Mike Mogis, Conor Oberst, and Nate Walcott of Bright Eyes (Photo: Nik Freitas)
As any Memphian knows, there are advantages to being a land-locked city far away from the coastal metropoles of money and power. While music industry towns like L.A. or New York seem to be where the action is, being left to one’s own devices in mid-America encourages a certain independence of mind, and hence some especially innovative creatives — from Sam Phillips to Jay Reatard. It turns out the same can be said for Omaha.
That Nebraska burg, like Memphis, felt relatively sleepy back in the ’90s, yet ultimately birthed a scene of its own that has endured for decades. Eventually the standard bearer for “the Omaha sound” was Bright Eyes, still going strong and set to appear at Minglewood Hall on Monday, March 17th. But they were only one of many bands sprouting up in the Omaha scene as the last century ended.
Bright Eyes multi-instrumentalist and chief recordist Mike Mogis recalls those days well. “Over the course of the last 25 to 30 years, a lot has changed about the Nebraska music scene,” he says today from his ARC studio in Omaha. “But back in the day, like the late ’90s, early 2000s, there was a very strong community of friends that all made different-sounding music. Bands that come to mind are Bright Eyes, our band, or The Faint, which is kind of an electronic band, or a band like Cursive, which is a heavier, emo kind of rock band. But we all played in bands together as well, like side projects. We’re all just friends, and that created a supportive musical community that we all felt inspired by. You know, inspired by each other.”
And the way Mogis describes it, all those bands sprang from a determination to make their own fun, despite living in the hinterlands. “I’m looking out my window, and it’s like 10 degrees and there’s snow everywhere,” he observes. “It’s sometimes a harsh place to live, but because of that, it’s also a good place to make music. When it’s cold like this, it’s what I call ‘record-making weather.’ You stay inside and you record music. Weirdly, Bright Eyes tends to record mostly in the winter. Maybe it’s coincidental, but it’s right after fall, which is kind of my favorite season. Anyway, it’s a good place to make music because, to be honest, there’s not a ton else to do.”
It was in that spirit that Mogis first worked with Bright Eyes’ chief singer/songwriter Conor Oberst. “I remember making the first proper Bright Eyes record, which is [1998’s] Letting Off the Happiness. I lived in Lincoln at the time, going to college, and I would drive to Omaha because Conor was in high school. I set up a quarter-inch Fostex eight-track reel-to-reel machine — you know, all analog — and a little mixing board. And we recorded that record in his mom’s basement. I set up in the laundry room as a control room, and then the room adjacent to that was like a little family den. Me and my brother A.J. Mogis just learned on our own, and he kind of taught me.”
That early effort already featured the fundamentals of the Bright Eyes sound, resting initially on the twin pillars of Oberst’s socially and psychologically astute lyrics and melodies over a strummed guitar, and Mogis’ delight in recorded sound and its infinite mutability. Both born of a D.I.Y. spirit, they come together to stunning effect on opening tune “If Winter Ends,” launching with a sound collage suggesting playgrounds, feedback, and traffic, then yielding to Oberst singing, “I dreamt of a fever/One that would cure me of this cold, winter-set heart/With heat to melt these frozen tears.” Record-making weather, indeed.
With a rotating cast of players, the band went from success to success into the new millennium. “We started our own record label, Saddle Creek, and just did our own thing, putting out our own records and our friends’ records,” says Mogis. “And, you know, it kind of took off for a moment there, in the early 2000s, with all those three bands that I just mentioned. We’re all still kind of kicking it today. And we all live in different places now, but Conor and myself have stuck it out here in Nebraska.”
As the band was taking off, another member of the extended Nebraska musical family, Nate Walcott, with roots in Lincoln, joined the group as a multi-instrumentalist, and 2007’s Cassadaga featured his musicianly contributions and full-on, edgy orchestral arrangements. “The first time we recorded the orchestra in L.A., at Capitol Studios, in their big room,” says Mogis, “I just got chills. I’m getting goosebumps right now, just remembering it.”
Thus the now-classic trio emerged, each bringing his own strength to the mix, as they continued to work primarily in Mogis’ studio. All the while, even after a nine-year hiatus, the group has made a point of giving every album a distinctive sonic stamp. Which holds true for their latest work, Five Dice, All Threes, released last year.
“With this one we wanted a more simplistic, sincere-sounding rock record, not too labored-over. We wanted to get back to being more of a live band again, like we used to be. It kind of had a similar approach to what we took on I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, except the fact that it’s not a folk record. This one is more akin to The Replacements, like more ruckus-y rock music.” Having said that, there are plenty of the band’s other elements present, from extended cinematic audio quips to Walcott’s arrangements for horns and strings, not to mention cameos from Cat Power and The National’s Matt Berninger. Mogis says audiences for their upcoming tour can expect an unpredictable mix of songs old and new, with a full sonic palette.
“We have a whole sample bank that Nate plays live, so he’ll trigger them throughout the show. It changes from night to night, depending on the mood,” Mogis says. “And we dig deep into our back catalog.”
Meanwhile, he’ll keep savoring the “record-making weather” that Nebraska offers. “You know, there’s not that many distractions,” Mogis reflects. “And that’s sort of what keeps me here. The fact that Conor and I built this recording studio anchors me here, because it’s a nice place. I enjoy making albums, making music, art, you know, whatever. And it’s a good place for that because it’s affordable, there’s not a whole lot else to do, and there’s a lot to be inspired by, living out here.”
Many know Jeremy Scott through his work with the now-defunct Reigning Sound, but there’s a lot more to this rock-and-roll lifer’s music career than that. After leaving that band for the first time (before the original group re-formed and then split again in this decade), he went on to found The Wallendas (featuring guitar pyrotechnics from Jim Duckworth), followed by Toy Trucks, The Subtractions, and a million ad hoc projects like the all-star tribute to Doug Sahm that he organized last month. (Full disclosure, I played with him in some of these groups.) One common thread through all of these has been the presence of the gritty, indie rock energy he often showcases on his weekly radio show on WEVL, Out On the Side, marked by a close attention to vocal harmonies.
That was also true for the first album under his own name, 2022’s Bear Grease, which he pieced together with multi-instrumentalist/engineer Graham Burks Jr. through the magic of overdubs. As the Flyer observed at the time, “though he started with acoustic intentions, he couldn’t help but let his rock instincts take over.” And, as that unfolded, the album took on a hard-rocking edge that required a full band.
And thus were the Drip Edges born, as Scott added Noel Clark on guitar and Mitchell Manley on bass to create a team that could present the album in a live setting. Now, with the release of their new EP, Kicking the Tires on the Clown Car, the quartet has come into its own. I spoke to Scott last week to see how this release compares to his solo debut.
The new EP
Memphis Flyer: The song “Dirty Sound” on the new EP seems the most like Bear Grease, and it’s the only acoustic-driven song on the record. You’ve said this new release was recorded by the Drip Edges as a band, but is that true for “Dirty Sound”?
Jeremy Scott: That’s 97 percent me, and Graham helped with the percussion tracks.
So that’s the only track done in the manner of Bear Grease?
