Author: Preston Lauterbach

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Do You Hear an Ecko?

CREDIT: by Justin Fox Burks

The last old-school record company in Memphis plugs away in a lair below Hollywood Street near Sam Cooper Boulevard, unbeknownst to most of the city. Ecko Records was launched in 1995 to release a salty song by a once-popular local artist when no established label would take the chance. Ollie Nightingale’s “I’ll Drink Your Bath Water, Baby” sold enough to make founder John Ward think he could make a living in an unforgiving business and set the artistic tone for the upstart company.

Thirteen years later, the company represents the last gasp of Southern soul in Memphis. Ecko’s artistic roots intertwine with the genre’s most celebrated record labels, and its business practices echo this bygone era.

Ecko functions as part of the chitlin circuit, a conglomerate of African-American nightclubs, concert promoters, radio stations, and mom-and-pop record shops concentrated in the Deep South and sprinkled throughout Northeastern and Midwestern cities. Circuit music, interchangeably called blues, Southern soul, soul blues, and even grown folks’ music, appeals mostly to black listeners over age 35, a loyal good-time group that packs festivals and juke joints to hear the artists who’ve been circulating for decades.

The most popular circuit attractions, including Marvin Sease, Mel Waiters, Bobby Rush, Shirley Brown, and Denise LaSalle, are black singers, also well over 35. Their subject matter, best exemplified in song titles such as LaSalle’s “Pay Before You Pump,” Sease’s “Candy Licker,” and Waiters’ “Hole in the Wall,” reflect the humor, taboos, and lives of grown folks, pretty well disqualifying the music from crossing over to a wider (and whiter) audience.

Though the chitlin circuit operates outside the mainstream music business, Ecko is not immune to the convulsive changes gripping the industry at large. Death has claimed several Ecko artists — first Nightingale in 1997, then Quinn Golden in 2003, and Bill Coday earlier this year — while CD piracy slices Ecko’s sales and corporations gobble up the small local radio stations through which the lifeblood of Southern soul flowed. Ecko survives thanks to its time-honored approach to making music in Memphis.

“It’s tradition-based music, blues, played in a contemporary way,” Ward explains. “A song like ‘Green Onions’ … it sounds contemporary, just as good today as it did whenever they put it out. You don’t just hear it and say, ‘1962, I remember them days.’ As opposed to Motown music, which is pop-based and sounds like oldies now. Stax stuck pretty close to the roots. I feel like what we do is that type of music … same influences in blues.”

Still, Ward insists, Ecko is no reverberation of the classic Memphis sound. “We’re not trying to recreate what anybody did at Stax. It ain’t got anything to do with that — it’s totally contemporary. I can play you a song that we did 10 years ago, and you can’t tell me that we didn’t just do it yesterday.”

A Place of Second Chances

There’s something poetic about Ecko’s studio. For starters, the company makes music for an underground music scene from a subterranean location. Ecko and its fans are invisible to mainstream music, if not the rest of the world. But it’s also a place of second chances. Jim Stewart, who co-founded Stax Records, established an independent record-producing facility there after the demise of his beloved record label left him heartbroken and much lighter in the pocket.

The facility houses offices for Ward and promotion man Larry Chambers and includes the “big studio” — a dark, spacious room decorated with a drum kit, microphones, guitars, and a full mixing board — a smaller demo studio known as the “Soul Hole,” and the Ecko warehouse.

The Ecko staff has three full-time employees: Ward, Chambers, and recording engineer Till Palmer. Old Memphis souls, songwriter Raymond Moore and singer Morris J. Williams, round out the Ecko creative team, both working freelance in collaboration with Ward, who produces and writes the lion’s share of Ecko songs, acts as artist-and-repertoire man, finding the right songs for each artist and laying down the occasional guitar solo.

Ecko records a combination of established circuit performers like David Brinston, former Bar-Kays singer Carl Sims, Denise LaSalle, and Lee “Shot” Williams and up-and-coming talents O.B. Buchana, Ms. Jody, Sheba Potts-Wright, and Sweet Angel.

Ward explains that the singers don’t get rich from their releases, but the recordings and Ecko’s promotion lead to other opportunities. “The artists are out there doing shows; that’s their living,” he says. “A good record gets them more shows and better shows. They’re more in demand. If you have no record, you’re in no demand. The record gets them work.”

“Bookings and record promotion work hand-in-hand,” adds Chambers. “I tell the artists where they’re getting the most play and how to get in touch with the promoter there. The promoter is interested in who’s selling because that’s who’s going to put asses in seats. And that is the bottom line.”

Though Ecko abides by the Stax philosophy, the Ecko sound owes more to Jackson, Mississippi-based Malaco Records, the industry leader in grown folks’ music for the past 35years.

by Justin Fox Burks

Larry Chambers, promotion man from Ecko Records

Malaco’s formula for success in the contemporary blues market has involved artists who are over the hill by pop-music standards but still appeal to middle-aged Southern black fans. Z.Z. Hill, Johnnie Taylor, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and Tyrone Davis recorded for major labels until disco killed the mainstream popularity of blues-based music. Malaco scaled their operations to turn profits on a 25,000-seller, then made a fortune with Hill’s 1982 hit “Downhome Blues,” which sold in the range of 400,000 copies initially and has since accrued gold-record status as a million-seller.

“‘Downhome Blues’ sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday,” Ward says.

Though blues in name, no listener would mistake an Ecko record for a Muddy Waters tune. Ecko uses mostly programmed tracks mixing a drum-machine beat, synthesized piano and horns, and a single background vocalist dubbed to three-part harmony. The production style reflects the lean economy Ecko operates in, and Ward says that the audience doesn’t mind, though deal-with-the-devil blues purists scoff at Ecko’s sound.

