Michael B. Jordan, as both of the Smokestack twins, is a little reluctant to invite a vampire into his juke joint.
Ryan Coogler has proven himself to be one of the great masters of genre films. Every time he’s tried a new kind of film, he has mastered it and made it better. In 2015, he made the Rocky spin-off Creed, starring his friend and frequent collaborator Michael B. Jordan as the son of Rocky’s frenemy Apollo Creed. It was, incredibly, better received than Sylvester Stallone’s attempt to revitalize the inspirational sports picture he had pioneered. Remember 2005’s Rocky Balboa? Of course you don’t.
Then Coogler moved on to the superhero space with Black Panther, the consensus choice for the best chapter of the never-ending Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Coogler saw the potential of his star Chadwick Boseman to transcend the shallow and banal crash-bang and become a hero for the people. And I’m not just talking about Black people, who were finally able to see on-screen both a hero and a culture which looked like them. T’Challa was the MCU’s moral center, the person who took time to wrestle with the right and wrongs of the situation, rather than just punching the bad guys. Marvel’s vision of good leadership is not the American President Thaddeus Ross, a barely reformed war criminal, or Tony Stark, the technocratic billionaire. It’s T’Challa, the King of Wakanda, who prioritizes justice for all humanity and puts his nation’s (and his own) blood and treasure on the line to achieve it.
Now, Coogler ventures into the horror genre with Sinners. The 21st-century superhero film cannibalizes genres so they can be digested by the corporate body. Captain America: Winter Soldier was a ’70s paranoid thriller in colorful tights; Guardians of the Galaxy is a sci-fi adventure with the occasional super-heroic flourish. Even Black Panther more closely resembled The Adventures of Robin Hood than it did Thor: The Dark World. The horror genre gives its practitioners more freedom. Throw in an atmosphere of creeping dread, a few jump scares, and a little monstrosity, and you can call it horror. After all, this is a genre that encompasses both David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
Coogler takes the opportunity to play fast and loose in Sinners, bringing in elements from all over the cinematic map. One of its biggest influences is Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, a decidedly not-horror psychological portrait of two deeply damaged people trying to find themselves in the squalor of North Mississippi. Another major tributary is Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, the vampire neo-Western that provided Bill Paxton’s finest hour. If I had to pin it down, I would call Sinners folk horror. Like The Wicker Man and Midsommar, it finds terror in the inscrutable laws of pre-Christian pagan beliefs.
The film’s animated preamble introduces us to the concept, handed down over millennia through dozens of different cultures, of shamanistic figures whose music-making was so powerful that it became magic and temporarily tore the veil between our world and the spirit world. We then meet Sammie Moore (Miles Caton). It’s October 1932 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and times are tough. Sammie’s a preacher’s son who quotes scripture from the pulpit on Sunday morning after playing the blues on Charley Patton’s resonator guitar on Saturday night.
Against the wishes of his pa, who warns him against “playing music for drunkards who shirk their responsibilities,” Sammie takes a gig at the Delta’s newest venue, Club Duke. The owners are the Smokestack twins, Smoke and Stack, both played by Jordan. They left Clarksdale 15 years earlier to fight in World War I, then joined the Great Migration to Chicago, where they became enforcers for Al Capone’s Prohibition smuggling operation. After years of being good soldiers, they have unexpectedly returned to the Delta, throwing cash around and sitting on enough bootleg booze to stock a juke joint for months. How they came into this good fortune is one of the film’s early mysteries.
The twins buy a former cotton warehouse and proceed to get the band back together, Blues Brothers-style. Along with Sammie, they recruit piano pounder Delta Slim (the great Delroy Lindo) and the singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson) for opening night. It is one hell of a party. Every drunken shirker in a three-county radius packs into the run-down old building to party their butts off late into the night.
Did I mention that Sinners is also kind of a musical? And that some of the music was recorded here in Memphis by Boo Mitchell at Royal Studios? Coogler frames the big emotional moments with musical numbers performed by his cast. On Club Duke’s opening night, Sammie’s songs whip the revelers into a frenzy of ecstatic dancing. When people from other eras start to appear in the barn, from a masked San shaman of Kalahari to Eddie Hazel decked out in Parliament-Funkadelic-era Afro and star-shaped sunglasses, we know we’re through the looking glass.
The revelers are mostly oblivious, but someone notices the magic working. Remmick (Jack O’Connell) appears, smoldering from the sunlight. He’s an Irishman of indeterminate age, who knows all the old Appalachian folk songs. When he and his little band show up at Club Duke, the door man Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) won’t let them in. Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke’s ex-wife, is a secret voodoo priestess who recognizes the undead when she sees them. But it’s going to take more than a mojo bag and a trunk full of guns to defeat the devils this time.
Sinners spends a long time giving backstory to its sprawling cast, so that when the action kicks in, we feel each loss and setback. Coogler takes big swings, but not all of them connect. Jordan’s double duty as twins could have been a disaster, but he pulls it off with bravado. On the other hand, a half-assed subplot involving the Klan bogs things down in the final reel. It hardly matters. Sinners is one of our great filmmakers exploring the outer limits of his gifts. Let Coogler cook.
The finale of last year’s Tambourine Bash (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
You might imagine that today’s announcement of the featured artists in October’s Tambourine Bash at the Overton Park Shell was meant to synchronize with this week’s Memphis Flyer cover story celebrating Memphis women in music. After all, the new lineup for the annual fundraising concert for Music Export Memphis (MEM) is loaded with some of the city’s great sonic sisters. But Elizabeth Cawein, MEM’s executive director, swears the gender skew was sheer serendipity. “It’s funny because, to be totally honest, we hadn’t thought about it at all,” she says. “But it is so heavily representative of women — I love it!”
It’s proof positive of the ways Memphis music is evolving today, and typical of the kind of synergy that happens when an organization like MEM is so diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Guided only by the principle of lending Memphis musicians a hand, serving as an “engine and platform to grow their careers and elevate Memphis’ profile as a contemporary music city,” MEM has an embarrassment of riches to work with, from all corners of the music world.