Yes, it is. I put all the harmonies on. And Graham’s got a Mellotron, and I was playing around with it. And I’m like, “Well, maybe you can put some of this on?” Because he put Mellotron on “Fred Neil Armstrong” on the first record. And then he was like, “Well, why don’t you just do it?” I’m like, “Are you sure? People could get hurt!” But it wound up sounding not awful. Then there are weird things in there that sound almost like a trombone in spots. That’s just me on the guitar, running it through this pedal called a Slow Engine. Sometimes it can make it sound a little bit like a backwards guitar. It’s a pretty cool device.
You’ve certainly leaned into the hard rock elements of Bear Grease on this new release, but they’re revved up more, played by a seasoned band. I hear a lot of Hüsker Dü’s influence on some of the tracks.
Yeah. Hüsker Dü was so formative for me. Okay, I heard the Replacements first, and I dug them, but I got really burned out on the Replacements, and now I don’t really feel like I ever need to listen to them. Ever. That’s not their problem, that’s mine. Hüsker Dü, I can listen to whenever. It all holds up. And the one that really bit me in the ass was [1985 album] New Day Rising. That was a great combination of power and melody. That whole run from Metal Circus through Zen Arcade is so amazing. But New Day Rising is probably my personal favorite.
What exactly has stayed with you from those records, as you’ve written your own songs?
Just the songwriting combined with that guitar sound. And I picked up some things here and there from Bob Mould’s guitar style. Like, I was listening to the intro to the first song of ours — “Everything’s Gonna Have to Be Alright” — and thinking it probably sounds a little bit more like Sugar [Mould’s post-Hüsker Dü band]. Even though I didn’t have that Rat [distortion] pedal and the other stuff he used.
The intro to another song, “Nobody Wants to Drive,” almost sounds like Ratt, the band. The crunch and darker chord changes are a little more metal.
That one actually is probably more influenced by Sugar. And that one is funny because that started off when I was still doing the Toy Trucks band. We tried playing that song, but it was more like a really energetic, forceful waltz. It was in 6/8, and the chorus was the same, but the verse was entirely different — different melody, different lyrics. And I came back to it with these guys, thought about a little bit, and I’m like, “What the hell am I doing here?” So I just decided to make it 4/4, to make it more of a straightforward thing.
The band seems to really relish playing an outright rocker.
It’s a testament to how these guys can put a song over, and it’s good playing with these younger guys that have that energy. I mean, nobody’s going to confuse me with a spring chicken at this point. I guess I’m a little bit more of a winter chicken.
The Drip Edges will play a record release show at the Lamplighter Lounge on Saturday, February 15th, at 3 p.m. Joecephus & The George Jonestown Massacre will open.
If you live in Memphis, you’ve likely heard phrases like “home of the blues,” “heart of soul music,” and “birthplace of rock-and-roll.” Ask anybody; even Google AI insists (so it must be true). Yet Memphians have also seen their favorite artist skip over FedExForum for a tour stop in Little Rock. Despite the rich musical talent and history, Memphis is not a popular destination for national tours. Last-minute cancellations are not uncommon either, as seen just a few years ago with Drake and Moneybagg Yo. Still, locals pride themselves on a vibrant and historical music scene, which is undeniably true. Stax Records, Royal Studios, the Memphis Drum Shop, Easley McCain Recording, Sun Studio — the list goes on. Online lists of the nation’s distinguished music cities frequently rank Memphis in the top 10. But, over the past couple of decades, Memphis has resembled a black hole in the major touring circuit. If asked why, artists would likely say it’s not personal, just business.
Simply put, ticket sales here are unpredictable. Memphis has a reputation as a “walk-up” city, meaning tickets are typically bought as a last-ditch effort instead of far in advance. This could be related to Memphis’ relatively low socioeconomic level. This is not to say Memphis has no appetite for live music. Just look around: Music is everywhere. There are roughly 60 locations within Memphis city limits that provide live music and entertainment, and these locations would not be paying musicians without their ability to attract an audience.
Last December, a partnership between national entertainment agency Live Nation and Crosstown Concourse spawned the construction of a new Memphis venue. Sitting right next to the Concourse, the 1,500-seat venue is expected to host roughly 100 events a year, ranging from comedy to corporate meetings to concerts. Similar types of events can be seen at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts or The Crosstown Theater, albeit with smaller crowds. According to a press release, the new venue is projected to bring more than 150 music industry jobs to Memphis, with base starting salaries of $20/hour, (theoretically) filling a Nashville-sized hole in Memphis’ professional music market. The press release steers clear of this comparison; rather, their plan is to “honor Memphis’ rich musical heritage while filling a key gap in the market, providing a platform for artists eager to perform in the city.” Here, in this almost-mission statement, lies the mysterious “black hole” of live music in Memphis.
By filling a market gap, Live Nation means providing a more “legitimate” venue for big artists to schedule shows. But what about all the other larger venues in Memphis? There’s Minglewood Hall, Memphis Botanic Garden’s Radian Amphitheater, FedExForum, and even smaller locations like Lafayette’s Music Room that have boasted plenty of national acts. Is this “gap” due to a lack of venues, or is it a lack of artists’ interest? The latter seems more likely. But Live Nation’s massive list of nationwide artists likely bolsters their confidence to “fill the gap.” This is what Sherman Willmott, founder of Shangri-La Projects and local music expert, feels the public should be focusing on.
“I think the lede here … is not the venue; it’s Live Nation booking. They’re filling a big empty hole that started with the death of Bob Kelley. Over that time period of the last 25 to 30 years, there’s been no … full-service promotion in town,” Willmott says. Bob Kelley, booker and promoter of Mid-South Concerts, died in 1998. The booking world since then has become “monopolistic. … There’s very few providers.” Memphis especially is not known for large booking agencies/promoters or music business infrastructure, hence the potential impact of Live Nation booking on the Memphis music scene. Memphians will have access to hundreds more artists in pop, indie, electronic, hip-hop, country, and more. Even if the venue starts out slow, Live Nation will likely be able to keep it afloat long enough to catch on. “There’s no one with deeper pockets,” says Willmott.
The introduction of Live Nation to Memphis could point the city in a new direction regarding industry jobs, but 150 of them is a lot to promise. Willmott says he does not “see them hiring that number of people,” drawing on comparisons between the Orpheum Theatre and The Green Room, each of which has a smaller staff. But if the new venue does hire that many, it’s possible for a larger music business market to open up in Memphis.
Naturally, there are some fears and questions about a nationwide corporation like Live Nation (recently involved in an antitrust lawsuit) digging their claws into the Memphis music community. But Willmott points out the role of Crosstown Concourse in the new venue’s booking process: “Bookings at Crosstown are … between 70 and 90 percent local artists.” After all, Crosstown was designed to uplift the community arts, and events at The Green Room or Crosstown Theater do just that. Further, the vertical village supports education (Crosstown High School) and healthcare (Church Health). It is hard to imagine Crosstown wavering from this community-focused vision, even when working with a corporate giant like Live Nation.
Sure enough, things are changing around Memphis. RiverBeat Music Festival is back for its second year in a row, boasting an even bigger lineup of global artists as well as a surefire program of lively and talented local artists like Jombi and Lina Beach. Grind City Brewing Company and Barbian Entertainment just announced a new venue, Grind City Amp, boasting a max capacity of 4,500 and a deep backdrop of Downtown Memphis. The outdoor venue is set to open in the spring of 2026. Although Live Nation and Crosstown have not specified their venue’s opening date, there seems to be a new era of shows coming to Memphis. Let’s hope our favorite artists start showing up on the bills.