“People don’t go to the store and buy a record for the guitar player,” Ward says. “The majority of music buyers don’t know the difference between an A and an F. They buy what they like. They’re scarcely aware of how good the drummer is or whether there’s a drum machine or a drummer playing at all.”

Workingman’s Blues

Raymond Moore, a soft-spoken 68-year-old grandfather, appears an unlikely source of song titles like “Bone Me Like You Own Me” and “If I Can’t Cut the Mustard (I Can Still Lick Around the Jar).” Moore grew up in Memphis and attended Booker T. Washington High School, where he met David Porter. Porter, who would become among the most prolific and decorated songwriters in the city’s history, liked Moore’s poetry and encouraged Moore to pitch ideas to Stax Records artists. “The very first song I made money on was Carla Thomas’ ‘How Do You Quit (Someone You Love),'” Moore says. “My first check [in 1965] was for between $800 and $900, which was good back then.”

by Justin Fox Burks

Team player: Ecko’s Morris J. Williams

Moore authored tunes for Rufus and Carla Thomas and Sam & Dave before accepting a contract to write exclusively for Fame studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where Atlantic Records sent its top rhythm and blues singers to record.

The Fame contract guaranteed nothing, but it did give Moore and the writing staff access to the talented artists who frequented the studio in the late ’60s and early ’70s, including Clarence Carter, Aretha Franklin, Bobbie Gentry, Wilson Pickett, and Candi Staton. With the exception of Franklin, all recorded Moore’s material.

He left Fame for Muscle Shoals Sound, another studio for hire, hot in the heyday of soul.

Moore worked a regular job in Memphis throughout his songwriting career while enjoying moments of musical success. Candi Staton recorded “I’d Rather Be an Old Man’s Sweetheart (Than a Young Man’s Fool),” co-written by Moore, Clarence Carter (of “Strokin'” fame), and George Jackson (who wrote “Old Time Rock-and-Roll,” among many others). Intended for Aretha Franklin, the song received a Grammy nomination in 1969. The company newsletter at General Electric, Moore’s employer at the time, noted the achievement.

The workplace proved to be a fruitful environment for an artist writing workingman’s songs. “Some of the fellas would joke about something, and I’d use it,” Moore says.

He eavesdropped on break-room chatter and the boasts and laments of everyday life from the very consumers he tried to appeal to in music. “They’d say, ‘Watch it — he’s gonna take it and write a song about it.’ If it’s a good saying, I would,” he says. “This guy was talking about his outside woman, saying all he was getting was the bills and no merchandise, which I thought was pretty nice.”

Atlantic Records thought Clarence Carter’s “Getting the Bills (but No Merchandise)” nice enough to issue as a single in 1970.

Country singer Razzy Bailey cracked the Top 10 of the country charts with a rhythm-and-blues song Moore wrote, “Scratch My Back (and Whisper in My Ear).”

Since his 1996 retirement from the Kellogg’s factory, Moore has drawn inspiration from daytime TV talk shows. “Especially Divorce Court,” Moore says. “The way people act and clown. The way people act on Jerry Springer gives me ideas, too.”

Moore estimates his annual Ecko earnings between $5,000 and $10,000. EMI Records owns his Muscle Shoals work and pays off twice a year, while Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), the composer and performer royalty clearinghouse, pays quarterly on everything else.

Moore and Ward meet to write every week, and the duo compose at least half of Ecko’s recorded output. “Lately, I almost forget them as fast as I write them,” Moore says.

Sitting in the “Soul Hole,” where he and Ward compose songs in the Ecko compound, Moore explains that he writes as other retirees fish and golf. “This is about the only place I go,” says the lyricist. “Here and church.”

Mr. Promo Man

No one knows the new challenges facing the old-school record company better than Chambers, 61, who’s been with Ecko since its inception, following a songwriting career with Fame and Muscle Shoals Sound, often in partnership with Moore, and at Malaco Records in the early ’80s.

“After John cut ‘I’ll Drink Your Bath Water,’ he called me and said he needed me to work with him. He knew I had done promotions back in the ’80s,” Chambers explains. “There wasn’t any money. It wasn’t even worthwhile talking about a salary. Our deal was done on friendship and survival.”

Chambers has faced challenges that never confronted record promoters in the classic era of Southern soul. “Everyone was doing well until 1999, when the CD burner came in,” he says.

Already operating on a thin margin, bootlegging hit the contemporary blues business harder than most segments of the music industry. Ecko survived thanks in part to Chambers’ boundless energy and old-fashioned record promotion. He carries on in a fast-paced, gravelly voice. “I was working 14- to 16-hour days to get off the ground,” Chambers says. “I’ve slacked up a little bit. Now I just work 10 to 12 hour days.”

Ecko must steadily release new records to keep cash flowing. It keeps Chambers pressing the flesh at every soul blues festival within 150 miles, on the phone day and night, and burning up the highway to meet program directors, disc jockeys, and mom-and-pop shop owners. As the only Ecko marketing employee, his territory is the entire U.S., though he focuses on the Deep South, where the highest concentration of Ecko listeners and affiliated businesses are located.

“I’m working nine records at present,” he says. “I have to make sure all of our music is being played on the radio and make sure the club jocks are working it out in the streets and in the clubs. I’m working stores, too. It all ties in — if a record’s getting airplay in a certain market, you want to make sure that the stores are ready to do something with it.”

Chambers witnessed the decimation of independent black radio in the South up close. He estimates that two-thirds of the family-owned, black-format stations he conducted business with 10 years ago have since been sold to one of the media conglomerates that emerged from deregulation of the radio industry in 1996.

