Tag: blues

On Beale

Post author By Joe Boone
Post date July 17, 2014

CREDIT: H. Michael Miley

H. Michael Miley

Beale Street

You can put my name on the list of locals who have casually maligned Beale Street. But I’m here to eat words. Here goes: I love Beale Street.

The stereotype is familiar: Either rock blues played by heavy-set white guys in bowling shirts or throngs of black kids who don’t care to hear any blues. It’s true that there are sub-ideal bands and some nights when not everybody belongs. But this dismissive view of Beale is cheap shorthand and a sad way to miss out on an important part of Memphis’ economy, culture, and good times.

I recently went to Beale four times in 10 days and had a blast every time. Milling through the crowds at B.B. King’s Blues Club on a Friday at lunchtime, you hear accents from all over the world. It’s true that the British, Japanese, and continentals were not hearing Sleepy John Estes or Mr. King in his prime. People get hung up on “authenticity” and miss things like the Stax Academy Alumni Band’s residency at B.B. King’s. I went back to B.B.’s and heard Preston Shannon play his regular Wednesday night gig.

Shannon reminded me of the whole spectrum of a blues performance. I had been guilty of using the cheap shorthand, of using a bad example (Stevie Ray Vaugnabees) to define contemporary blues. Shannon is a moving guitarist and vocalist who’s been active since the 1970s and on Beale for almost a quarter century. He works within a tradition of showmanship that makes each note meaningful: a mix of human spiritualism and worldly desire. At his best, he works himself and the audience into something like a funky, social, religious experience. People come from Japan. Why don’t we come from Collierville or Central Gardens?

I walked down Beale several times over those days and saw throngs of people having good times. I heard music I liked: C-3 Blues Band at Rum Boogie and the McDaniel Band at the Blues Hall.

But there is one thing we should fix: The bars are in an outdoor volume war. Loudspeakers are set up, one after the other, down the street, each playing its own music. There was a moment when I saw a man who had clearly traveled here to listen to music. He was aghast at the cacophony of competing sound systems. You couldn’t hear anything. He was furious. So was I. The music that draws people to Beale did not have giant, solid-state amplifiers. Huge amplifiers are used as weapons by the military and are the worst thing about live music.

Beale, like Overton Square, is on the good foot. Beale Street Landing, the new Orpheum development, the new Hard Rock Café, and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame herald an even better experience for Memphis’ beloved musical pilgrims. We should not treat them like Central American dictators and blast them with unhealthy levels of noise. Put musicians out front, singing and playing unamplified instruments.

The city or merchants association should enforce the noise ordinance’s prohibition against loudspeakers for promotion. We should also amend the current ordinance to allow for drums, singing, and acoustic instruments in the entertainment districts like Beale, Broad Avenue, and Overton Square.

One solution was heard at A. Schwab for the Beale Street Caravan fund raiser, where the Bluff City Backsliders played a mostly unplugged set behind Jason Freeman’s powerful voice. The sound perfectly filled the room. You could hear it if you wanted to listen to every note, but you could also think or say hello to someone. Sleepy John never had a 300-watt amp.

Last weekend, I was in Nashville on Broadway. When you pass a bar like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge or Robert’s Western World, the band is in the window, and you can hear what they are doing inside. It makes you want to go in, or it allows you to go hear something else. But you are not subjected to noise pollution the whole time you’re on the street.

Beale’s energy is so much more fun than Broadway. Beale is rowdy and wrong in just the right way. You can go to Nashville and walk your granny down the street for a cotton candy. That’s sorta fun, but Beale is the place for cutting loose and showing off your soul. Even standing in the deafening and absurd contrast of what is and what it was, I love Beale Street. We should all go more often.

Tags bb-kings, bb-kings-blues-club, Beale Street, blues, Memphis, Preston Shannon, Rum Boogie, STAX Academy

Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Leo Bud Welch To Be Honored at Juneteenth Festival

Post author By Joe Boone
Post date June 11, 2014

Leo Bud Welch will receive a Living Legend award at the Juneteenth Urban Music Awards on Thursday, June 12th, at the New Daisy. He will play the Juneteenth Festival on Friday at 9:15 in Robert Church Park. Welch is back in Mississippi following a tour of Europe. the 83-year-old Bruce, Mississippi, native came to prominence last year with the release of his debut album Sabougla Voices, a collaboration with the church choir he led in Bruce. Below is my piece on him for our music issue back in May.
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Leo Bud Welch

Linking gospel and blues into one tight chain.