What’s more, the Tambourine Bash, now in its sixth year, is a unique space where all of those corners can come crashing together, with some imaginative and inspiring results. That’s in part because Cawein chose early on to structure the event around the intense spirit of collaboration that characterizes this city. When artists play the Tambourine Bash, they don’t just appear with their usual performing bands. Instead, three contrasting artists or bands are thrown together to work with each other in any way they see fit. It’s all about the mash-up. Take this year’s lineup, for example:
Lana J + EsMod + Aybil
Tonya Dyson + Daykisser + ADUBB
Lina Beach + Jessica Ray + Ryan Peel
Wyly Bigger + MadameFraankie + Blueshift Ensemble
Sunweight + Oakwalker + Jeremy Stanfill
Southern Avenue + surprise guest collaborator
FINALE: Superjam featuring all Tambourine Bash performers, produced by Boo Mitchell
Mixing and matching such versatile artists makes the Tambourine Bash unique, for audience members and performers alike. “Curating this lineup is one of my absolute favorite things that I get the privilege to do,” says Cawein. “And artists around the city know about it, so they get excited. I send that email saying, ‘Hey, are you available on October 10th?’ And they get pumped. I love that.”
It’s indicative not only of how collaborative artists here can be, but also of how comfortable they feel when working with MEM. “I feel like they have a lot of trust, too,” Cawein observes. “When I reach out and say, ‘We’re going to put you together with some other artists, and I don’t know who they are yet, but I promise it’ll be good,’ they trust me. And that feels great because it means I can really just come up with some stuff that will be cool.”
One reason it works is because Cawein keeps an ear close to the ground of the local scene. “I have people in my head, and a sense of the scene and where it is and what’s popping. Maybe it’s artists I’ve been playing on my show on WYXR [Straight from the Source] or people that have come across my radar for other reasons. And I’ll have a working document for a solid year. Like, as soon as we do Tambourine Bash this year, I’m sure I’ll have another doc, where I’m dropping names of artists in that I want to feature next time.”
This year’s creative mix have some Tambourine Bash firsts. “One set from this year that I’m super excited about is Wyly Bigger, MadameFraankie, and Blueshift Ensemble,” says Cawein. “We’ve included horns several years. We’ve had the Mighty Souls Brass Band, we’ve had Lucky Seven Brass Band, but this year I really wanted strings. And so Blueshift just popped to mind. As I started putting that one together, I’m thinking about Wyly’s piano playing and just the sort of raucousness of that, mixed with MadameFraankie, who is so versatile as a guitar player, especially the stuff that she’s done with Talibah Safiya recently, just really funky and soulful and kind of gritty, but also going in a very experimental, electronic kind of direction. And then to have strings with that, I’m just so excited about the flavors that have been combined there. I can’t wait to see that one.”
It seems the universe delivered on Cawein’s wish for strings in other ways, too. “The funny thing is that we have strings in several places this year because we have Oakwalker, and we also have EsMod, who is a rapper in that first collaboration on the bill [but] is a violinist as well.”
Another favorite group of artists is a group who originally were competing for a single slot on the bill. “One that I’m really excited about is Lina Beach, Ryan Peel, and Jessica Ray,” Cawein adds. “Jessica Ray was one of the winners of a partnership we did with Choose901. We got them to call on their audiences to vote for artists they wanted to see on the Tambourine Bash lineup. And the secret, that you can totally reveal here, is that we ended up adding all three of them. We narrowed them to finalists, and we had people vote, but in the end, it was like, ‘I want all three of these artists,’ and that was Jessica Ray, Oakwalker, and Jeremy Stanfill.
“So Lina Beach sings and she’s a songwriter, but she’s such an amazing guitar player! And I knew I wanted a big, bodacious vocal to pair with her, and we had a lot of beautiful vocals on the lineup already, don’t get me wrong. But I wanted someone who is just a belter, right? And so I thought of Jessica Ray.”
That’s but a fraction of the sparks that are bound to fly come October. As usual, all artists performing at the Bash will congregate onstage for the finale led by Boo Mitchell. That too should offer some surprises, on a night when all should set aside their preconceptions and expect the unexpected, as these harbingers of the city’s musical future gather together for an unforgettable night.
Click here to reserve your tickets to the 2024 Tambourine Bash now.
Lina Beach live in Australia (Photo: Bianca Holderness)
Growing up in Franklin, Tennessee, Lina Beach came to love playing music, but she never imagined that her playing would go as far and as fast as it did once she moved to Memphis. “Since I was born, both my parents sat me at the piano, and my dad started teaching the violin at 5 years old,” she says, “and I wanted to be around that however I could. But when I got to college, I didn’t necessarily believe in myself enough to pursue a career as an artist and musician.” These days, all that has changed.
As a teenager learning guitar, Beach knew what she liked: Joe Walsh, U2, classic rock, Stevie Wonder, The Beatles. Then one day a new sound seized her imagination. “I was out eating lunch at a hot chicken place in Franklin and they played ‘I’m Still in Love with You’ on the speaker. And it literally stopped me and my friend mid-conversation and we got out our phones and Shazam’d it.
“That became one of my all-time favorite songs. I found the vinyl LP in a shop in Downtown Franklin and that was a heavily rotated album for me. When I got to Rhodes, I made that Memphis connection and I started to learn that that’s where that music was made. This was before I knew about the Hi Rhythm Section. I just knew I was in Memphis.”
That changed in the spring of 2021 when she landed an internship at Royal Studios, where Al Green and other Hi Records artists had recorded with the Hi Rhythm Section. Suddenly she was working directly with Boo Mitchell, whose father had produced those hits for Hi.