“Back then, we had deejays who could ‘break’ records. That’s not possible now. The deejays don’t have the power. Their time slots are already set up with what they’re going to play,” Chambers says. “Back then, a jock could play your record as many times as he wanted. He could back it up: ‘That was so nice, I’m gonna have to do it twice,’ they’d say. Now everything’s loaded into a computer to come on at a certain time.

“Now you’ve got to be prepared to deal with consultants,” he adds. “One of my consultants works in Dayton, Ohio, and he controls two of my stations in Louisiana, three in Mississippi, and one in Alabama. I have a problem with that because he doesn’t know what people down there want to hear. He takes the power from the program director and deejays in that city who know the audience.”

Still, Chambers says his approach is about the same:

“The pitch is that I’m going to bring an artist into a club to do a promotion for the station. You pitch them the artist that you want to ‘break,’ who isn’t getting exposure. In other words, if he’s already playing the hell out of Barbara Carr, I’m satisfied. If he’s lacking on O.B. Buchana, that’s who I’m going to pitch. The director will be glad to have that free advertising, and we get exposure.”

Exposure is at a premium. Powerful program directors and personality deejays aren’t the only casualties of the corporate takeover of small radio.

“Payola still works with some of the deejays, but they can’t ‘break’ any records,” Chambers says. “They still come to you as if they can, but how are they going to break a record if they’re only on four hours once a week? Or if you only have a 12-hour soul blues program each week? It’s just not possible.”

Resilient Soul

Through all that, Ecko has endured. With the attrition of its talent, the assault on its bread-and-butter radio stations, and bootlegged CDs, the company has hung in there long enough to find a promising new outlet for its traditional soul. “At this point, digital sales are about 20 percent of what we sell,” Ward says.

In fact, downloads represent a return to the singles market that Memphis companies competed in during the soulful ’60s and ’70s.

“It’s a single song that people buy now,” Ward says. “Just like back in the old days.”

Visit eckorecords.com to hear the Ecko sound.

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News The Fly-By

Tennessee Volunteers?

The state of Tennessee is testing the volunteer spirit of its employees in an upcoming round of voluntary job buyouts.

Without a state income tax, Tennessee relies on sales tax as a major source of revenue. Lola Potter, public information officer for the state department of finance and accounting, explains that those proceeds have plunged with consumer confidence in recent months, along with other funding sources. Now the state needs to trim $468 million from the next fiscal year’s budget.

As a result, the state government extended 12,000 buyout offers to employees, and hopes that 2,200 of them will accept, thereby saving Tennessee $64 million in recurring costs. The buyout program’s total cost to the state is $50 million.

“Each agency has its own plan,” Potter says. “There is not a mandate of how they’ll operate. The mission they were given is to find a way to deliver services without any effect on the quality, with 5 percent fewer employees.”

The buyout package includes four months salary, an additional $500 bonus for each year of state employment, payment of accrued leave, and two years of tuition assistance for volunteers wishing to continue their education at a state college. Buyout volunteers can reapply for a state job two years after accepting the deal.

Whether the economy will improve by then, however, is anyone’s guess.

“There’s a lot of argument among economists if this is going to be a long recession or something we recover from this calendar year,” Potter says. “Our thinking had been that we’d pick up toward the end of the calendar year. Now a lot of economists don’t think that’s going to happen. The reason we wanted to reduce the budget is just in case we’re sitting here this time next year without seeing any [economic] growth.”

The program is voluntary for now, but the state may lay off employees to reach its target numbers.

State government ranks as the tenth-largest employer in Memphis with 5,247 locally based staffers (about 1,200 fewer than Wal-Mart stores).

Local departments that could be affected include agriculture, child services, department of corrections, environment and conservation, health, and veterans’ affairs. A complete list can be accessed at www.tn.gov.

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News The Fly-By

The List, Part II

The combination of the initials “M-L-G-W” and the word “list” cues memories of Joseph Lee, the so-called VIP roster, and the end of Lee’s tenure in charge of the city’s utility company.

Memphis Light, Gas and Water released a new list last week. This one includes the names of 30 employees who might be in violation of the city’s residency law. That ordinance, enacted in 2005, states that newly hired employees who live outside the city limits have six months to establish a city residence or face termination.

Serious enforcement of the policy at MLGW began after an internal audit last month exposed Armstead Ward, vice president of human resources, as a violator of the ordinance. Ward will step down September 5th.

“The primary reason that employee residency matters is that it’s the law,” Gale Jones Carson, MLGW director of corporate communications, explains. “It really doesn’t matter whether people agree with the ordinance; until it changes, MLGW and city employees are duty-bound to obey it.”

Richard Thompson, editor of the Mediaverse blog and an MLGW communications specialist, is on the list. MLGW hired Thompson in October 2007. According to a June 19th Mediaverse post, Thompson provided MLGW with his address (which sits north of Shelby Drive between Riverdale and Hacks Cross, just outside the city limits) at the time of his hiring, and agreed to comply with the residency code.

Thompson’s start date, however, coincided with the real estate bust that crippled the national housing market. Thompson declined to put his house on the market. Though his house will go on sale in July, that may not be enough to save his job. Carson explains that MLGW president Jerry Collins will review each case individually. “I don’t know what the determining factor will be,” Carson says. “I do know that he’s getting input from the board, and he’ll make a decision [about their employment status].”

Carson speculates that the recent City Council residency discussions for Memphis police officers set a bad precedent for MLGW workers. “I think we’re going to have difficulty getting an exception made for MLGW employees, because there’s such difficulty to get an exception for police officers who work for the city,” she says.