“Hard working man,” Leo Bud Welch said of himself and his 82 years. “I did some hard work in my life. I needed something to come along easier for me. Thank God, I got it going.”

Welch has it going all right. This year, his first CD, Sabougla Voices, got attention from NPR, and he worked on a film in New Orleans with Ryan Gosling. The gospel bandleader and bluesman is planning a tour of Europe and getting ready for his sets on Saturday at the Beale Street Music Festival. Welch’s blend of the spiritual and the secular seems to make perfect sense, in spite of the anxieties that other musicians faced as they crossed the great divide from the choir to the juke joint.

“Blues ain’t nothing but somebody’s life,” Welch says. “Just like the Bible telling the story of Jesus Christ. Blues is life. It’s about how hard you worked down through the years. Whether you got a girlfriend, y’all are liable to be on bad terms. Or your wife. Whatever. Blues is just explaining about life. Life on this earth.”

Welch has found some due recognition for a life spent in gospel music with his group the Sabougla Voices (the “ou” pronounced as in “know”). That group is from his lifelong church, the Sabougla Missionary Baptist Church, south of his home in Bruce, Mississippi. He hosted a gospel music show on a local television station. Welch also has a blues band. But much of his life was spent in the region’s logging industry.

“I run the chains. I cut timber,” Welch says. “I told my wife that if I had a dollar for every tree I trimmed off, I’d be a millionaire today. I called it a one-man band: the one-man saw. I mean, I cut a many a timber. I did that for 35 years. Right here in Bruce.”

Bruce, Mississippi, has a motto: “Where Money Grows in Trees and Hopes and Dreams Never Die.” The town of 2,000 people is currently home to seven logging companies. Timber was an essential asset of Mississippi, dating back to the Chickasaw tribe. The industry grew with the development of the sawmill and exploded with the advent of the railroad. E.L. Bruce was a hardwood-floor magnate, who later started Terminix to keep the termites out of his floors. In 1924, the E.L. Bruce Company set up the town of Bruce to service its lumber needs. It’s said that the whole town ran by the sawmill’s whistle. By the 1950s, Welch was spending less time with his guitar and more time with a chainsaw.

“It was mostly hardwood. We’d go over to the Delta and cut on the banks of the Mississippi River. All that. We’d cut trees right on the bank and they’d throw those tops in there and they’d have to go get them, you couldn’t leave all those tops in the water,” Welch says. “What we’d do is go down there on Monday, and we’d stay until Friday night when we’d come back to Bruce. We’d have a cook down on camp. Somebody’d cook. We couldn’t see when we’d go, and we couldn’t see when we’d come back. We worked from dark to dark. It got so I couldn’t see how to notch a tree.”

During his time on the logging crews, Welch still played in church. But even that had not always been acceptable.

“Back in them days, they didn’t hardly allow guitar in the church,” Welch says. “It was the devil’s work. You carry a guitar in there, and they say you’re sinning. Now, church don’t sound like that. Back in them days, they’d hardly have a piano. They might have an old piano, and somebody’d be — I call it peckin’ on it. Wouldn’t sound too good to me.”

Welch knew what sounded good. He played all sorts of music before he went into logging.

“I’ve been playing about 60-some-odd years,” Welch says. “I watched my first cousin. His name was R.C. Welch. He had a guitar, and me and his brother played on his guitar. We played around the house. And when I got big enough, we’d play in houses, at picnics. Picnics, like a three-day picnic out in the woods: ball games for three days straight, a picnic for three days straight. There would be a big crowd when different ball teams would come play ball. We mostly played at house parties. Some would call it [a] house dance or whatever. That’s when I started out. It was just me and my first cousin. There’d be others who came there to play. But they always wanted us to play. In other words — I’m not bragging — they were not as good as we were.”

Welch has never run from the blues, and he worked as a musician before he began logging.

“I played in clubs. I organized some guys in Grenada in a band called the Joy Jumpers. Walter Farmer played a steel guitar,” Welch says. “I played with different bands. We did a broadcast in Grenada at the hotel. It was 1400 on the radio dial. That was back in the 1950s.”

But the logging work put a stop to that.

“Now I wasn’t going out and playing at house parties late at night,” Welch says. But he kept his church music moving.