Delta Stardust opening for Acid Mother’s Temple. (Photo: Andrew Geraci)
The blues have always hung out at the crossroads of the mundane and the supernatural — as when Robert Johnson exhorted anyone listening to “bury my body down by the highway side, so my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride.” But in spite of the blues walking side by side with the devil and buying mojo hands for so long, the genre was never quite associated with shamanic states of consciousness until the ’60s, when tripping hippies folded the blues into both the folk and the heavy rock they favored. Yet when that sonic mash up coalesced into psychedelic rock, the music lost all its grounding in a particular place. It was largely part of the everywhere/nowhere world of pop music, never spawning a site-specific tag analogous to “Delta blues,” but rather proffering a universal message of peace, love, and understanding.
Now, with the advent of a new Memphis/North Mississippi band, Delta Stardust, that may well be changing. As the band’s chief songwriter Michael Graber, aka Spaceman, puts it, “We wanted to go for this transcendence, but we also wanted to be from somewhere. It’s that whole yin-yang, push-pull thing.”
Album art by Rowan Gratz
Beyond being an abstract statement of the band’s mission, those words also capture the sound they’ve come up with, which can be heard on their debut album, Snakes Made of Light, released on January 24th. At the foundation of most tracks is the jangling, earthy, ramshackle string band sound to which Graber and his new/old bandmates have devoted themselves since at least the mid-’90s heyday of Prof. Elixir’s Southern Troubadours, through the venerable Bluff City Backsliders, and on into more recent projects under the name Graber Gryass. All these have sported, to varying degrees, Graber’s songwriting, which often blends the archaic language of the Carter Family with Graber’s more Whitman-esque, visionary poetry. This holds true for his work for Delta Stardust. But the new band also explores novel audio flavors.
“We gave ourselves permission to bring in all kinds of different textures,” says Graber of the new sonic stew. “You know, the synthesizers, the mellotrons. We recorded at the home studio of John Kilgore, who was the co-producer and engineer. He’s the engineer at Zebra Ranch studio [established near Coldwater, Mississippi, by the late Jim Dickinson 30 years ago]. But John also makes his own guitar pedals and has about 400. And we had tons of Moogs and different compressors. He’s like a Brian Eno in Senatobia. There, in his home studio, John said, ‘If you can dream it, I can find the sound equivalent.’ So we were able to add that alchemical — we call ‘stardust’ — texture that way.”
Thus the yin-yang qualities were baked into the band’s sound simply by virtue of where they cut the music. Even as they fired up old Moog synthesizers, they never forgot that they were in Senatobia, Mississippi. “That’s why we call the genre ‘roots psychedelia,’” Graber explains. “What would happen if, just to take any example, if The Chemical Brothers or The Flaming Lips were actually from the Mississippi Delta? And they had all that burden of influence, but they still wanted to hit escape velocity, too, so to speak, right? If they didn’t want to just rewrite Beatles chord structures, but wanted to talk to their ancestors, in a sense, yet also reach for new heights?”
It should be noted that this cornucopia of sounds is deployed with some restraint, compared to your typical synthesizer band, because the string band is always holding down the fort. And some of the sounds are nonelectronic, yet still unfamiliar in the jug band context. Like the chortling “Hoooo!” that opens “Owl in My Backyard,” a bit of field recording that adds a visceral dimension to a song about a bird that “kisses creation on the forehead each night.” A few tracks later, “Two Questions” opens with frogs and crickets before the swooping, lush chords of Eric Lewis’ pedal steel sweep you away.
Even that opening pastoral evolves before reaching “escape velocity,” as Graber notes. “Then you can hear The Band influences on the chorus, with the accordion and dobro, and then it gets into a weird sound somewhere between Pere Ubu and Black Sabbath, as kind of an inner dialogue, right? But then weaving it all together. Just trying to hit that range of emotions was a joy, and the band was willing to do it as well. You know, we cut most of the stuff live, and then we did some overdubs.”
Recording the basic tracks live was made possible in part by the caliber of musicianship that the core membership of Delta Stardust represents, including Andy Ratliff (a “key collaborator” who goes back to the Prof. Elixir days), Carlos Gonzales, Jesse Dakota Williams, and Scott Carter, as well as many virtuosic cameos by Grayson Smith, Mark Jordan, Victor Sawyer, Jeremy Shrader, Tom Link, Robert Allen Parker, Julia Graber, Eric Lewis, and Kitty Dearing.
The most “topical” track is arguably “Memphis Tattoo,” which brings some uniquely urban concerns into the album’s lyrical universe. “I think anyone in Memphis can relate to the story behind that song,” says Graber. “I was running on the Greenline and I got shot at. The bullet just buzzed right past me into the bushes, and my dog took off. There was smoke everywhere. I called 911, and I posted on social media about it. And then everyone started telling me about how they have these gunshot wounds. You know, people have them as almost a badge of joy. And people start piling on to that post and even posting pictures and other things about their gunshot wounds that have healed. So then I started thinking: What is a Memphis tattoo, but a healed gunshot wound?”
And therein lies yet another opposition held in tension, where the folk harmonies and strums of the music, and psychedelia’s promise of transcendence, undergird an all-too-real, yet somehow hopeful take on the gritty world of today. “The bittersweetness,” says Graber, “is that only the survivors can sing it. But it’s just life here, you know?”
Delta Stardust will celebrate the release of their debut album at the New Memphis Psychedelic Festival, Friday, February 7th, at B-Side Bar, 7 p.m. Other bands at the festival will include Twin Face Kline, Arc of Quasar, and The Narrows.
Stax salutes a fallen hero. (Photo: Courtesy
Stax Museum of American Soul)
Back during the initial flowering of Stax Records, as the label went from success to success in its first half-dozen years, and all its rooms buzzed with an ever-expanding staff trying to keep up with popular demand, one star in particular had a tendency to saunter away from the studio, where the action was, and take a detour down Stax’s back hallways from time to time. Deanie Parker, one of the label’s first office employees who soon became their lead publicist, remembers it well — that’s where she worked.
“Every now and then, he just walked in the door,” she recalls a little wistfully, “with little gifts for the girls in the office, little packages. That’s the kind of person he was.”
Now, scores of mourners will be sending flowers to that same soul singer, Sam Moore, the high tenor partner of Dave Prater in Stax super duo Sam & Dave, who died at the age of 89 on January 10th in Coral Gables, Florida, from post-surgery complications. This week, we pay tribute to the great Sam Moore by revisiting the pivotal role he played in the history of Stax and all soul music, as remembered by two who were right there with him: Deanie Parker and David Porter.
(Photo: Bill Carrier Jr. | Courtesy of The Concord API Stax Collection)
Sam Moore: The Stax Years
The quieting of one of soul music’s most expressive voices sent powerful shock waves throughout the music world — certainly among his late-career collaborators like Bruce Springsteen, but not least in Memphis, where Moore and Prater, singing the songs of Porter and Isaac Hayes, helped bring the Stax sound to its fullest fruition in the mid-’60s, becoming overnight sensations with hits like “Hold On, I’m Comin,’” “You Don’t Know Like I Know,” “I Thank You,” and “Soul Man.”