Still, the responsibility rests with the employee. “They should think seriously before taking the job if they can’t comply with the residency requirement within six months,” Carson says. “People are not buying and selling houses in this economy.”

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Cover Feature News

Memphis Eccentrics

CREDIT: by Justin Fox Burks

This city is a lot of things. Typical it is not. Memphis has a history strewn with colorful characters. It’s part of our heritage. In the course of writing and researching feature stories for the Flyer, I’ve discovered that colorful characters are still alive and well in the Bluff City, and I’d like to shine the light on a few of my favorites. The subjects of these profiles represent the kind of people who, traditionally, have made Memphis unique: an artist, an entertainer, a preacher, and a protester. They impressed me with their uniqueness of vision, their distinctive styles of self-expression, and their deep commitment to individuality. So for those of you marching to your own beat, we salute you.

Nelson Smith III

Drive up Thomas Street, toward Frayser from downtown into the neighborhood known as New Chicago. Peek down Huron Avenue, and you’ll see a car parked on the south curb beside an old nightclub. Your eyes aren’t deceiving you — that is a red 1984 Pontiac Fiero transforming into a gray Ferrari. Ask one of the fellows sitting outside the club about it, and he’ll explain: “That’s Nelson’s. If he gets an idea, he’s likely to do something about it.”

In a city renowned for its artists, Nelson Smith III remains one of Memphis’ best-kept secrets. Smith, 63, creates fanciful and imaginative sculptures and is responsible for some of the city’s iconic commercial art from a bygone era. Samples stand and hang throughout Smith’s studio, formerly Currie’s Club Tropicana, where a young North Memphian named Isaac Hayes had his breakout performance in the early 1960s.

Today the club is part sculpture studio, part machine shop, and part social club. Most days you can find a group of the artist’s friends sitting around a shop table like the Knights of New Chicago, pouring big glasses of brandy, sipping cold beer, frying catfish, or barbecuing chicken. A 12-foot-tall combat soldier lunges at visitors with bayonet drawn just inside the entrance. He glares down through the Phillips-head screws that serve as pupils in his eyes. A yellow cartoon lion and a pig in a paper cap help lighten the mood. And a clue about the artist’s past lurks in the shadows against the back wall. It’s a 10-foot-tall mold of a familiar character unseen in these parts in quite some time — the cheerful, chubby Shoney’s Big Boy, the restaurant’s mascot from the 1950s until his untimely passage to mascot heaven in 1984.

In addition to Big Boy, Smith sculpted the Pizza Inn mascot, designed the logo for Cozy Corner Barbecue, and created art and signage throughout Libertyland, among dozens of completed projects. “That’s what I do — I engineer art,” he says.

Smith took up art as a 10th-grader at Manassas High School, not far from his present studio. He credits a year at the Memphis College of Art — permanently interrupted by Vietnam-era military service — for his mold-making skills. Since then, he’s learned to make do with untraditional materials.

“The stuff that you would throw out — cardboard and scrap wood — I use to shape models for the molds. I never could afford that hundred pounds of clay,” he says, alluding to the title of the Gene McDaniels song about the material God used to fix the world. “I can make any shape out of cardboard.”

His skill and economic use of materials helped Smith foster a mutually beneficial arrangement with the regional Shoney’s franchise. “They kept ordering their statues from California, and it cost a thousand or better bucks just for the shipping, much less the cost of the Big Boy,” Smith says. “I told them I’d make the statue for that.”

Smith used one of the official Big Boy statues to create his mold and then made a fiberglass replica. He stood the statues side by side and invited the Shoney’s owner to choose the original. “You’re hired,” the man told Smith, who produced about 15 of the statues for restaurants in the tri-state region.

The Shoney’s work led to more restaurant projects. Smith outfitted the now defunct Moonraker eatery in Germantown with a pirate ship and theme-decorated Holiday Inn bars like the Red Fox Room and the Coronado Club. Smith explains that technology has since rendered his manual design, engineering, and production techniques obsolete: “I do this by hand, and the computer can cut it right out.”

Today, many of Smith’s signs and sculptures are lost. He doesn’t know what became of his Big Boys, but he stays busy designing sets for school plays and sound studios. And there are his labors of love, including the Fiero-Ferrari. “I’ll get it running again,” Smith says.

Sugarman

Sugarman owns a huge collection of blazers. They’re not new either: double-breasted, broad lapels, and rows of big plastic buttons on both flanks.

by Justin Fox Burks

Nelson Smith III

He smokes sitting with his legs crossed, the left leg hanging as close to parallel with his right as it gets, arms crossed over his legs with hands hanging limply. He pulls the cigarette toward his lips without lifting the elbow from where it rests.

My wife and I were driving out in the country, and as I made a left onto North Germantown Road from Ellis Road, a figure sitting on the porch of a house set back off that intersection caught the corner of my eye as I accelerated — a shimmering polyester blazer, pointy lapels, gold-rimmed spectacles, white mustache, and ring of white hair, sitting there smoking on a Saturday morning.

“I think that was Sugarman,” I told my wife. But we’d gone by so fast, and she hadn’t met Sugarman and didn’t know about his blazers or his posture.

The next time I saw Sugarman, hanging outside the Boss Lounge on Jackson Avenue, I asked where he stays, and he told me the corner of Germantown and Ellis. “Come by anytime and just ask for Sugarman,” he said. Then he told a group of paper-bag drinkers standing around the parking lot a story. The set-up involved him removing his dentures to orally please a lady friend, an act he refers to — perplexing me completely — as “sucking cock.” This lady enjoyed his technique so much that she stole his false teeth.