“Later on, I joined a gospel group here in Bruce called the Spirituales. I played lead guitar for them and sang a few songs. Then my sons were playing with me. They were about 16 or 17. I named that band Leo Welch and the Rising Soul Band,” Welch says. “We played places like the Cotton Patch in Tupelo. Down in Batesville, over on the river; we used to play up between Oxford and Holly Springs, a place they called the Barn. We used to play all up in there. We played all around. Our pastor would go out in the street and want the choir to go with him to sing. Nobody would go, except for me, my sister, and my sister-in-law. I named that group Leo Welch and Sabougla Voices. That’s what’s on that CD.”

While some African-American artists faced self-doubt and even public scorn over playing blues in what is still a religiously conservative society, the blending of secular and spiritual does not bother Welch.

“I’ve belonged to that church ever since I was young,” Welch says. “They built it for a school out there on that 16-section land. But somebody decided to go to having church there. It’s down south of here in Calhoun County, down the Number 8 highway. That’s the only place I went to school. I had to walk to school in the mud and in the water. Mud up to my ankles some times. I had those cut off boots. Raggly looking with patches all over them. Everything was great back in them days. More great you might even say than it is now. Everything’s gotten modern now. It’s going the modern way. They kept asking me about playing for the church. In the long run, they elected me to be an officer of the church. Of course I’m a deacon of the church in Sabougla. But since we’ve been going out playing, I tell them I’m going to be there when I can be there.”

I ask if he ever preached. He falls out laughing. Welch is passionate about gospel music and breaks into any song he hears in his mind, playing it finger-style on his pink guitar. He has the same infectious enthusiasm for blues, eagerly and happily playing the shared songs of his place and time.

“I don’t see where there’s no devil in the blues,” Welch says. “They do more devilsome things than that. Oh yeah.”

Tags blues, Blues Rules 2014, Fat Possum, Leo Bud Welch

Music Music Features

Blues News

Post author By Joe Boone
Post date May 29, 2014

Life of Riley screens at the Brooks Museum of Art on Thursday, May 29th, at 7 p.m.

This documentary from director Jon Brewer renders B.B. King and the blues in an unsentimental and unsettling manner. The film opens with Bill Cosby, who emphatically rejects any romantic notions of the music or of King’s life. It’s a powerful opening to a great historical document.

King’s life is set in place as he is interviewed in recent footage at the site of his birth. There are moving interviews with many of his old friends and family members. Those are cut against interviews with Bono and Eric Clapton. But the man who emerges is one who never stopped moving through a half century of extreme social change.

The notoriously hard-touring King, now 88, was orphaned, went to a one-room schoolhouse, and then into the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. The horrors of the system are powerfully depicted. He witnessed a lynching, worked under armed guard, and ran away twice to Memphis before the musical life took hold. Music aside, the first-person history of 20th century plantation life is worth watching. What King accomplishes from this appalling situation is one of America’s greatest artistic legacies.

King’s guitar playing is idiosyncratic to say the least. His stylistic efficiency relates to his lifestyle of working and moving fast with a light footprint. His ex-wife’s story of him fishing in a silk suit has a funny aspect to it. But his response, “It’s all I have,” is that of an orphan who had nothing, had to depend on himself, and who couldn’t let himself stop working. This is what Cosby wants us to bear in mind. This film should be shown in our schools. Life of Riley goes to video on demand on June 1st.

• KWEM, the West Memphis-based radio station that launched “Memphis” music, is powering up again. Mid-South Community College in West Memphis received a license to operate a low-powered FM transmitter. The signal will go live in about 90 days on 93.3 FM and might reach parts of Memphis. But the programming will be streamed online at kwemradio.com.

KWEM was a music-production think tank at the dawn of electrified blues. In the film discussed above, B.B. King mentions the exposure and experience he gained through his sponsored work on KWEM. The deal was you could pay to play on the air or get a sponsor.

Howlin’ Wolf, born Chester Burnett, had a connection to the station that ran for half a decade: Burnett was the station’s first African-American host. In 1951, Sam Phillips heard Wolf on KWEM, recorded him in Memphis, and sold the records to Chess. Everybody thought things were going along smoothly. However, Ike Turner, pianist and frequent collaborator with Phillips, took Burnett across the river to record at KWEM for the Bihari brothers, owners of the Modern label in Los Angeles. Although Wolf eventually went on to a productive relationship with Phillips and Chess, Joe Bihari and Ike Turner recorded four tracks on Howlin’ Wolf at KWEM in 1951 and several the next year.

