthetic.

“I’d been a fan for years,” Watson recounts, “and we jumped on the project. Matthew and I loaded up the car and went to West Virginia. We set the recording equipment up in his trailer, and we tried to record. He trashed the recording equipment! So we tore all the stuff down and went back to the hotel. We called him, he said he’d sobered up, so ‘come on’ — this went on for days. We couldn’t get anything on tape. We tried for a week, but he was so drunk that we couldn’t get anything on him.”

“Nothing I’d ever done has been this fucked up. This was the hardest, believe it or not,” Watson admits. The Fat Possum crew returned to Mississippi, where it was another month before they got a phone call from Haze. “He said, ‘Man, I’m sorry about that. I went to church last night, and I got right with the Lord. I quit drinking vodka — all I drink is beer now. I wanna come down there and make a record.’ So he came down for a week, then we took a break for a few months, then he came back for another week. At the time, my studio was in my house, so he ended up staying with me.”

Watson settles into the story: “He gave me a list of stuff that he wanted — cigarettes, light beer, and naked movies. Basically we sat around watching pornos and slasher movies, eating pork chops and drinking beer. The first three days he was here, I couldn’t get him to record anything. Then I’d be asleep, and he’d say, ‘Bruce, wake up — I wanna record!’ At 3 o’clock in the morning, we’d get rolling.”

Appropriately, Johnson named the album What The Hell Was I Thinking. It opens with “Your Memories,” a mellow country ballad. Things pick up with “Ugly Woman” and “No Shoes,” but it’s not until the off-kilter “Stay With Me” — replete with hollers, trash-can drums, and tuneless harmonica punctuation — that the party really gets rolling. Like his recording sessions, Adkins’ live shows are rumored to be hit-or-miss affairs. In fact, Haze has never played a gig in Memphis, a situation that fan and erstwhile promoter Mike Condon hopes to remedy with a show at the P&H Café on December 21st.

At 61, Memphis bluesman Robert Belfour is one of the youngest — and most together — artists on Fat Possum’s roster. He was born and raised near the label’s current location in North Mississippi but moved to the city 40 years ago. He managed to slip under Johnson and Watson’s radar until last year, when they released his first full-length, What’s Wrong With You. Stylistically, Watson considers the album “a link between Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside,” the label’s two best-selling artists. Belfour’s understated acoustic blues, largely unnoticed by local music fans, have received rave reviews around the world. (Billboard magazine’s Chris Morris calls the record “a stone marvel.”)

Watson is modest about the recording process, saying “the first thing we did was listen to everything that he does, then we started picking songs.” When working with artists as accomplished as Belfour, Watson considers his job simple: “Find the best stuff and get the best out of them.”

Sam Phillips had the same approach. “Everything I recorded had a basic gut feeling to it. I tried to help the artists where I could with a song structure or a lyric, but basically I tried to get them to record what they had and to bring out of them what they were. I felt it so strongly it was almost a religious belief. With society changing as it has, I knew this music wasn’t going to be available in the pure sense forever.”

Watson puts it a whole lot plainer. “We’re basically capturing a dying form. These are the last guys doing this kind of music.”

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Local Beat

by CHRIS HERRINGTON

Local singer-songwriter Nancy Apple is perhaps best known for the songwriters nights and pickin’ parties she regularly hosts at bars such as Kudzu’s and the Blue Monkey. But now local audiences who have never been to any of Apple’s song swaps can get a taste via their television screens. On Thursday, December 20th, at 7 p.m., WKNO-TV Channel 10 will premiere In Their Own Voice: An Evening With Memphis Songwriters, a 60-minute concert hosted by Apple.

In Their Own Voice was taped live at the Bartlett Performing Arts and Conference Center a few months ago and features, in addition to Apple, Keith Sykes (the accomplished local songwriter who has had songs covered by Jimmy Buffett and John Prine, among others, and who also hosts a monthly songwriters night at the Black Diamond), Teenie Hodges (rhythm guitarist for the Hi Records house band in the ’70s and author of several songs recorded by Al Green), Duane Jarvis (former Dwight Yoakam sideman who co-wrote “Still I Long For Your Kiss” with Lucinda Williams), Sandy Carroll (a blues-based performer), and Delta Joe Sanders (an acoustic folk-blues performer).

The program intersperses brief interview segments with the cozy, informal live performances. Highlights include Hodges playing his classic “Take Me To the River,” Sykes’ reading of his moving “Broken Homes” from his most recent album, Don’t Count Us Out, and Apple’s “Fooled By the Heart” from her recent album Outside the Lines.

Local author Robert Gordon will host an It Came From Memphis Holiday Bazaar-O on Saturday, December 22nd, at Earnestine and Hazel’s. It Came From Memphis, Gordon’s eclectic history of the back alleys and byways of Memphis music culture, has recently been reprinted with a second CD listening companion, and Gordon will celebrate with a night of music, film and video, and visual arts. Musical guests are scheduled to include Jim Dickinson, The Reigning Sound, B.B. Cunningham (of the Hombres, who cut the garage-rock classic “Let It Out [Let It All Hang Out]”), Sid Selvidge, and The Bo-Keys. Artists who will have their work for sale include Jimmy Crosthwait, Charlie Miller, Dan Zarnstorff, and Jackie Ware. Rare Memphis videos will be shown throughout the night.

On Friday, December 21st, starting at 8:30 p.m., Java Cabana Coffeehouse will host an acoustic benefit concert for Hope House. Affiliated with the Junior League, Hope House is a non-profit agency that provides care to young children who are either infected with or affected by HIV or AIDS. Performers at the event will include Autumn Grieves, Jason Freeman, Bella Sun, Jeff Evans, and Jeff Pope. There is no cover for the event, but donations are encouraged.

You can e-mail Chris Herrington at herrington@memphisflyer.com.