We headed inside the Boss Lounge to see Sugarman perform. On stage, that is. Sugarman does not sing particularly well, but as a man in the crowd explains, “He has a way of putting a song over.” He opened with a cover of Tyrone Davis’ “Turning Point,” which recounts the singer’s renouncement of the cheating life. A sample of the lyric in Sugarman’s improvisational style: “No more staying out late, no more narrow escapes, I-I-I-I-I reached the turning point: in my life.”

Sugarman made the song his own. He grafted the introduction of Joe Simon’s “Power of Love” onto the beginning of “Turning Point” before getting into the meat of the song as Davis delivered it. From there, he transitioned to another Davis tune, “Can I Change My Mind.” The band, unaware of Sugarman’s change, continued to play “Turning Point.” They caught on by the second verse, which Sugarman ended by going back into “Turning Point.”

This is how he puts a song over.

Alton R. Williams

The man sprays cologne on his neck, fluffs up the bedsheets, and climbs into bed, waiting expectantly for his wife to join the romantic scene. He calls to her impatiently. After a few minutes, she enters wearing a long, pink terrycloth robe and curlers in her hair.

by Justin Fox Burks

Sugarman

“What took you so long in the bathroom?” he asks.

“I was getting ready,” she says.

“Ready for what?” he wonders, gesturing at her attire.

“To do the wild thing!” she replies.

That’s one way to get people to come to church.

Tradition can be cumbersome. So believes Apostle Alton R. Williams, who portrayed the man in the above bedroom scene enacted for his church’s congregation a few months back. Williams split from the Baptist church in 1997 and founded the nondenominational World Overcomers.

“That was the beginning of the change from tradition. It became more oriented to the word of God,” he says. “When you’re with a denominational church you stay loyal to that church’s traditions regardless of what the Bible says. When I went to a nondenominational name, the growth of the church really took off.”

The church rolls include more than 10,000 names, though Williams says he sees more like 5,000 people in the pews on Sunday mornings. The church has a staff of about 100. Williams has authored 18 books, which cover topics ranging from Christianity and yoga to a law enforcement prayer guide.

The World Overcomers believe in, among other things: immersion baptism, baptism of the Holy Ghost, speaking in tongues as the initial evidence that accompanies baptism of the Holy Ghost, laying on of hands to heal the sick, women in ministry, rapture, heaven and hell, and that the end-time is fast approaching.

Williams and the Overcomers are known for two things. One is the Statue of Liberation Through Christ, a 72-foot replica of Lady Liberty (about half the height of the original) carrying a cross instead of the torch, with the Ten Commandments tucked into her left arm. It casts its odd shadow from the corner of Winchester Road and Kirby Parkway. (And no, Nelson Smith was not involved in the project.) The other source of Overcomer renown is the series of sermons on marital sex entitled “How To Get the Hell Out of Your House.”

Flyer: How did the infamous sermon on the bed come about?

Alton R. Williams: My wife and I got together in a way that would get people’s attention instead of lecturing them. The reason we did it is because men in their counseling sessions say that they’re not getting what they want or getting it frequently enough. Many women have religious mindsets about sex. They come in thinking it’s a duty. A lot of them have not come into it thinking about pleasure for themselves because of the way mama or religion has taught them — that sex is your duty, and it’s for the man. We want women to be free to enjoy sex. The Bible, in Genesis 18:12, says that Sarah all the way back in the Old Testament called sex pleasure. She didn’t see it as a duty or having a baby. Our women need to know that they can enjoy it. The key book in the Bible is the Song of Solomon. I think people would be shocked if they read that and saw for themselves what God permitted and what they can do in the bedroom.

Example?

The most important thing in there is how the wife, in [Song of Solomon], is the one leading the sexual escapades. You don’t find that a lot in women, particularly Christian women. The Bible talks about tongue kissing, that’s in there. There’s a part of Scripture where a woman talks during the sexual escapade, telling her partner what she wanted. The Bible talks about how the man looks at her physical body — it brings out the breast, her hips, her legs, her navel, all of that. Men are stimulated by what they see. Women need to know that men aren’t crazy because of that. It’s allowed in Scripture. In first Corinthians 7:5, the Lord said you cannot go and pray unless it’s with the consent of your mate. That means if your mate wants to have sex before you start praying, you gotta put prayer aside and go take care of the need. Now that’s how high a priority God placed on sexuality.

How did the Statue of Liberation Through Christ get here?

Driving down I-40 to Nashville, I passed by Bellevue Baptist Church’s crosses, and I saw those crosses as a witness to the world. We’re sitting on the best corner in Memphis [Winchester Road and Kirby Parkway], and I asked myself what I could do that wouldn’t duplicate what Bellevue had done. One night, watching TV, if you notice when Letterman comes on there’s a big picture of the Statue of Liberty that rolls by. For a flash second I saw a cross in the Statue of Liberty’s hand. The thing that finally pushed me to do it was the Buddha statue on Mendenhall. If you go look out in that area at Winchester and Goodlett, behind that Wendy’s is a big field, and there are several Hindu statues that have been put up. People actually go and worship those things. I see these things that honor other gods, and I wanted to do something that would give God glory and minister a message about America not leaving its Christian heritage.

The concept of the end-time is one of your church’s core beliefs. Are we getting close?

Oh God, yes. There are so many signs: the frequency of the storms. In one week, you had several tornadoes, you had an earthquake in China, fires, and floods all at one time. The Bible says that all these things will begin to happen with greater frequency. The people living on earth are moving more toward sin and iniquity, and the earth is reacting to that. The earth begins to groan, the Bible says, because of all the evil in the world. We are rapidly moving toward end-time.