Burnett, James Cotton, Junior Parker, Hubert Sumlin, and Elmore James worked or performed at KWEM. Bill Black and Scotty Moore played there. Johnny Cash made his broadcast debut and hosted a show.

Jim Dickinson — Memphis’ Dr. Johnson — was emphatic on the issue that Memphis music had its roots at West Memphis’ Plantation Inn. He insisted that Packy Axton was the funky Prometheus who brought the sound back across the river. Between Phillips and Sun’s reliance on KWEM and the Stax/Mitchell connection to West Memphis live scene, it’s a wonder we don’t call it West Memphis Music.

• Memphis Blues stalwart Daddy Mack has a new album and will celebrate its release at the trolley stop of the Center for Southern Folklore on Saturday, May 21st. The show will be recorded for a Beale Street Caravan broadcast and will include tracks from Daddy Mack’s latest album, Blues Central. If you’ve never heard and met this band, you’re missing out big time.

Tags BB King, blues, Chess Records, Howlin' Wolf, Ike Turner, Sun Records

Music Music Features

Furry and Sid

Post author By Steve Selvidge
Post date March 6, 2014

CREDIT: Courtesy Steve Selvidge

Furry Lewis’ birthday was March 6th. On March 11th, Omnivore Records will release Sid Selvidge’s album The Cold of the Morning — originally released in 1976 on his Peabody label. Selvidge’s son Steve recalls growing up with Lewis and his father’s admiration for Furry and his music.

Furry Lewis was a country blues legend. I almost killed him. Well, sort of, but we’ll get to that.

Born March 6, 1893, Walter “Furry” Lewis is a towering figure of the country blues world. Raised here in Memphis, he performed on Beale Street in its heyday. He played with W.C. Handy. He recorded crucial blues classics such as “Cassie Jones,” “John Henry,” “Billy Lyons and Stack-O-Lee,” and “Judge Harsh Blues” (also known as “Judge Bouché”). Furry had a finger picking style that was exquisite, complex, and downright funky. His slide playing was otherworldly; at times it would take over the vocal and sing for him. Years playing in medicine shows (where snake oil salesmen and the like would hawk their wares) gave him the chops of a vaudeville entertainer.

Furry’s recording career was over

by the 1930s. He took a job with the city of Memphis, working as a street sweeper. He did all this on a prosthetic leg. Years later, shortly after he retired from his street-sweeping job, he was one of the first of his generation of bluesmen to be “rediscovered” by young, white musicians caught up in the emerging folk scene of the early-mid 1960s.

Around this time is when my family enters the picture.

My dad, Sid Selvidge, first encountered Furry around 1964 at The Bitter Lemon in Memphis. Located on the corner of Humes and Poplar, The Bitter Lemon was the epicenter of the burgeoning folk/blues/coffee-house scene in town. Owned and operated by John McIntire, one of the city’s original beatnik artists, this was also where my dad, Jim Dickinson, Lee Baker, and Jimmy Crosthwait began to form their musical relationships.

It was in this environment that they found themselves in the unique position to learn firsthand from the masters of the music they were just discovering. Baker became a student of Furry’s, eventually backing him up on gigs. My dad, in addition to learning all his music, developed a bond with Furry that meant more to him than just the music and the scene.

While not exactly a father figure (my dad’s father died when my dad was a kid), Furry Lewis was one of the most significant men in his life. A graduate of Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes), my dad came from the typically homogeneous background of a white child who grew up in the Mississippi Delta. Furry opened his eyes and gave him a more graceful introduction into the integration that was happening all around him. Dad had many funny stories about Furry’s escapades and sayings. But behind all of that was a deep respect and an even deeper gratitude for helping him into a musical world that was more raceless than what he had known before. From then on, Furry loomed large in our house.

Furry’s music is some of the first I can remember. “Cassie Jones” in particular — hearing my dad, Baker, and Dickinson playing and singing that song. They would trade verse after verse, with Jimmy Crosthwait always behind the washboard, everyone showing what they learned from Furry. But even prior to that, I remember being really little, maybe two or three years old, and going over to just hang out at Furry’s house. He kept a couple of gerbils or hamsters; I forget which. We would bring cabbage for them and a pint of Ten High bourbon for Furry. I loved going over there. The whole atmosphere just seemed really laid back and fun, and he was always really nice to me.