“When I got to Royal I was soaking it all in: how to make records, learning the engineering side, and watching Boo work,” she recalls. “Boo allowed me to get my hands dirty, wrapping cables, learning how to match the mic to the channel in the [mixing] board. And he let me sit at the board and learn commands in Pro Tools, and I just felt so empowered. I took that back to Rhodes and would help lead the live sound events all over campus, and helped teach other students, too.”
About six months into her time at Royal, a fellow intern had brought an acoustic guitar to the studio and Beach started idly playing it. “I’d been inspired to soak up all I could at the studio and go home and learn the guitar riffs. I was playing a lot at home. But it wasn’t until halfway through the summer that Boo first heard me play guitar in the lobby. He came in and asked, ‘Who’s playing that guitar?’ That was a life changing moment. Boo said, ‘Okay, I didn’t know you could do all that.’ And then he looked kind of puzzled and said, ‘It doesn’t make sense. I’m looking at this girl, and she sounds like a 70-year-old Black man!’”
Mitchell began incorporating Beach’s playing into sessions, most notably on his son Uriah’s track “Exotic Love,” released last year. And then came a game changer: Beach received a grant from the Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies, which contributes $3,000 to each fellow for summer projects and research. Beach, who had just begun writing her own songs, decided that her “research” would be recording an album, and Mitchell was all for doing it at Royal.
For the past two years, that’s been at the center of Beach’s life. The songs began to pour out of her, and, in another watershed moment, her backing band for some of those sessions turned out to be the Hi Rhythm Section. That group still includes brothers Rev. Charles Hodges and Leroy “Flic” Hodges, plus Archie “Hubbie” Turner, who all played on Hi’s hits half a century ago, not to mention Steve Potts on drums, cousin to original Hi drummer Al Jackson Jr. And until his death 10 years ago this month, Mabon “Teenie” Hodges, with his uniquely stinging guitar lines, was also central to the group.
To this day, Hi Rhythm remains in demand, especially as the core band in the musical documentary series Take Me to the River, and as the touring group representing the film on the road for the past 10 years. “When I was in the studio with them recording my album, it was a dream come true,” says Beach. But by 2023, fate was about to give her another undreamt-of boost.
“I think it was in May, right after I graduated,” she recalls. “The guitar player that was filling in [for Teenie Hodges] moved out of town right before this big Hi Rhythm show and Boo was like, ‘Uh, Lina, do you think you could learn these 20-plus songs in the next two weeks?’ From that point on, I was listening to the songs in all my free time. I listened to all those Teenie parts — really studied them. And I don’t even think Boo told the band that I was the guitarist! I just showed up at sound check with my guitar and I had to kind of breathe in my car for a second before I went inside. Then I walked in and they saw me and were like, ‘Lina! Are you going to be playing with us today?’ I was like, ‘Apparently so, yeah.’ So I get up there and plug in, and Charles is playing Al Green’s ‘It Ain’t No Fun to Me.’ As Charles was playing the organ, I jumped in and he was like, ‘Oh man, that’s amazing!’ He said, ‘I can feel that!’ All my nerves melted away then; it was a huge validation from the band themselves.”
The rest, as they say, is history, as Beach has proved herself a worthy addition to this legendary group. As Boo Mitchell noted before their appearance at the RiverBeat Music Festival, “Hi Rhythm features Lina Beach, who is officially filling in the Teenie Hodges guitar spot. The band has adopted her as their sister. She’s the official guitarist and she’s also an artist.”
And so, even as she still puts the finishing touches on her debut album, Beach has ascended to the heights of Memphis soul royalty, holding her own with Hi Rhythm, even leading them through her own songs as they’ve toured Australia, England, and the U.S. this year, not to mention accompanying the likes of William Bell at England’s Red Rooster Festival. Not bad for a 23-year-old (who sounds like a 70-year-old Black man).
“It must be something in the water” is a phrase you often hear when the subject of Memphis music arises. It resonates because the beats, bards, and blues springing from this city for over a century have a mysterious power matched only by the majesty of the Big Muddy itself, our sounds evolving over time like a river in its banks, their shape-shifting flows connecting north and south, east and west, old and new alike. Setting a music festival on the Mississippi’s banks was the stroke of genius that defined the Beale Street Music Festival (BSMF) for decades. Now a new player is keeping it there, and it’s called RiverBeat.
Spring: A Time for Music
A kind of imperative informed the founding of RiverBeat Music Festival in its infancy — the feeling that, regardless of the promoters or the festival’s name, when spring comes to Memphis, some kind of music must be made at the water’s edge. So when Kevin Grothe, vice president of sponsorships for the nonprofit Memphis in May, announced last October in an email to media outlets that “the Board of Directors has made the very difficult decision to suspend the Beale Street Music Festival in 2024,” many felt a powerful sense of loss.
There was even some bitterness evident in the announcement, as James L. Holt, Memphis in May president and CEO, noted that, as well as losing nearly three and a half million dollars due to low attendance in 2023, BSMF was being sued for $1.4 million in property damages by the Memphis River Parks Partnership. “With a pending lawsuit and the event now unwelcomed in the new Tom Lee Park, future Beale Street Music Festivals will face fundamental challenges,” he wrote.
But the Memphis River Parks Partnership (MRPP) clearly wasn’t opposed to music by the river in principle. Within days, MRPP president Carol Coletta had announced that Forward Momentum, the private company behind the Mempho Music Festival and Mempho Presents, would be taking the reins. “With its successful track record and deep financial strength, Forward Momentum was a great fit for a signature music event in Memphis,” she said.
Indeed, as Mempho Presents spokesman Jeff Bransford says today, the MRPP actively sought out the company, which by then had a presumably successful track record with the Mempho Music Festival every October since 2017, as well as growing success in promoting one-off shows through the year. “We were approached to fill the gap in springtime and we jumped at the opportunity to do it,” he notes.