Even then, “Sam Moore got along especially well with the administrative staff,” says Parker, recalling those spontaneous gifts. “He was the most gregarious of the duo. He was a great conversationalist and very personable. Dave was rather laid-back, kind of quiet.
“Keep in mind, now, that I was not in the studio with him all the time because I was in administration,” Parker goes on. “But because of our proximity to each other, it gave me an opportunity to get up and, when the record light was not on in Studio A, go in and observe and listen — not only to their rehearsals, but to the final takes and the playback.”
Surely anyone at Stax was rushing down the hall to hear the hot new duo’s latest, once the hits were hitting, for they were taking the Stax recipe to a whole new level of artistry. Yet while those songs are now part of the Stax canon, the definitive statements of the Memphis Sound, the success of two newcomers named Sam & Dave was not a foregone conclusion when they arrived.
Deanie Parker heading up the publicity desk at Stax (Photo: Courtesy Bill Carrier Jr. | The Concord API Stax Collection)
Newcomers
“There was no one interested in Sam & Dave,” songwriter David Porter told Rob Bowman in the liner notes for The Complete Stax/Volt Singles: 1959-1968. “It was like a throwaway kind of situation [to] see if anything could happen with them.” Indeed, it seemed no one at Atlantic Records, who had a distribution deal with Stax, knew what to do with this singing duo from Florida, who’d had little luck with their scattered singles on the Marlin, Alston, and Roulette labels. Despite this, said Porter, “I was very much interested in Sam & Dave.”
But were Sam & Dave interested in Memphis? Atlantic had “loaned” the duo to the smaller label that was showing so much promise, but in 1965 Stax was hardly a household name. Moore’s reaction, according to Parker, was, “Who wants to go to Memphis?” Moore had his sights set on crossover pop stardom in the Big Apple, not moving to what seemed like a backwater. “He really did not have a positive impression about Memphis,” Parker says. “And apparently he was not all that familiar with Stax, which stands to reason, because when Sam & Dave got here, we only had a couple of stars. We just had Rufus and Carla, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, the Mar-Keys, and Otis [Redding]. I don’t know that we had more than those in the category of the top stars.”
Moore himself described the situation hilariously in his acceptance speech for Sam & Dave’s induction into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in October 2015. “When Dave and I first came to Memphis,” Moore recalled, “the first person I saw was David Porter. He had on a small hat, a big sweater, and his pants looked like pedal pushers. Water came into my eyes.” Moore paused for laughter with impeccable comic timing. “Then it got worse: I saw Isaac. Isaac had on a green shirt with a low-cut neck, like that, a white belt, chartreuse pants, pink socks, and white shoes. I started crying harder. I wanted to go home.”
There must have been more than a little truth to that, for, as Moore went on to explain, “I had in mind to sing like Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Wilson Pickett … but then they introduced us to these two guys and we went inside and they introduced us to the songs. And they didn’t sound nothing like Jackie Wilson and all these people! And then I turned to Dave … and he was trying to get a phone number to get to the airport.
“Being the new kids on the block, we had nothing to say. So we had to go on in there.”
In fact, they were walking into the Stax brain trust, which had always dared to be different. When Sam & Dave’s pre-Stax singles tried to emulate the more polished soul of Wilson or Sam Cooke, albeit without their orchestral flourishes, the results came off as rather corny. Now it was 1965, and pop music was getting edgier, from Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” to the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Even James Brown, whose biggest hits had been ballads like “Try Me,” was cooking up material like “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.”
Porter and Hayes mapping out the next Sam & Dave hit (Photo: Courtesy Bill Carrier Jr. | The Concord API Stax Collection)
Dream Team
David Porter, who saw their potential early on, inched them toward a rawer take on soul music when he penned the shuffling, feel-good “A Place Nobody Can Find” for them, though the B-side, written by Porter and Steve Cropper, was a more tender ballad, with sassy horns thrown in for good measure. Unlike their later hits, Prater was given the lead vocal, though Moore’s upper register parts hinted at the harmonies that were to come. It wasn’t until their next single that Porter and Hayes teamed up to produce the duo, and their nascent songwriting partnership blossomed. And they gelled not only in the substance of the songs, with Porter crafting lyrics for Hayes’ music, but in the strategy they mapped out for the two new kids on the block.
Reflecting on that strategy today, Porter says that Sam & Dave “didn’t have a concept as far as the artistic direction that they needed to go. That’s why Jerry Wexler, the president of Atlantic Records, brought them to Memphis, in hopes of finding whatever that was — he didn’t know what it was. But we had our concept of what we wanted to do, and that was to bring it out of the church, the spirituality out of the church, and have the music emphasize what we called the low end of it, the bass, drums, and guitar, and the underlying chord progressions in the low end, paired with the gospel persona of it, the spirituality of the church.”
And yet, as with Ray Charles and so much of the finest soul music, the gospel underpinnings supported very secular, worldly sentiments. Lyrically, Porter paired the world of the bluesman with the spirit of church. And that came as a shock to the singers, who had both grown up singing in church choirs.
“David Porter and Sam could clash,” Parker recalls, “but it wasn’t hostile, and it didn’t last but a few minutes. It was like they were sparring, you know? Of course, Isaac’s thing was the keyboard, he was the melody man, and Porter was the lyricist. And sometimes Porter had to stop and help both of the guys understand what he meant when he wrote, ‘Coming to you on a dusty road.’ You know what I’m saying? Because this was not Sam & Dave’s environment. This was David Porter’s environment from the area around Millington, Tennessee.”
And so a great foursome was born, beginning with the single “I Take What I Want,” which, as Bowman notes, “was to provide the model for the majority of Sam & Dave’s Stax 45s.” By the time “Hold On, I’m Comin’” dropped in March of 1966, topping the R&B charts and reaching number 21 on the pop charts, that model was locked in. After crafting a song and a sound, Porter and Hayes would only need to give the duo a brief rundown before they got it. Porter can still picture it today: “I’m standing there with them, and I’m looking at them as I give them the lyric sheet. We go through the melody at the piano, and then by the time they get on the microphone, they go into another world. They made it their own, and that’s when you know you’ve got something special.”
And so, even if “Sam was the dominant one,” as Parker recalls, and more prone to pushback, both Sam and Dave were consummate professionals. “We had to go on in there,” as Moore recalled, and they did.
Porter says, “There never was a comment like, ‘Well, I don’t want to do that song. I don’t like that song.’ Because we produced the albums, even when we were doing a song by some other writer, and on occasion we would do that, they still didn’t object. They would bring their own spirit and commitment to wanting to make it as good as it could possibly be. And they did that.”
The Key to the Speedboat
The foursome’s recipe for success not only gave Sam & Dave’s career a boost; it solidified Stax’s standing as a label. As Robert Gordon writes in Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, “their album Hold On, I’m Comin’ proved to be the breakthrough for Stax’s album sales. In all the company’s years through 1965, they’d released only eight albums. … In 1966 alone they released eleven albums and Sam & Dave’s Hold On went to number one on the R&B album sales chart. Albums were good business.”
