Memphis has long been Vinyl City, USA, and one reason has been its world-class record stores. That legacy wasn’t born with modern shops like Shangri-La or Goner, or Pop Tunes before them, but in the 1940s with the Home of the Blues record store on Beale Street. It was the ultimate clearinghouse for wax platters back in the day, especially in the underground community of blues, R&B, and soul aficionados.
Elvis Presley famously shopped there, and another fan was Johnny Cash, who wrote in his autobiography Cash, “I loved going to Home of the Blues, the record store. That’s where I bought Blues in the Mississippi Night, the great anthology of Delta blues singers recorded by Alan Lomax, which is still one of my favorite albums (I borrowed a good song title there, too).”
Only a little later, the store was a mecca of sorts to John King, the legendary promo man for Ardent Studios and Ardent Records, and the collector whose vinyl library forms the basis of the Memphis Listening Lab. Upon King’s death last year, his friend Sherman Willmott recalled that “he grew up with rock-and-roll, chasing the records … taking the bus Downtown to Home of the Blues record shop on Beale.”
After the shop closed in 1975, it seemed relegated to the dustbin of history, its name living on mainly through the series of 45s released between 1960-62 on the Home of the Blues record label. But lately, one of the original owners’ family is working to preserve that legacy more proactively. Now living in Northern California, Bruce Frager grew up in Memphis spending a lot of time with his great-uncle Ruben Cherry and his great-aunt Celia Camp Hodge, pivotal figures in the history of Home of the Blues. While Cherry was the ostensible owner, it was Hodge who founded the Southern Amusement distribution company that financed it. “She was sort of a wheeler-dealer,” Frager says of his great-aunt today.
As part of the tightly knit extended family, Frager knew the Home of the Blues record shop well. “Of course, we’re Jewish, so we had all the holidays together — bar mitzvahs, birthdays, all that stuff,” he says. “And we used to take a bus to go Downtown to the record store on weekends. We used to get tickets to go to shows. I saw the Beatles at the Coliseum, and I don’t know how many times I saw James Brown. I have a collection of James Brown cuff links that he would give me when we went backstage.”
When the retail shop grew to host a record label, it made its name signing many significant Black artists of the day, including Roy Brown, Willie Mitchell and His Orchestra, and the 5 Royales. In a 2017 interview with the Memphis Flyer, singer/songwriter Don Bryant fondly recalled his association with the latter group, who recorded one of his earliest compositions for the label. “The 5 Royales recorded my song at a studio down on North Main, Home of the Blues. I wasn’t even allowed to go in the studio, I had to sit out in the lobby. That was one of the biggest deals I could have had in those days because they were one of the most famous groups. My group, the Four Kings, was always trying to imitate them, dance-wise and song-wise.”
Today, Frager says his father Jerry, at 92, is “the only remaining generational family member from the Cherry/Camp/Hodge legacy of the Home of the Blues record store and music label,” and Frager the younger is motivated to preserve the family’s musical legacy partly out of filial love. And so, while home next week for Hanukkah and his late mother’s yahrzeit (a yearly remembrance of someone’s passing), he’s inviting a select cross-section of Memphis music influencers to a gathering with his father on December 10th, hoping to both share and learn more of the history of the Home of the Blues. To that end, he’s also created a Facebook group, Home of the Blues Memphis, where others can share their memories and memorabilia. “This open house in a couple of weeks is sort of me tying it together,” says Frager. “I’m excited to be in touch with people who are connected with [Home of the Blues], who can help me visualize how to take this to the next level.”