And “jumped” is the right word, as the Mempho team had only a few scant months to book the open weekend in May. “We’ve been dealing with a very compressed timetable to get year one off the ground,” Bransford says, but he is clearly proud of what they accomplished. The lineup has “a little wider demo[graphic] compared to what we’ve traditionally done at Mempho. That means more urban, more pop, and more country types of things that typically we have not done as much of.”
Odesza (Photo: Courtesy Mempho Presents)
Now, with headliners like Odesza, the Fugees, and Jelly Roll topping the bill at Tom Lee Park each night, May 3rd through May 5th, it seems Mempho Presents has pulled off the impossible in a very short time, with the momentum of over four decades’ worth of gatherings by the river maintained and only growing.
Take Us to the River, Boo
One noticeable difference between RiverBeat and the BSMF is the lack of focus on the blues. The Blues Tent, once a fixture in the older festival due to its roots on Beale Street, is no more. And yet, as if to compensate, the city’s legacy of R&B and soul music is more present than ever. As Grammy-winning producer/engineer Boo Mitchell notes, that can be summed up in just five words: “Take Me to the River.”
That’s the title of the 1974 Al Green hit produced by Boo’s dad, Willie Mitchell, of course, but since 2014 it’s also served as a catch-all title for projects in film, music production, and education that are deeply connected to Memphis music history. It started as the brainchild of North Mississippi Allstar Cody Dickinson and director Martin Shore, who wanted to connect the legendary blues and soul musicians of Memphis with younger artists. The resulting film documented the in-studio creative collaborations between Mavis Staples, Snoop Dogg, Al Kapone, Frayser Boy, Yo Gotti, Lil’ P-Nut, Otis Clay, Bobby Rush, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Charles “Skip” Pitts, and William Bell, all underpinned by the Hi Rhythm Section, who had played on the original Hi Records hit from which the film took its title.
Boo Mitchell (Photo: Ronnie Booze)
Take Me to the River, the film, then grew into a franchise of sorts, leading to years of touring, a similar film pairing classic New Orleans players with younger artists, and an educational curriculum developed with the Berklee College of Music. Now a third film, Take Me to the River: London, is in the works. Yet for Boo Mitchell, nothing can top the initial epiphany he had when the original film was made. “That movie changed my life,” he says. “I started working on the film around 2011, about a year after Pop [Willie] had passed away, and I didn’t really have any of my own [production] credits up until that point. And then my whole my career changed. The film gave me a chance to show people what I was, what I could do.”
Original Hi Rhythm members Leroy and Rev. Charles Hodges, Archie Turner (Photo: Ronnie Booze)
Now, 10 years on, Mitchell is especially proud to bring the Take Me to the River Live band to the RiverBeat stage, tying together multiple threads of Memphis music history. While technically not the headliners, their performance on Friday is arguably the heart and soul of the entire festival.
In part, that’s because of artists who died since the film was made, singers Otis Clay and Bobby Bland and guitarists Skip Pitts and Teenie Hodges. The latter, brother to fellow Hi Rhythm players Charles and Leroy “Flic” Hodges, was critical to their unique sound and left some big shoes to fill. Yet Mitchell feels they’ve bounced back by adding someone from the younger generation.
Lina Beach (Photo: Caleb suggs)
“Now,” says Mitchell, “Hi Rhythm features Lina Beach, who is officially filling in the Teenie Hodges guitar spot. The band has adopted her as their sister. She’s the official guitarist and she’s also an artist. So she’ll be opening with Hi Rhythm because she’s working on an album at Royal [Studios] that I’m producing.”
Eric Gales (Photo: Courtesy Mempho Presents)
That alone keeps the current touring band true to the film’s original mission of connecting generations, yet Take Me to the River Live will feature more legends than just Hi Rhythm (which also includes Archie “Hubbie” Turner and Steve Potts). “We’ll also have local hero Jerome Chism, who sings three nights a week at B.B. King’s Blues Club and is a really incredible performer,” Mitchell says. “Then next, Eric Gales. And then Carla Thomas, and lastly, the great William Bell.”
Hearing these virtuosos, including Gales’ stunning guitar work, plus originals by Beach and the classic hits associated with Thomas and Bell, just as dusk settles in on the Mississippi River, will surely be a charmed moment in Memphis musical history that may never be repeated.
The Memphis Flex
Yet Mitchell is excited about far more than just his own band’s performance. Because of his deep absorption in local music history, he can see Memphis refracted through most of the acts featured at RiverBeat. He rattles off the many acts who developed in Memphis only to achieve national recognition: The Band Camino, 8Ball & MJG, Al Kapone, Talibah Safiya, Lawrence Matthews, Marcella Simien, the Lucky 7 Brass Band, Qemist, Mark Edgar Stuart, Salo Pallini, Bailey Bigger, Dirty Streets, and Southern Avenue. The latter, Mitchell notes, are the latest in a long history of Memphis success stories who have worked at Royal Studios. “They were in the studio the day before yesterday,” he says. “I recorded and mixed their new album. I mean, this is going to be a next-level record. And they’ve got a crazy tour coming up, opening for Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson.” Festivals like RiverBeat, Mitchell notes, are the perfect training grounds for local bands like Southern Avenue to level up. “Putting local artists on big stages is so huge.”
That’s always been in Mempho’s brief, and RiverBeat will be no different. The curated acts reach across generations and state lines alike, from the world-touring Don Bryant, who once wrote songs for Hi Records, then found success later in life fronting classic soul aficionados The Bo-Keys, to Rodd Bland’s tribute to his father, Bobby “Blue” Bland, to Mississippi acts who’ve long been associated with Memphis like Charlie Musselwhite, Kenny Brown, The Wilkins Sisters (who once backed up the late Rev. John Wilkins), and Jimbo Mathus. Looking at it this way, putting all this regional talent in front of thousands of music fans this weekend might be considered quite a flex for Memphis and the Mid-South. And no other festival compares to it in that sense.