Parker likens it to the fledgling label acquiring a sleek new machine. “They reminded me of a speedboat,” she says. “A boat that nobody was 100 percent familiar with because they were not on the water in the speedboat every day. They had to figure out a lot of things mechanically, and they had to become acquainted with each other. And I’m talking about Sam and Dave and David and Isaac. Once Sam and Dave found their groove with David and Isaac, it was like they had found the key to speedboat. They then began to realize that they had more going for them with their new producers than they’d ever imagined.”
If the speedboat was designed by the producers, Porter makes it clear that Sam & Dave supplied the spark of ignition. “You, as a creator, can create something that you know is strong and good, but when you have an artist that’s able to create their own individuality through the spirit of what you’ve done, then you’ve got something special. That’s the thing that made Sam Moore such a special talent, as well as Dave: They would go into the ownership of the message. I would tell them where the vibe was, and they would have to live the spirit of the message. That’s where true artistry comes in. And the more songs we wrote for them, the more comfortable they would get into doing it.”
Or, as Porter wrote on social media after Moore’s death, Sam & Dave “were always filled with passion, purity, individuality, and believability, grounded in soul.”
The road grew dustier and rockier as the years rolled on, with Atlantic claiming ownership of all Stax masters prior to 1968, and taking Sam & Dave away from Memphis. The duo never reached the heights of their Stax records again, and split apart as Moore struggled with addiction through the ’70s. Yet, with the help of his wife Joyce MacRae, whom he wed in 1982 and who now survives him, he kicked drugs (coming to support several GOP candidates along the way) and revived his career without Prater (who died in a car crash in 1988).
By the time he spoke to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame 10 years ago, Sam Moore had fully embraced his Stax past. “Coming from a humble beginning, with no formal training in singing or anything, we were just two guys who got out there and took the church with us, like Al Green did. … I’m going to say this to you: Thank you Memphis people, the band, the friends that Dave and I met all those years. …They believed in us. They stuck with us. Every record company that we had been with just didn’t know what to do with us. Sixty years later, I’ve been doing this. I’m blessed.”
Sam Moore knew he’d helped build something for the ages. As David Porter reflects now, “The music that was done by the four of us together will live on forever. There’s no doubt in my mind.”
Joce Reyome (Solo/Duo first place) (Photos: Nate Kieser)
Singer Shaun Murphy, formerly of Little Feat, had just finished her set as part of The Galaxie Agency’s “IBC Showcase,” held last Thursday afternoon at B.B. King’s Blues Club on Beale Street. During the lull between sets, my wife Vicki and I continued our conversation with the woman seated next to us. “I’ve never seen snow, before,” she said in a distinct Australian accent. “I live in Adelaide, which is in South Australia.” Snowfall at sea level is very rare, especially for a coastal Australian city like Adelaide.
The woman, wearing a Creamsicle-orange hoodie, went on to tell us that she’d visited several places in “the States,” but she hadn’t brought any cold weather clothing because she didn’t think it would get this chilly in the South. She hadn’t had time to go shopping for something warmer after arriving in Memphis.
Snow was forecast for Memphis and the Mid-South with predicted accumulations of five to eight inches. The woman had come to see a musician from her hometown of Adelaide compete in the 40th edition of the International Blues Challenge.
The Memphis-based Blues Foundation hosts the International Blues Challenge (IBC). Typically held in January, the annual event brings together blues musicians, fans, and industry professionals for what is essentially a week-long “blues convention,” featuring blues documentary screenings, roundtable discussions, award presentations, a free health fair for the musicians, showcase performances, and vocal/instrumental master classes conducted by blues veterans.
The challenge portion of IBC week featured mostly up-and-coming blues artists competing in two categories: Solo/Duo and Band. These acts came from all over North America and from around the world. The “challenge,” along with the other activities, took place around the Beale Street Entertainment District. This year, almost 200 acts from nearly 40 states and 12 countries performed in several rounds of competition. The musicians represented their local blues affiliates or sponsoring organizations — called “societies.” Many of the societies’ members traveled to Memphis in support of their artists, creating a home away from home atmosphere that, in many ways, is unique to the blues genre.
That atmosphere of home permeated everything on Beale, and the far-flung travelers created a temporary ecosystem dependent upon one element — a love of the blues. Community is key to blues music and once you were on Beale Street for IBC, it was easy to become a member of that community and feel right at home.
After all, Memphis is the “Home of the Blues.”
Following Galaxie’s afternoon showcase, we made our way down Beale, stopping in at several clubs along the way to take-in performances. More than a dozen Beale Street locales served as venues for the nightly challenges. From Blues City Café to Alfred’s, Beale was alive with the blues. Fans and supporters came together over three consecutive nights to hear great music and have a good time.
In the Corner Bar at Club Handy, we ran into an old friend and blues musician extraordinaire, Mick Kolassa, aka Uncle Mick, who was one of the judges for that venue’s Solo/Duo performers. IBC challengers are rated according to such criteria as musicianship, vocal abilities, and stage presence. John Klaver, representing the Dutch Blues Foundation, played an extraordinary set, and Vicki talked with him afterwards. Klaver is a friend of Vicki’s first cousin, Mark Zandveld, an accomplished jazz bassist from Amsterdam, and Cousin Mark had given us a heads-up that Klaver would be in Memphis for IBC. Maybe Vicki’s quick “hello” helped Klaver feel at home.
Internationally, blues music is as popular as ever, and fans (and musicians) from abroad love to visit Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. There’s a certain Memphis mystique that the world wants to experience firsthand. Australian Frank Sultana, the IBC’s overall 2023 Solo/Duo winner, came back for a visit this year. Sultana said he not only loves coming to Memphis, but that when you’re here you feel “a connection to that [early blues] era, remembering when it all happened.”
That connection to the origins of the blues, along with the mystique, also fosters a sense of community — of feeling like home.
Sultana went on to say that the “connection to the blues” now comes “from everywhere [around the world],” including his home country of Australia, which sent seven acts to Memphis for this year’s IBC.
Thursday night ended with a couple more stops to check out the music and to say “hello” to more old friends. We were feeling part of the blues community, an ecosystem fed by great music and good times.
Then the snow came.
Friday morning was white, very white. And cold, very cold. Vicki reminded me, several times, that she hates snow. “Nice to look at,” she said, “from inside.”
We finally ventured out around 1:00 p.m. and sloshed our way back to the Beale Street ecosystem through six inches of snow and slush. Workshop classes and more showcase performances were already underway. Later that same evening were the semifinal performances.
Saturday brought continued chill with some sunshine for the IBC Finals, held in the historic Orpheum Theatre. The international blues community was well represented with five acts, including two from Australia. Regarding that global representation, Bob Kieser, the publisher of Blues Blast Magazine and a recent recipient of the Blues Foundation’s Keeping the Blues Alive Award, said, “IBC has evolved into quite an international event [and] shows the continuing importance of blues in shaping artists across the world.”
Josh Hoyer of Josh Hoyer & Soul Colossal (Band first place)
Dutchman John Klaver was a Solo/Duo finalist, but Joce Reyome of Canada won that category with an incredible onstage performance. In the Band category, Josh Hoyer & Soul Colossal, representing the Blues Society of Omaha, Nebraska, took first place.