Can you provide us an estimate?

God doesn’t give us that.

Jackie Smith

Seven thousand four hundred six days and counting. The demolition men and the wrecking balls came to level the Lorraine Motel, and Jackie Smith refused to leave. She locked the door to Room 303 and practically starved as the snow piled outside. Finally, they kicked the door in and carried her away. Judges served injunctions and issued restraining orders to keep her away from the property. So she pitched a tent across the street on the corner of Mulberry Street and Butler Avenue, and there she stayed. Street people beat on her and stole from her. Rain poured and icicles dangled from a chain-link fence. And she stayed.

by Justin Fox Burks

Apostle Alton R. Williams

Smith’s vigil at the site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination continues as it has for more than 20 years. And so do the challenges. As I approached Smith’s encampment on a recent sunny afternoon, a man turned to me and said something nasty about her. He stopped and threatened her, then he walked on, and I asked her what his problem was. She said that he should be working instead of begging for money to spend on dope. “I’m a lady,” she began, “and I have a good man who takes care of me. I don’t have to work.”

She’s heard all of the amateur psychology and remains unmoved. The soft-spoken protester doesn’t bother anyone; visitors have to choose to visit her and talk. She’s trimly built and cleanly dressed, her head wrapped in a black shroud as a mourner’s might be. She sits behind a desk scattered with a sun-bleached copy of Flyer columnist John Branston’s Rowdy Memphis, a yellowed edition of a Flyer dating from 2001, a photograph of King lying in state, copies of King sermons and self-produced fact sheets in plastic sleeves, and a copy of William F. Pepper’s Orders To Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King Jr. with the cover torn off. Inside a desk drawer are an assortment of pens and markers, thumbtacks for the banners she hangs, and lip balm.

She sings — sometimes opera, sometimes pop — for up to an hour each morning. Sometimes hecklers disrupt the vocal workout. She reads aloud to visitors from King’s sermons, offering “he’s so funny” as an aside to particularly clever examples of King’s rhetoric.

Smith says there’s no way to calculate the number of people who’ve elected to stop by over the years to hear her detail the irony of making this area nice for the bourgeoisie, despite the fact that King died for the poor. Now they have parties around the place she holds sacred, she says, and people drink beer under the path of the bullet that killed King. “I’m sure Dr. King enjoyed a beer in his life, but it’s not decent.”

She doesn’t know how many more thousand days she has, but just as the odd beat of our unique city goes on, so will her one-lady protest: “I don’t have plans to move from here until the good Lord calls me home. But I’ll let you know when it’s time for the grand finale.”

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News

Bar-Kays Play Baghdad … and Other Music Notes

Memphis soul legends, the Bar-Kays, are currently touring Iraq and Kuwait, performing for U.S. troops. They’ve visited troops in camp, hospitals, and one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. They recorded video footage, even conducted interviews with troops, and have taken plenty of pictures along the way, which they’ll share with us upon their return.

The band will be back in Memphis Wednesday, June 4. I suppose the cynical question will be “where do you hear more gunfire?”

Eddie Floyd, New Stax, Old Soul
Former Bar-Kays’ Stax colleague Eddie Floyd of “Knock on Wood” fame, became the first old school soul artist to record for the new Stax label. The Tracks on Eddie Loves You So cover mostly familiar territory for Floyd, going back to his days with the Detroit supergroup, the Falcons. He gives us a fresh rendition of “You’re So Fine,” originally cut nearly 50 years ago. In a neat twist on the veteran-artist-sings-standards format, Floyd performs a few successful tunes he penned for other singers, but never waxed himself, including “I Will Always Have Faith in You,” which Carla Thomas reached the Top 20 with in 1967, and Sam & Dave’s “You Don’t Know What You Mean To Me.”

Eddie Loves You So hits the streets July 29.

The reinvigorated Memphis Music Foundation has opened the new Musicians Resource Center at 431 S. Main Street. The foundation, under the leadership of Dean Deyo and aristocrunk artiste Cameron “Lord T” Mann, will provide independent artists with technological tools and music industry expertise needed to further their careers in a perplexing and ever-changing field.

Blue Monday at the Plush Club:
That’s right, the Beale Street nightspot that’s known for hip-hop and (alleged) Tiger brawls is mellowing things out. At least on Monday evenings. WDIA disc jockey Steve Ladd hosted the first installment of the weekly after work blues party at 380 Beale last Monday.

The great Big Don Valentine band, which features original Bar-Kays trumpeter Ben Cauley, provides the accompaniment to an all-karaoke-star lineup of singers including the great Preacherman, Nate Dog, and Charles Holifield. The entertainment begins at 6:30p.m. and runs till 10.

You never know who you might encounter there. Martial arts hero Steven Seagal. Tito Jackson, and Kevin Kane have been spotted within the walls of the purple palace. It is also theoretically possible that you’ll see Joey Dorsey there since he’s out from under Coach John Calipari‘s repressive social mandate of “no Plush Club.”

— Preston Lauterbach

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Music Music Features

Jug Band Pioneer Will Shade Honored With Grave Marker

CREDIT: Preston Lauterbach

Early twentieth-century Memphis musician Will Shade slipped into obscurity after a prolific recording career in the 1930s, and then into an unmarked hole in the ground following his death in 1966.

Shade’s music with the Memphis Jug Band — an outfit that featured homemade instruments like the jug, washtub bass, washboard, and comb in addition to guitar, banjo, harmonica, and kazoo — sounds archaic by today’s standards, but in their heyday of the late ’20s and early ’30s they celebrated the wild and wooly life on Beale Street, singing the joys and darkness of booze, voodoo, and legal cocaine.