Surprising Connections, and Making Memphis Proud
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that some of the other major names on the bill have deep Memphis connections. Mitchell vividly recalls his first encounter with Sacred Steel virtuoso Robert Randolph a decade ago. “I cut a record with him under the band name The Word, which is when Robert Randolph, the North Mississippi Allstars, and John Medeski got together. My aunt cooked for them during the sessions and they ended up naming the album Soul Food,” Mitchell laughs.
Kid Maestro with Lauryn Hill (Photo: DJ Rampage)
Another local tie-in, and perhaps the most consequential, is with festival headliners the Fugees. When the Memphis Flyer recently profiled producer Kid Maestro, who’s been a standout member of the Unapologetic collective for years, he revealed his enviable side gig as playback engineer for Ms. Lauryn Hill. Hill, of course, first gained prominence as the cofounder of the Fugees, with Wyclef Jean and Pras. When their second album, The Score, blew up in 1996, she became the first woman to win a Grammy Award for Best Rap Album, then went on as a solo artist to craft one of the best-selling albums in history, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
Hill has resumed performing in recent years, including extensive touring last year to celebrate Miseducation’s 25th anniversary. Along for the ride has been Kid Maestro, who, as playback engineer just offstage, is essentially a member of the band. Not often acknowledged, playback engineers are critical players in hip-hop performances.
“Ms. Hill’s needs are very unique in terms of playback engineering,” he says. “You’ve got to be super fast, paying attention, and when she puts her hand up to mute, you’ve got to be ready to stop with the band. Otherwise, if the band stops but there’s a beat playing in the background, it just doesn’t have that impact.”
He even interacted with hip-hop history on a very deep level with Hill, preparing him for his upcoming role in the Fugees’ RiverBeat show. “Right before this particular tour started,” he recalls, “they found the DAT tapes for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill album. So we got to really break down the original stems in the live show. It was really cool.”
Now he’s living the dream of working with one of the most influential and creative hip-hop groups of all time. “My first time meeting the rest of the Fugees,” he says, “it just became immediately clear why they worked. They were so intensely creative and powerful. Their energy, simply being in the same space working on the same thing, was palpable. And it was inspiring to see how different they are as people.”
Other Memphis artists will be thrilling to the Fugees as well, albeit from the audience, or possibly backstage. Talibah Safiya makes it clear that they had a profound impact on her life and her art. “I grew up listening to them. Lauryn Hill has been a huge influence, as somebody who could both rap and sing so well. I don’t think we’d had anybody able to do both of those things at her level. And to be able to stand next to these men who are such incredible lyricists and rappers, the combination of them really has guided my understanding of blending genres, for sure. To be able to be on the same stage as the Fugees, I’m incredibly honored.”
As Boo Mitchell noted, sharing the stage with such stellar talent is a boon to any artist and will only help foster the local scene all the more. It’s part of what makes RiverBeat unique, and don’t be surprised if the city’s up-and-coming artists rise to the occasion and blow your socks off. “This RiverBeat festival is going to be something that Memphians are going to be proud of,” says Mitchell. “There’s never been anything like this in Memphis. There’s even going to be a Ferris wheel at the top of the hill! It’s going to be next-level.”
The much-anticipated lineup for the upcoming Riverbeat Music Festival went live today, and it’s clear that Memphians won’t have any lack of quality music this May 3rd to 5th. And naturally, given that the festival is produced by the good folks at Mempho Presents, the curated artists are a good fit for the diverse tastes of the Mid South.
For starters, how can you go wrong with The Fugees? The unified forces of Wyclef Jean, Pras Michel, and Lauryn Hill are touring as one again, despite some of last fall’s reunion shows being postponed when Hill was beset with health concerns. Wyclef Jean confirmed just last month that more touring was on the books for 2024, and now their Riverbeat appearance is proof positive that Hill’s health has bounced back.
That will be especially meaningful to Unapologetic’s Kid Maestro. One of his regular gigs is functioning as Hill’s playback engineer when she’s touring with her solo band. He’s at the ready should he be recruited for the Riverbeat show. “Miss Hill’s needs are very unique in terms of playback engineering,” he recently told the Memphis Flyer. “You’ve got to be super fast, paying attention, and when she puts her hand up to mute, you’ve got to be ready to to stop with the band. Otherwise, if the band stops, but there’s a beat playing in the background, it just doesn’t have that impact.”
Kid Maestro’s experience is just one of the myriad ways Riverbeat reflects its rootedness in Memphis. Another will be an especially unique all-star event, when two-time Grammy-winning producer/engineer Boo Mitchell will direct and play with a hand-picked band of artists called Take Me to the River: Memphis, echoing the generation-spanning Take Me to the River films and education initiatives he’s played a hand in. “I believe this is a unique lineup,” he says of the group, which will include William Bell, Eric Gales, Carla Thomas, Jerome Chism, Lina Beach, and the Hi Rhythm Section. “I’m really impressed by the caliber of talent that signed up for our first year. I can’t wait to get back out there on stage and enjoy this event with all of Memphis.”
Other artists on the bill with a Memphis connection include 8Ball and MJG, Charlie Musselwhite, Southern Avenue, Al Kapone & the B.W.A. Band, Don Bryant & the Bo-Keys, Kenny Brown, Talibah Safiya, Marcella Simien, Lawrence Matthews, Jimbo Mathus, Lucky 7 Brass Band, Bailey Bigger, Dirty Streets, Mark Edgar Stuart, the Wilkins Sisters, Rodd Bland and the Members Only Band, and Salo Pallini.
On the other hand, Riverbeat is also bringing such big tent attractions as Odesza, Jelly Roll, Mt. Joy, Black Pumas, Big Boi, Tobe Nwigwe, The Band Camino, Killer Mike, Matt and Kim, Yung Gravy, Jessie Murph, and over two dozen other artists. All of which put the Riverbeat fest on track to uphold that fine Memphis tradition of music by the river in springtime.