During Saturday afternoon’s performances, Nardia, a band out of Melbourne, Australia, broke into their song “Long Way From Home.” I looked around at the Orpheum’s audience and let IBC week soak in — the stellar music performances, the atmosphere, and that feeling of community.
Home can be wherever you make it, and for one week in January the worldwide blues community came home to Memphis.
My previous piece in 2018 on my friend Stanley Booth, whom I knew for 64 of his 82-plus years, had concluded with his revelation to me that he’d become a Catholic, achieving what he called “the greatest pleasure of my life … a complete redesign.”
It was surely appropriate, then, for Stanley’s funeral to be a Roman Catholic mass, which took place at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Central Avenue on Saturday, December 28th, more than a week after his death at Harbor View Nursing Facility on North Second Street.
The attending group of communicants was smaller than I would have anticipated and scattered throughout the venerable high-ceilinged Midtown church. A mass was a mass, after all, and this one kept pretty much to the standard litany, without allowances for the kind of open memorial that people of consequence so often receive these days.
And Stanley Booth was very much a person of consequence. His authorship of The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Outlaw Band (published in 1984 as Dance With the Devil after years of dedicated effort and familiarity with the band) was arguably the War and Peace of the rock era. There were other notable books, like Rythm Oil, a compilation of shorter pieces about the people, places, and things of that era, which, after all, is still very much with us. (The purposely misspelled title was typical Boothian waggishness.)
My favorite single piece of Stanley’s, a brief review of a Janis Joplin concert in Memphis during the mid-’60s, a failure through no fault of the singer’s own, somehow manages to encompass all the rights, wrongs, misadventures, and pretensions of the time.
A memorial for Stanley will be scheduled for later on, or so promises our mutual friend David Less (no slouch as an author himself), who had made a point of looking in on Stanley in his last days. According to David, Stanley had been lonely and depressed at the nursing home, where he had grown progressively more physically incapacitated, even as his mind strained, as writers’ minds do, toward articulation and purpose.
All that striving had ceased mere days earlier, as Stanley, after consultations between David and Stanley’s daughter Ruby, was entered into hospice care per se. He had become mute and incommunicative, hovering on the edge of vegetative.
Very regrettably, I had not gotten around to seeing Stanley as he neared his end. Many reasons for that, including a newly acquired auto that couldn’t be depended on to start and resisted all efforts to fix. The basic reason, though, was that our relationship, like the car, famously had its fits and starts.
A few years ago, after a reasonably longish period of keeping close company (which meant, significantly, carting Stanley around and making sure he had things — e.g., wheelchair, TV, what-have-you — and passing on periodic feelers from music media types trying to connect with him), we’d had a bizarre interruption. Out of the proverbial blue, he’d asked me why, some 60 years earlier, I’d referred to his girlfriend of that time as “simian.”
I remembered no such shocking incivility toward a lady whom I had in fact admired and, reasonably enough, therefore, could offer no explanation. Many protests and back-and-forths later, there had been an exchange of over-the-edge remarks between us, resulting in a breach. Inevitably, there would have been a healing, something we’d gone through more than once during those aforesaid 60-odd years, but — time ran out.
Sadly, this kind of thing was not atypical for Stanley. His persona, like his sense of language, filled all the obvious, and most of the imaginable, spaces. Though he had reservoirs of charm, many of his relationships ran into stormy weather. Long on talent and short of stature, he had his share of the Napoleon syndrome. He could be modest, but never exactly humble. Or maybe that should be stated the other way around. His earliest literary model had been Ernest Hemingway, that paragon of basic English and exact phraseology.
At a public function some years ago, the late George Klein introduced him, molto con brio, as a celebrated music writer. No, Stanley objected, for better or for worse, he was a writer, pure and simple. This was an echo of Hemingway’s famous late-career admonition to his overly self-concerned contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald, “You see, Bo, you’re not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers.”
Over the years, I’ve known numerous highly talented individuals whose abilities transcended various categories of the usually recognized earthly disciplines. Even as we speak, I could name you a handful, right here in Mempho. Would-be Renaissance men (and women).
Though he was not without a generous amount of self-regard (as the high proportion of references to himself in all his work indicates), Stanley Booth was not among these across-the-board pretenders. A writer is all he was. No scatterer of loose energy across the lines. No diluter of his essential being.
And for that he deserves to be called a Master.
I did not mean to confer, earlier in this article, any slight upon the reach and scope of the Roman Catholic litany. Its very universality and subordination to a (lowercase) catholic whole may have been the aspect of the religion that most appealed to Stanley and caused him to embrace it.
“I am not after any pie in the sky,” he would tell me, by way of an awkward attempt to account for his conversion. In this piece, I have not listed any of the earthly honors conferred upon him, and there were many, including a lifetime achievement award from the Smithsonian Institute. But as Stanley once said, wistfully, “You can’t eat reputation. If I had a nickel for every good review I’ve had …” letting that sentence fade out rhetorically.
As the aforesaid litany notes, “we know partially, and we prophesy partially.” But it holds forth the idea for the striver of attaining the company of the saints, and that ain’t hay.
Often a meme will circulate listing the hits of bygone times. A roll call of great releases in, say, 1977 will leave one feeling it was a golden age of recorded music, our contemporary sounds paling in comparison. Looking over this year’s best-of list, however, I’m inclined to think that 2024 will be celebrated in much the same way. And if you should beg to differ, I would only refer you to those wise wake up call offered by GloRilla herself, “Do y’all know what the f*ck goin’ on?? (goin’ on … goin’ on … goin’ on …)”
Aquarian Blood – Counting Backwards Again (Black & Wyatt)
This caps off a trilogy of sorts, over which the sometime punk screamers dialed it back into the acoustic realm. Meticulously crafted yet loose, these songs are dark, primitive missives haunted by trauma and desire, as if German sonic artists Can reinterpreted the Incredible String Band.
Cedric Burnside – Hill Country Love (Provogue)
Burnside’s latest album turns the volume up, yes, but not the distortion. Bringing more of a full-band sound, this particular Burnside eschews the hard rock guitar tones that were his grandfather R.L.’s trademark. There are echoes of 2021’s I Be Trying’s quieter soul-imbued originals (“Smile”), but funkier, staccato riffs predominate — at least until he breaks out the acoustic for traditional numbers.
GloRilla – Ehhthang Ehhthang and Glorious (CMG/Interscope)
Rolling Stone ranked October’s Glorious among the year’s best, but we in the city where “everything is everything” tapped into the Ehhthang Ehhthang mixtape way back in April. While the 2024 releases are two peas in a pod, Ehhthang was arguably more significant as Glo’s triumphant debut in the full-length format. And tracks like “No Bih” slay (in Latin, no less) in such a stark, Memphis way: “F*ck it, carpe diem/I make ‘em motivated (okay)/Grammy-nominated (okay), f*ck whoever hatin’.”