An eclectic group of fans attired in bowler hats, vintage ties, and flapper gowns gathered at the Shelby County Cemetery last Saturday morning to pay Shade tribute and dedicate the new monument that marks Shade’s grave. Chicagoan Arlo Leach led a fund-drive to purchase the stone and emceed the tribute.

After a few words of remembrance, the celebrants broke out their harmonicas, jugs, guitars, kazoos, and mandolins and regaled Shade’s spirit with a few of his compositions, improvising verses to commemorate their affection for Shade or the day’s occasion.

Following the jam, a toast was proposed, and cups of brandy (Shade’s poison, so to speak) circulated. Celebrants drank and spilled shots on Shade’s stone that evaporated quickly into the breeze.

University of Memphis ethnomusicologist David Evans summed up Shade’s audience as “the movers and shakers in Memphis, as well as those who were moved and shaken.”

–Preston Lauterbach

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News

Millington’s Grand (L’il) Ole Opry

CREDIT: Preston Lauterbach

To celebrate the Flyer’s 1000th issue, our writers have written stories loosely themed around “grand.” Here’s Preston Lauterbach’s take on Millington’s Strand Theater:

If Millington’s Justin Timberlake can claim Memphis, then I’m sure no one will object if we adopt one of Millington’s musical gems as our own.

The first time I encountered the Strand Music Hall, while driving and gawking around downtown Millington, I stopped the car and pulled up behind the building for a closer look. In so doing, I nearly smashed a wet, mangy cat ….

Rest the rest here.

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News The Fly-By

40 Years Later

CREDIT: Preston Lauterbach

Thousands gathered Friday to march from City Hall to the National Civil Rights Museum in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The Rev. Al Sharpton and King’s son, Martin Luther King III, led the march and spoke of the day’s significance. King’s other living children, Bernice and Dexter King, were also in attendance.

“At the exact moment [that James Earl Ray shot King], we will stand silently and make a pledge of recommitment,” Sharpton instructed the City Hall marchers. “This is a day to recommit to the principles of nonviolence.”

Martin Luther King III ascended the podium. “Forty years ago, our father’s life was cut short in this city. But we were taught that you can dislike the evil act but still love the individual. We never harbored hatred. Our father taught us the value of love. As we prepare to march, we have to get our hearts right,” King said.

“America is a nation that should be farther along,” he continued. “Our father focused on the evils of poverty, racism, and militarism. While we’ve made strides with regard to race, on the issues of poverty and militarism, we are failing. We’ve come here to finish the work that our father began. I will ask you to make a commitment, not just to march and go home. March today, and in November, go to the polls. We must vote like we’ve never voted before.”

King and Sharpton emphasized the nonviolent nature of the march before departing.

“If you feel like someone’s going to step on your toe, and you’re going to have attitude, stay here,” Sharpton suggested.

The march proceeded uneventfully down Main Street.

The group arrived to a crowd packed in front of the museum, filling Mulberry Street from Huling to Butler avenues.

“Our vision is the eradication of poverty,” King began anew, standing on the spot of his father’s mortal wounding.

“We’re going to march on Washington again,” he said, referring to his father’s triumph of August 1963. “We’re calling for a major move in the White House. Today I called for the presidential candidates to appoint a Cabinet-level position [to address poverty]. Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain have pledged that they will give the problem their highest attention.”

At 6:01 p.m., the moment that Ray shot King 40 years ago, the crowd outside the Lorraine Motel observed a moment of silence. A chilly gust swept over the crowd from the direction of the boarding house from which Ray fired. A few raised their bowed heads and shared knowing glances.

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Cover Feature News

The Mayor and the Superintendent Search

The Memphis City Schools Board of Education called a special meeting February 21st. Meeting minutes show a single item on the agenda: the search for a permanent superintendent of schools. The five board members who showed up — four were absent — voted to contract with Ray and Associates, an Iowa-based education executive headhunter, as the search firm for the job and allocated $42,475 to pay the firm.

School board member Kenneth Whalum Jr. told The Commercial Appeal March 22nd that the national search was a waste of taxpayer money if the most qualified person was already in our midst, implying that Mayor Willie Herenton should return to his former position atop Memphis City Schools (MCS). His statement came a month after the special meeting in which Whalum could have voted against the expenditure had he attended.

Bill Newman, executive director at Ray and Associates, explains the search process already under way here. “We come in and work with the public and staff and the board to build a profile for the position,” he says. “We recruit to that profile and then bring the top candidates to the board. In this case, the board has requested that we receive the applications and submit to them only those with the closest fit to the profile.”

Alvin Johnson, Atlanta-based regional director at Ray, will coordinate the search. He has been involved in searches for school superintendents in Newport News, Virginia, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Prince George County, Maryland, among others. Johnson explains that the search can involve both applicants for the job and candidates whom the firm identifies. “We will seek out individuals who we think meet the profile,” Johnson says. “We’re in the process of putting the profile together now.”

Newman says that the basic criteria vary little from one superintendent job of this size to the next. “The [Memphis] board is looking for someone who will come in and raise academic achievement and engage the public in support, but that’s pretty much universal [for any search]. There are 10 or 11 criteria that they’ve agreed to,” he says, adding, “It’s not necessarily important to have a local person.”

Newman and Johnson have delivered their timetable to MCS. “We’ll be meeting with the board toward the end of April or the beginning of May to present the top candidates,” he says. “We will close this search on about the 24th or 25th and take two weeks to do the background investigation that’s so important.”