“We are so excited to host the RiverBeat Festival along the Mississippi River at Tom Lee Park,” Jeff Bransford, spokesman for Mempho Presents, said in a statement. “Memphians know us for Mempho Music Festival, and now we’re introducing another signature event in downtown Memphis, which we believe will be a big draw for international and local visitors alike. RiverBeat was conceived as an inclusive event featuring a wide range of genres that will attract music lovers from all walks of life. Through music, we will bring our community together, support our local businesses, and attract new visitors to our city. We believe this is what Memphis is all about.”
All three-day ticketing and parking options are available now for purchase here.
Wearing a green ribbon can mean a lot of things, or nothing at all. That’s part of the mystery at the heart of Louise Page’s new music video, where the core message is “I want to see you dance the way you dance in your kitchen,” and the stylish art direction assures us that, in that part of the house, green pairs well with pink.
For many, the green ribbon signifies mental health awareness, and there’s a primal call for sanity in the way Page calls out the kitchen boogie as an integral part of mental hygiene. But maybe that’s reading too much into a song that just wants to make you dance.
To that end, Page musters the full power of her band, complete with violin and horns, to make the most danceable track she can. And the video captures that energy perfectly, tacking back and forth between that kitchen and a sweaty, stomping club scene, where drag queens Moth Moth Moth and Baby Mas, plus dancer Felicity Fox, match the singer’s moves strut for strut, and even producer/engineer Boo Mitchell gets down on the dance floor.
As Page says in her artist’s statement, she was “trying to write a song that was both a dance and a celebration, but also acknowledging how absolutely bat shit insanely difficult it has felt to be a functioning human being in a dysfunctional, often dangerous world. Joy can be a revolution. You can dance for the dead. That’s what this song celebrates to me.”
It’s a perfect way to bring out the power of Page’s crack combo. “Huge shoutout to my band — Annalisabeth Craig, Jawaun Crawford, Gunter Gaupp, and Michael Todd — for playing the hell out of this song and for riding with me. Huge shoutout to my friend Calvin Lauber for mastering the song, and Boo Mitchell for recording, producing, and believing in it!”
Director Laura Jean Hocking also hails the group effort that made such a wild party of a video possible. “I am credited as director on this video,” she says, “but so many people were vital in making these visual worlds come to life — the fabulous art direction team of Sallie Sabbatini/Erica Qualy/Annalisabeth Craig, Robbie Eubanks’ beautiful hair & makeup, Chad Barton’s excellent lighting and color timing, Sarah Fleming’s stellar camerawork — the list goes on. Being able to showcase Moth Moth Moth and Baby Mas was important to me, with the government trying to enact laws to ban drag performances. I wanted them to convey the message, ‘You cannot make our art form a crime. We’re not going away.’ And any time Louise calls me to do a music video, the answer is yes. She’s a great collaborator and a joy to work with.”
As Memphis Tigers football coach Ryan Silverfield said after his team beat Navy in Annapolis on Saturday, “It’s been a hard week.”
If the burst of high-profile violence in Memphis has you down and anxious, singer/songwriter Richard Wilson has a little burst of positivity for you on this Music Video Monday. “A Happy Day Is Coming” bounces along on a jaunty beat. The gospel tones of the B3 organ are provided by Memphis legend Charles Hodges. As seen in the video, produced by Carrie Leah Sanders, it was recorded at Royal Studios with Boo Mitchell behind the board.
Music can’t cure everything that ails us, but it does help you feel better for a little while, and that feeling is the beginning of hope. Even as we mourn and debate now, let Richard Wilson remind you that this, too, will pass.
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
(L-R) Leroy Hodges, Charles Hodges, Hubbie Turner (Photo: Ronnie Booze)
It was only a few months ago that this writer was privy to a stunning set of interviews with the remaining members of the Hi Rhythm Section. Hearing the Rev. Charles Hodges (organ), Archie “Hubbie” Turner (keyboardist), and Leroy “Flick” Hodges (bass) share stories from recording Al Green tracks in the very studio where it happened was a brilliant moment, but I kept wanting to hear them play some music. At Royal Studios, that’s what it’s all about.
Now, the general public can be privy to both the stories and the songs, played by the very musicians who were there. This Friday, August 26th, the Halloran Centre will present The Musical History of Royal Studios, narrated by producer, engineer, and studio co-owner Boo Mitchell. A musically driven journey through more than 60 years of history, the stories will center on the journey of Boo’s father, the late Willie Mitchell, and his iconic Royal Studios.
“I’ve wanted to do this type of show for a minute,” notes Mitchell in his typically laid-back way. “I thought it would be cool to showcase the music and the history, and let people learn some stuff they probably didn’t know.” Many may not realize, for example, that Royal, a cinema that was converted into a recording space in 1956, is one of the oldest continuously running studios in the world. As such, there will be a lot of history to cover in Friday’s show, going back to Willie Mitchell’s early days at Hi Records, based at Royal.
As Mitchell notes, “It’ll be an action-packed show, full of stories that people don’t know about. It’s about Royal, but it will focus on Willie Mitchell and the stuff he had to go through to get where he was, and to get Royal where it is. That’s the glue. You can’t tell the story without covering Willie Mitchell, so there’ll be some Willie Mitchell songs. Like ‘Soul Serenade’ and ‘20-75.’ Those were two pivotal tracks. ‘20-75’ was the first song that Willie engineered.”
Instrumentals were what put Hi Records on the map, going back to Bill Black’s Combo. But when trumpeter Willie Mitchell joined the label, he took the instrumental approach to a new, jazzier level. And once he got behind the mixing board, he made them snap, crackle, and pop. What’s remarkable about the Halloran show is that members of the same band that recorded those early hits, namely the Hodges brothers, are still playing in Memphis. Indeed, they’re still recording new hits at Royal today.