IMAKEMADBEATS – WANDS (UNAPOLOGETIC)
While there are mad beats throughout this instrumental journey, there are also orchestral passages both ethereal and bombastic, at times sounding eerily like the ’70s synth-meister Tomita. It’s an interstellar trip in audio form, in which you’re never sure if you’re hearing a sample or an intricate new composition by MAD himself. “I’m Losing My Mind I’m OK” even features lyrics, hauntingly sung by Tiffany Harmon.
Juicy J and Xavier Wulf – Memphis Zoo
While Juicy J co-founded the dark horror-hop of Three 6 Mafia, this collab with fellow Memphian Wulf is, paradoxically, dark, ominous, and … fun. But there’s a gravitas here, too, as on the most popular track, album opener “The Truth,” an exhortation to cut the BS, stop fronting, and face facts. And a deeper truth about our times comes out in personal fave “Alley Oop”: “We’re living in the era of the alley oop,” and it’s not a good thing.
MonoNeon – Quilted Stereo (Court Square)
“I walked in the room and got butterflies.” So MonoNeon described his studio work with Mavis Staples on “Full Circle,” a highlight of Dywane “MonoNeon” Thomas Jr.’s latest work. With its doo-wop-ish vocal bass riff evoking a gospel bounce right out of the last century, it embodies funk and soul’s past, present, and future. Then there’s the sing-along jam with George Clinton, the perfectly Clinton-esque [and downright bluesy] “Quilted!” – an ode to flying your sartorial freak flag high, even if that means walking down the street decked out in bespoke, multicolored quilts. Then there’s the chugging New Wave pop of “Church of Your Heart,” the jungle beat rap of “Segreghetto,” and the sparkling sizzler of the summer, “Jelly Roll,” full of glossy synth warbles and bass stabs, its video overflowing with extras seemingly right out of the Crystal Palace roller-skating scene. MonoNeon’s greatest work yet.
NLE Choppa – SLUT SZN (Warner)
One of four releases by Choppa this year, all carry on his raunchy “Slut Me Out” variations, most audaciously with this album’s shuffling, acoustic guitar-driven “Slut Me Out 2 (Country Me Out),” featuring J.P., who sings, “If I was a cowgirl/I’d wanna ride me too!” Both versions skew gender in new ways for hip-hop, but it’s the stylistic mash up of the galloping, dancehall-flavored “Catalina” with Latin star Yaisel LM that truly takes Memphis hip-hop into global waters, reflecting Choppa’s Jamaican roots.
The Lisa Nobumoto Jazz Masters Orchestra – A Tribute to Jazz Singer Nancy Wilson
Having performed with the great Teddy Edwards for decades, this Memphian knows how to give Wilson’s catalog her own individual stamp. “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” becomes a ballad, worlds away from Frankie Valli’s stomper. “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” verges into boogaloo territory, yet with a relaxed delivery. Carl Wolfe’s big, brassy arrangements give the album a rare jazz classicism.
Jerry Phillips – For the Universe (Omnivore)
Though this is Phillips’ debut album, his decades of experience recording with great songwriters like John Prine at the studio his father built lend it the feel of a career-topper from the last century. The wry observations and hard-won wisdom of songs like “Specify” (exhorting his lover to say what she wants) or “She Let Me Slip Right Through Her Fingers” are carried by Phillips’ voice, echoing Charlie Rich or Johnny Rivers, and a band of ace Memphis session players.
Talibah Safiya – Black Magic
As artist-in-residence at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music last year, Safiya tapped into the High Water Recording Company’s back catalog, working with producer/engineer Ari Morris to weave generous helpings of Mississippi blues and soul into her samples. Erstwhile Memphian-turned-international-producer Brandon Deener lends his sonic touch as well, not to mention guitarist MadameFraankie, who brings a simmering soul vibe to underpin Safiya’s powerful-yet-playful voice.
Marcella Simien – To Bend to the Will of a Dream That’s Being Fulfilled
For this most personal of journeys into her family’s past and her own well-being, Simien’s playing nearly all the instruments, crafting a setting in a kind of synthetic world-building, evoking the sweep of generations with the sweep of electronic filters. Rootsier sounds also make an appearance, as the artist conjures a timeless space to commune with her ancestors.
Snowglobe – The Fall
Like much of Snowglobe’s earlier output, this is rich with layers of ear candy. Though grounded by chords on an acoustic guitar or piano, the arrangements fill out with all manner of harmonies, synthesizers, or electric guitar riffs and hooks. Think Badfinger meets “Soul Finger,” with hints of Harry Nilsson’s darker moods and post-‘90s quirks all their own.
Cyrena Wages – Vanity Project
Produced and mixed by Matt Ross-Spang, this album has some of the rootsy, vintage elements of his previous work with Margo Price, yet with the contemporary pop instincts once championed by one of Wages’ heroes, Amy Winehouse. Most of all, the sounds jump out of the speakers with the grit of a real band, which includes guitarist and songwriting collaborator Joe Restivo.
Reba Russell reflects on her career (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Last Saturday at Hernando’s Hide-A-Way, the Memphis Blues Society recognized nine artists for their regional and global impact with its Lifetime Achievement Awards. Among the awardees were Thomas Bingham, Charles Gage, Mike Glenn, Eric Hughes, Al Kapone, Memphis Gold, Andrew “Shine” Turner, and Jay Sieleman, a roster marked by its eclecticism and inclusiveness. Yet there was one more recipient who was especially notable: Reba Russell. As one of the few local women still regularly singing the blues in this town (also including Barbara Blue and the incomparable Joyce Cobb), the celebration of Russell’s decades-long career was significant beyond the music itself.
It was an appropriate award for the artist who only last year released the powerful single, “Women Rule.” As Russell says, “You know, I am a woman-lover. I believe in women, and I want women to do good, and I have even been ugly and kind of mean to men over my career and in life! It’s one of my favorite themes. But I’m really passionate about that. I really believe it. I just don’t think we get a good enough shake and that we’re still trying to overcome that.”
Saturday’s ceremony, then, meant a great deal to Russell. “Memphis doesn’t support the blues or the Memphis Blues Society like it could, you know,” she says. “I just wish there were more people that cared, but at the same time, it was just a big, warm hug. And for me personally, Wayne and James and Sally were there, and they were at the very first gig I ever played at RP Tracks.”
Memphis Blues Society president Angela Ghoreishi and Russell at last Saturday’s event (Photo: Mark Cardwell)
That would be Wayne Russell, her husband and bass player; drummer James Cunningham; and longtime friend Sally Raburn, who, Russell says, “has been a music fan her whole life.”
Speaking of that first RP Tracks show back at the dawn of the ’80s, accompanied by her husband-to-be and Cunningham, Russell says today, “I told the dude who was giving me a ride there, my friend Bill Turner, ‘Take me home. I don’t want to do this. I’m scared!’” Luckily for the club-goers that night, Turner stayed the course.
But it was still nerve-racking for the young singer. “I pretty much sang with my back to the audience,” she laughs, and that was not lost on Raburn. “She was the one who, at the end of that night, came up and said, ‘You are an amazing singer, but you know, it’d be nice if we could see your face. You should turn around while you’re singing!’”