The board then will conduct interviews with the consultant-picked candidates. Since Ray conducts national searches for numerous school positions, they prefer to stay out of the interviews. “We don’t attend the interviews because we really don’t want candidates performing for us,” Newman says. “We work with the board after the interviews to help make a choice to select somebody, or the top two, and plan for what they want to do next.”

Herenton has not contacted Ray and Associates, nor have they contacted him about the job. “We’ll wait to see if he applies for the position,” Johnson says. “If the board members say that they want us to reach out to certain individuals, then we will do that. We certainly want the pool as broad as possible.”

Will Herenton’s announcement scare off other qualified candidates?

“If I was on the school board I’d want to know what kind of effect the mayor’s announcement will have on the search for a new superintendent,” says Tom Jones, the blogger for Smart City Consulting who has served as a top aide to three county mayors. Jones says if he wants the job, Herenton should be treated as a serious contender. But he’s also concerned that the mayor’s gambit could cool national interest in the superintendent position by scaring away top contenders.

“He may be the last man standing,” Jones says. “Tell me, who is going to read that story in The New York Times and say, ‘Oh yeah, I want to step into the middle of that hurricane.’ It’s hard enough just running a school district. Nobody wants to step into the middle of a political struggle.”

In an online article titled “Back to the Future,” Jones wrote that the school district ran better “under Superintendent Herenton than it has under anyone since.” But he added, “There has been a lot of support in the community for this search. It should go on.”

The mayor’s ability to draw controversy doesn’t undo his professional and academic credentials. It’s not every day that a school system can hire a retired mayor of a major city who was once a serious contender to head some of America’s largest school districts.

“It will be interesting to see what kind of comprehensive plan [the mayor] presents,” Jones says. He adds that in order to assure continuity, the board of education, not the superintendent, should be responsible for crafting big-picture policy:

“Every superintendent comes in with a list of programs that last as long as the superintendent. There has got to be a system in place to make sure that students don’t suffer every time we change superintendents.

“There is also this idea that we want a superintendent who is going to be with the system for 10 years,” Jones adds. “But do we really want a superintendent who other districts aren’t recruiting? Is having a superintendent who nobody else is recruiting any indication of success?”

Despite the time and money invested so far, the school board can still hire a candidate from outside the headhunting process. “The school board can do whatever they want,” Newman says. “I don’t think that’s their intent. Their intent is to do a national search.”

School board member Martavius Jones says, “The board is going to go ahead with the process we agreed upon. I don’t know whether the mayor will submit his information to the search firm, but there’s no one, mayor included, we will exclude from applying for the position.”

The recent article in The New York Times quoted Herenton as saying, “When you’re good, you don’t seek positions, they seek you.”

We’ll see.

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News

“Untold Chapters of the Memphis Movement” Panel at the U of M Offers Surprises and Emotions

A Wednesday afternoon panel discussion at the University of Memphis promised to showcase some of the untold local stories of the civil rights movement. This it did, although a few emotional outbursts and surreal moments unfolded to boot.

The public address system inside the Rose Theatre played an audio montage of recorded speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and ’60s soul music that climaxed with “I Have a Dream” and “Shotgun” by Junior Walker and the All-Stars blaring simultaneously.

To keep things orderly, moderator Michael Honey — author of the sanitation workers’ strike history Going Down Jericho Road — provided each of the six speakers a 10-minute timeframe to make their points. Angus McEachran, then metro editor at The Commercial Appeal, recalled covering the King assassination and the cleverness of reporter Tom Fox, who feigned a heart attack to avoid ejection from the St. Joseph’s Hospital emergency room, where King was taken following the shooting.

Eighty-six-year-old retired sanitation worker Joe Warren made reference to the signs he and his striking brethren displayed in Memphis, telling the crowd, “I am still a man.” He shared an anecdote about his visit to then-Mayor Henry Loeb’s house a year before the strike to ask for a concession for the workers. Loeb, whose stubbornness prolonged the sanitation workers’ strike and helped bring King to Memphis that fateful spring, reportedly told Warren he’d be the first one fired.

John Burl Smith and Charles Cabbage helped found the Black Invaders, a civil rights group. Though their philosophy didn’t exactly adhere to King’s nonviolent approach, they established some common ground in Memphis during the days leading up to King’s murder. “The Poor People’s Campaign was King’s dream,” Smith explained, “to bring poor whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans together in a coalition. He promised us if we worked with him, he would work with us. He wanted to unite Black Power and the nonviolent movement.”

Cabbage seemed tired of the old song and dance. “Before I get into this for the thousandth time,” he began, “we should talk about the new initiatives in the black community.”

The most passionate of the speakers, Cabbage equated our painful local legacy to the present. “We watched the greatest leader in recorded history go down in this city, and stood still. We’ve stood still ever since.”

Ed Redditt, an African-American Memphis police officer in 1968, and Jesse Epps, a union representative, discussed their roles in the drama as well.

Despite the location of the event, no more than 20 students attended.

Following the speeches, the moderator opened the floor to questions and comments from the audience. One man calmly addressed the panel as his respected elders before thundering into a rant about the African separatist teachings of Marcus Garvey. Another attendee who slept through most of the presentations asked the panelists about the decision of the King party to stay at the Lorraine Motel, where King was shot, instead of a more secure location. He screamed at panel members, calling them liars before storming out of the auditorium.

Cabbage and McEachran lamented the lack of student turnout. “Next time we do this, we need to bring the kids,” Cabbage said. The University of Memphis student body president invited the panelists to return, promising that he’d fill the theatre for the sequel.

Preston Lauterbach

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—Preston Lauterbach