While Charles and Leroy’s brother Mabon “Teenie” Hodges passed away in 2014, Michael Toles, who first played with the Bar-Kays, and then Isaac Hayes’ band, will play guitar; Steve Potts will fill in for the late Howard Grimes’ and Al Jackson Jr.’s places on the drum throne. But the Hi Rhythm Section might more appropriately be called the Royal Rhythm Section, as their unique chemistry has continued to be caught on tape at the studio, long after the label folded.
Of course, Mitchell, who grew up in the studio under Willie’s wing, is on a first-name basis with the label’s greatest hitmakers. “We’ll play some Al [Green], Otis [Clay], Ann [Peebles], Syl [Johnson], and O. V. [Wright] songs,” he notes, before adding, “but we’ll also do a few of the more modern things by John Mayer and [Silk Sonic’s] ‘Smokin’ Out the Window’ and a couple of the new joints. And of course, ‘Uptown Funk.’”
A rotating cast of stellar singers will be fronting the band, including Marcus Scott (former lead singer of Tower of Power), Lil Rounds (American Idol finalist), Gerald Richardson (Cameo), and Ashton Riker (Stax Music Academy Alumnus). Mitchell himself, though a fine pianist, will not play. He does hint that he may join the band on a unique ’70s instrument featured on one of Royal’s most iconic hits. “I may play the electronic bongo device for ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain,’” he says. “But mostly I’ll be sitting on stage, narrating the whole thing. Telling stories, showing pictures. Then the band will play the music I talk about.”
Cedric Burnside and Boo Mitchell accept the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album (Photo courtesy Boo Mitchell).
It’s not every day that three different Grammy winners in one year can trace their sound back to one recording studio, but such was the fate that the 64th Annual Grammy Awards bestowed upon Royal Studios this week. While it’s not surprising that Mississippi blues Grammy-winners Cedric Burnside and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram worked at Royal, the studio — and a stellar Memphis musician — also played a key role in recording the debut album by Silk Sonic, whose “Leave the Door Open” claimed four wins: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best R&B Performance, and Best R&B Song.
To learn more about this year’s Grammys from a Memphis perspective, I caught up with producer/engineer Boo Mitchell, Royal’s co-owner, on layover in Dallas while flying home from Las Vegas, where the gala event was held on Sunday.
Uriah and Boo Mitchell (Photo courtesy Boo Mitchell)
Memphis Flyer:You’ve attended a lot of Grammy Awards ceremonies. Was there anything different this year, even before the winners were announced?
Boo Mitchell: We had a lot of family out this year. My son Uriah was my road warrior with me. We got to Vegas Thursday, and then Jeff Bhasker, the co-producer of “Uptown Funk” and the Uptown Special project, invited us to this insane party. We thought it was in Vegas, but it was in L.A.! So me and Uriah drove to L.A. Friday for this party, and then had to be back in Vegas Saturday morning for the premier screening of Take Me to the River: New Orleans at the House of Blues in Vegas. Then I was invited to the Black Music Collective’s event — the maiden voyage with John Legend, Jay Z and a whole host of amazing artists.
And then we went to see Silk Sonic Saturday. They have a residency at Park MGM. If you’re in Vegas, you should see it. The choreography, the humor, the music, and the musicianship are incredible. Then they have the after party. [Trombonist] Kameron Whalum DJ’s at that, and some of the band hops on stage and plays while Kameron is DJing.
Memphis in the house! Uriah Mitchell, Kenneth Whalum III, and Kameron Whalum at the Silk Sonic after party (Credit: Boo Mitchell)
And Kameron’s brother, Kenneth Whalum III, who plays with Nas, was there. I think Kenneth is the one who introduced Kameron and Bruno Mars. Kenneth was playing with Maxwell at the time, or Jay Z. Bruno was just starting to emerge, and was like, ‘I need a horn section.’ So Kenneth connected those dots. It’s a family affair, full circle. And those same guys have been playing with Bruno since the beginning. They’re on Bruno’s early records. Kameron’s been with Bruno’s touring band for ten years.
And you know Kameron, he was playing Three 6 Mafia and Young Dolph and all that stuff. Memphis was in the house!
It seems Silk Sonic is tied to Memphis in more ways than one. You engineered most of the album, yet, because the single was a live recording, Royal wasn’t technically involved in Silk Sonic’s Grammys, correct?
We didn’t get credit for the Silk Sonic single because of a record company glitch. I recorded the intro to the song with Bootsy [Collins], which was supposed to be part of the song, but when it got uploaded, the intro was listed as a separate track.
How many tracks from that album did you work on Royal?
I think seven out of ten tracks, including that intro and “777,” the song they performed at the Grammys. We did the horns on that one with Kameron, Marc Franklin and Kirk Smothers.
Christone “Kingfish” Ingram’s 662 won Best Contemporary Blues Album, and though most of that was engineered by Zach Allen, you engineered the bonus track at Royal.
Man, that kid … well, he’s not a kid anymore. But, he’s literally one of the most talented and prolific guitar players of our time. He plays with the feel of an 80-year-old man. How can you have that much soul? You’re only 20-somethin’!? Kingfish is incredible. His voice, too. I’ve watched him grow as an artist, working with him over the years. And he just keeps getting better and better. That 662 album is amazing. The producer, Tom Hambridge, is a veteran blues producer who worked with Buddy Guy. Pop [Willie Mitchell] and I got to work with Tom on a Buddy Guy record. We did some horns on that album. And Tom did a phenomenal job with Kingfish.
Cedric Burnside and Boo Mitchell accept the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album (Photo courtesy Boo Mitchell).
And clearly Cedric Burnside winning Best Traditional Blues Album was very meaningful to you, as producer.
Man, that record, I Be Trying, was so special to me. I’d been wanting to work with Cedric for years. Our chemistry is really good. We’ve always had this instant kinship, and working with him in the studio was like we were raised from kids or something. It was very intuitive. His voice, his musicianship. He’s like the spirit of Mississippi. It’s nostalgic and futuristic at the same time.