It may be hard for today’s fans to reconcile that stage fright with the bold, bawdy blues (and soul and rock) singer they know. That’s summed up by longtime Memphis multi-instrumentalist and erstwhile guitarist for the Reba Russell band, Paul Taylor, now living in Wisconsin. “You could ask anybody about Reba,” he says, “and they would say that she’s one of the most electrifying vocalists you’ll ever hear in person, and she never fails to deliver, and she has the same powerful voice that she’s had for her entire career. I just marvel at her every time because she just has such an intense power.”
That power was apparent to friends who heard her even before that first show, and Russell credits their encouragement as a key motivator back in those early days. Through a series of bands, first Visions, then Portrait, and finally Reba and the Portables, Russell, Wayne, and a rotating cast of band members took the city by storm, performing mainly covers at clubs like Solomon Alfred’s or the Bombay Bicycle Club. In the meantime, the singer and her bassist were clicking romantically, marrying in 1986.
Yet on her journey, from the Portables becoming one of the city’s premier cover bands, to a production deal with Chips Moman, to finally leaning into singing and recording her originals with the Reba Russell Band, the singer has remained appreciative of friends who helped her along the way. At Saturday’s event, Russell says, “I just got up there and praised Memphis and Memphis musicians and producers and engineers and everybody who perpetuates the whole blues scene. Because, you know, I had no experience when I started. I came here and, boom, everybody helped me. Nobody was ugly to me or told me to go away. So I was just trying to express my appreciation to the fabulous musicians in this town, many of whom aren’t here anymore, that have left the planet, yet were so instrumental in helping me and other people get on our feet and become worthy and hard-working musicians.”
That gratitude extended to her fellow awardees as well. “It was really awesome to be included in that group because there were some really cool other people that were given awards that night,” says Russell, noting that it reflected well on the the Memphis Blues Society. Founded in 2005, it gave aid to blues artists during Covid, then launched its Lifetime Achievement Awards in 2021
“There are blues purists, and then there are people who are into opening the blues up,” she observes. “It was really cool that Al Kapone was honored last night, and he spoke about that. He has been advocating and adding a blues feel and blues themes to his rap, and I’m sure that there are a lot of blues purists who kind of thumb their nose at that. But from my point of view, it’s absolutely amazing that he’s doing that, and teaching kids, and passing that blues legacy on. I really enjoyed his speech. What he said was really important.”
Reflecting a bit more on the evening and Al Kapone, she continues, “I think he was as proud as I was about receiving the award. And, you know, he’s a lot younger than I am, and he’s got a long time to perpetuate his artistry. So yeah, that part was lovely to me because it was about the continuation of this genre. It’s important for younger people to get hip to it.”
In these fraught days of authoritarianism and climate change, when our fate depends more than ever on local community action, music continues to seal the bonds between those fighting the good fight. It’s an age-old function of song, for songs are both rousing and inherently inclusive, spreading equally to all eardrums in the vicinity. America has a tradition of protest and organizing songs going back more than a century, from Joe Hill and the Wobblies, to singing through megaphones at Occupy Wall Street, to today’s pop songs at political rallies or in countless poetry-song slams across the land.
It was no accident, then, that Bruce and Barbara Newman’s mutual love of folk music and the blues led them to create a concert series celebrating both music and community action simultaneously. And, appropriately enough, it started back in the ’90s with the music of Woody Guthrie. “My law practice was starting to represent folk musicians like Tom Paxton and Dave Van Ronk, a whole bunch of them,” says Bruce Newman. “So we started calling on these people to play music concerts, each one for different charitable beneficiaries. The first one we did was a tribute to Woody Guthrie, and we had Odetta, Oscar Brand, Richie Havens, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Tom Paxton, and Josh White Jr. on that first bill. And the second one had Tom Paxton and Oscar Brand again, plus Melanie, Roger McGuinn, and Tom Rush.”
Those early concerts became Acoustic Sunday Live, an annual tradition unlike any other in Memphis, now in its third decade. And that last headliner from the early days — veteran singer-songwriter Tom Rush — is significant because he hasn’t been back since then. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.
“I consider Tom Rush a friend,” says Newman. “I see him at Folk Alliance [International] every year. And I bugged him for 20 years, ‘Tom, when are you coming back?’ Well, he always had a conflict the first week in December, right when we always have our concert. But this past summer he said, ‘Bruce, if you move it one week, I’m coming down. It’s a good cause. It’s important.’ And that’s what we did.”
Booking Rush, a diehard pioneer of the folk club scene whose first album came out in 1965, would be a coup for any folk festival, but this year’s Acoustic Sunday Live will also feature Shakura S’Aida, Steve Forbert, and Tim Easton, not to mention special guests Anne Harris and Marcella Simien. As in other years, one thing is clear: When the Newmans get their Acoustic Sunday on, they don’t play.
While finally getting Rush back was a challenge, it was especially significant both because of his ties to the series’ earliest days and because of his role in the ’60s folk revival. Like many folkies of that era, Rush had a great love of Woody Guthrie and classic Appalachian and Southern folk songs when he launched his career as a young English major at Harvard, filling his first albums with such material. But he had too much curiosity to be a pure traditionalist, and, as the ’60s wore on, he filled out his repertoire with songs as disparate as Bo Diddley’s “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” and Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.”
That eclecticism has marked Rush’s career ever since, setting him apart from the “more authentic than thou” folk set. “I’ve never been accused of being pure,” Rush quips today. “Early on, when I started out in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there was this big folk scene going on, with people playing all kinds of different traditional music. They all tended to specialize. There was one guy who did almost nothing but Woody Guthrie songs, and a band that did nothing but bluegrass, and another guy who did Delta Blues, or Irish-Scottish ballads, and so forth. And I tended to be the generalist.”
That doesn’t detract from the power of Rush’s music to bring folks together. Indeed, his inclusiveness only amplifies that power, even as he eschews what Bob Dylan once pejoratively dubbed “finger-pointing songs.” Part of that came down to Rush’s own sense of himself. “There’s a certain irony in a bunch of Harvard students sitting around singing about how rough it was in the coal mines,” he chuckles. “I did ramble around from genre to genre. By the time I cut my second album for Elektra, I’d run out of traditional songs that got me excited. So one side of that album was traditional songs, and the other side was me covering rock-and-roll tunes, including one that I wrote, ‘On the Road Again.’”
He also had his antennae out for a new era of songwriters. “Then the following album was The Circle Game, where I introduced [the songs of] Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne because nobody really had heard of them before. That was a further switch away from traditional folk. These three brilliant writers came at me from different directions, but they were writing stuff that was dazzlingly great, yet not so different from folk that I couldn’t relate to it.”
His ear for a good song has served him well, up through his latest release of all originals, Gardens Old, Flowers New. Those attending Acoustic Sunday Live should expect that same soothing voice and eclectic ear that’s kept Rush, now on what he likes to call his “63rd annual farewell tour,” in demand for decades, as he swaps songs with other legendary troubadours. “I stay away from getting political on stage,” he says. “I have done shows to support various causes, but I don’t take it on stage. I think my shows should be a little bit of a vacation from problems of the world.”
Acoustic Sunday Live —The Concert to Protect Our Aquifer, presents an evening with Tom Rush, Shakura S’Aida, Steve Forbert, and Tim Easton, as well as special guests Anne Harris and Marcella Simien, at First Congregational Church, Sunday, December 15th, 7 p.m. Tickets start at $50.