My clearest memory of hanging out there started pretty much the same as any of our other visits. When he was home, Furry would leave his prosthetic leg off and just keep to his bed. So we came in, fed the gerbils (or hamsters), and gave Furry his Ten High, and I crawled up onto his bed to sit next to him like I always did. He kept a little cigar box on his bedside table that held his cigarettes and lighter. Next to that was a small glass for his whiskey. He would keep it covered when he was drinking for fear that a spider might drop in. But the first thing that I noticed when I sat on his bed that day was a pistol on that same bedside table. I don’t know if it was always there and I just hadn’t noticed it before, or if he had accidently left it there this time, but it definitely caught my eye.

I can clearly remember thinking that it would be funny to pick up that pistol and point it at Furry’s temple. Keep in mind; I’m of a generation brought up on Looney Tunes reruns: Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, and such. This kind of joke seemed like fair play to me. So, my dad looked up to see his youngest son holding a gun to his good friend’s head.

Now, I doubt that I was big enough to really physically pull the trigger, but nonetheless, my dad was smart in that he didn’t shout or jump to me in any kind of panicked manner. He just calmly got up and asked if I would let him hold Furry’s pistol. So I did. Blues crisis averted.

Years later, Furry’s house caught fire, and he was pretty badly injured. He was hospitalized but quickly started to show signs of improvement. The last time my dad saw Furry, he was in the hospital room along with Lee Baker. Furry was in great spirits, laughing and clowning around. The three of them were going back and forth making up their own verses to “You Gonna Look Just Like a Monkey When You Get Old.” Dad said goodbye and left. Later that night Furry developed pneumonia. He died the next day. Dad recorded a version of “The Monkey Song” on his final album I Should Be Blue in 2010. The credits are listed as (W. Lewis, S. Selvidge, L. Baker).

These days, Furry Lewis means so many things to me. He’s a familiar voice that always puts me at ease. Musically, he’s a continuing inspiration to me, as well as a centering force. I guess most of all now, he just helps to keep me close to my dad’s memory. He was an important man in his life, and he influenced my dad and all of his close musical friends in a way that will continue to provide me with musical guidance and inspiration.

I always smile when I see or hear Furry Lewis. And I’m glad I didn’t kill him.

Tags blues, Furry Lewis, Sid Selvidge

Music Music Features

North Mississippi Allstars Homecoming at Minglewood Hall

Post author By Joe Boone
Post date November 28, 2013

Those Allstars stay busy. The Brothers Dickinson recently returned from a European tour promoting their latest record, World Boogie Is Coming. They will play their Thanksgiving homecoming show on Friday, November 29th, at Minglewood Hall. But that’s not the half of it. The North Mississippi Allstars have partnered with the Mid-South Food Bank to gather the goods. You can bring canned food (check the date) and take a selfie at the donation desk to be part of the Food Bank’s online photo album of helpful blues fans. Don’t go missing from that. We’ll be looking for you.

Think the Allstars are through packing this night with excitement? WRONG. The band announced that the concert will be filmed for release on DVD, and the crew will be 100 percent local, according to Cody Dickinson’s Facebook page. As far as the concert is concerned, there will be plenty of surprises as special guests are lined up to join the Allstars onstage. Even if the guests were 100 percent local, this would be something to see, given the brothers’ recent two-month stint at Minglewood under the Sons of Mudboy aegis. That band, a second-generation continuation of father Jim Dickinson’s legendary outfit with Sid Selvidge, Lee Baker, and national treasure Jimmy Crosthwait, rounded up a who’s who of contemporary Memphis players: Harry Peel, Al Gamble, George Sluppick, Paul Taylor, and others. Who needs out-of-towners?

Another point of interest: Pay attention to Luther’s guitar. The elder Dickinson brother was paid a tremendous honor last year when Gibson introduced the Luther Dickinson ES-335. The 335 is an essential blues tool: B.B. King’s Lucille is a 335. Chuck Berry? Yep. Orbison and John Lee Hooker too. Gibson let Luther add details to the design, including a block inside the frame to cut down on feedback, a Bigsby tremolo, and the paint. That paint job was copied from Father Jim’s 335 and enters the official Gibson palette of colors as “Dickinson Burst.” Wow.

Tags blues, Dickinson, Minglewood Hall, NMA, North Mississippi Allstars