Have you known Cedric a long time?
I’ve always known the Burnside family legacy. Maybe the first time I met Cedric was 2010 or ’11, and it may have been a Grammy thing. And I got to make a record with him for Beale Street Caravan. They were doing these videos of different artists at different locations, and they asked me if I would record Cedric in front of a little audience, and film it. Like in a little club. So we did this recording, and it was not the ideal studio setting to make a record. He had a floor monitor — it was more like a club. And I was like, ‘I don’t even understand why this sounds so good.’ Because it was recorded all wrong, according to textbooks. But his energy, man. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how you record things, as long as you capture the energy. As long as God is in the room and you’re recording, and the tape’s rolling. There was clearly something anomalous about it, and about him and his voice. And he was like, ‘Man, that sounds so good!’ I was like, ‘Yeah, right? I don’t know why!’
That may have been the catalyst, because every time I’d see him after that, I’d be like, ‘Man, we’ve got to make a record.’ And then the stars lined up with the label, Single Lock. Those guys are amazing. They just gave me the freedom to do what I wanted to do.
Cedric was so good to trust me. Sometimes I would have these crazy ideas for a blues record. Like, ‘Can we put a cello on this?’ [laughs]. But Cedric really trusted me in the process. Even if he didn’t quite understand what I was going for at the time. And then he’d be like, ‘Man, I had no idea this would sound like that.’ Between the artist and the producer, there’s always a give and take, and I’m not a heavy handed person. I always try to consider what the artist wants or what the label wants. But at the end of the day, I’ll always go with my gut.
Also, Cedric’s songwriting is incredible. That’s one of those albums where something is guaranteed to resonate with you. Even the last song, “Love You Forever,” I was like, ‘Man, we just made a bedroom blues song!’ [laughs]. A blues love song! It’s one of my favorite songs. It almost sounds like something D’Angelo could have sung.
It’s nostalgic and futuristic at the same time. It captures all the spookiness of the old deep blues, and it still sounds current. Some of those tracks could be in a Wu-Tang sample.
And for me personally, Cedric’s record was the first time I got to do what Pop did. Because he produced, engineered and mixed all the Al Green stuff. So I finally got me one, doing it like him. Which is all I want to be anyway.
Yvonne Mitchell had to be patient when her father, producer Willie Mitchell, was at work. Since she’d turned 18, she’d been working at Royal Studios, where all of Hi Records’ output was recorded. “He’d be working in the control room, and I would be in my office. Then I’d go back to help him when he needed me during recording and mixing sessions,” she recalls. But this day was different. She hadn’t heard from Willie for a while.
Wandering back to the control room, she saw Willie seated at the mixing board. A voice echoed through the speakers, “I can still feel the breeze …” as eerie tremolo strings shivered with cinematic urgency. “That rustles through the trees …” An organ chord suddenly chopped the silence like a pang of loneliness. And then Yvonne saw her father’s face. He was in tears.
Yvonne Mitchell (Photo: courtesy Yvonne Mitchell)
“He had to piece so many parts together for that song,” Yvonne recalls. “He would take it apart, then stop and start tearing up. That particular song took him a whole day to mix. I said, ‘Dad, why are you crying?’ He just looked at me and said, ‘This is a masterpiece.’”
He wasn’t wrong. Half a century later, hearing Al Green sing “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” can still give you goose bumps. It’s a different beast than the Bee Gees’ original version. The intimacy of Green’s voice, the sacred steps of the Hi Rhythm Section playing behind him, those strings, and other sonic surprises all carry the listener on a twilit journey. It was a breakthrough moment in the history of soul music, or any music.
Al Green (Photo: Bud Lee)
Yet the track was but one of many breakthroughs, both personal and artistic, that were going down then in the former little cinema known as Royal Studios, one of the oldest continuously operating recording facilities in the world to this day. Fifty years on, it’s worth revisiting those months, starting in late 1971, during which Hi Records became the epicenter of the musical universe, culminating in Al Green’s twin masterpieces of 1972: January’s Let’s Stay Together and October’s I’m Still in Love With You.
A Long Time Coming For Willie Mitchell, it had been a long time coming, marking the culmination of many years’ worth of craftsmanship as he toiled to create a distinctive sound. What he arrived at, with tracks that flowed with watery chords underpinned by an inexorable rhythm section and topped with Green’s silky delivery, sounded like nothing else on the pop landscape at the time.
Willie’s grandson Boo Mitchell, whom he raised as his own son, recalls the trajectory that took the trumpet-wielding Willie, aka Pop, to the apex of the 1970s hit parade. “Pop came from the big band era,” says Boo. “But when Pop got back from the Korean War in ’55, he was tired of big band. He wanted something different. So he started a band with [drummer] Al Jackson Jr. and his younger brother [and baritone saxophonist] James. That grew into the Memphis soul sound.” It was a new brand of stripped-down, hard-hitting, groovy R&B, ultimately popularized globally when Jackson and others began recording at Stax Records, and it had its roots in Willie’s outfit. “He had the most famous band in town,” Boo says. “Everybody played with him at some point.”
Back row (left to right): James Mitchell, Teenie Hodges, Charles Hodges, Leroy Hodges; front row: Willie Mitchell and Howard Grimes (Photo: Lansky Bros.)
James would later play a major role in the classic Al Green oeuvre. But it all began when Willie was hired by Hi Records in the early ’60s, with the brothers’ horn sound propelling several instrumental singles for the label, including the hit “20-75” in 1964. That track was the first where Willie had complete control of the production, a giant leap forward in more ways than one.
“Pop went through all of this racial oppression to get to where he was,” Boo explains. “The engineer that was at Royal in the early ’60s, Ray Harris, told him that Black people couldn’t touch the mixing board.” Both the injustice and the aesthetics of it rankled Mitchell, so he threatened to quit unless he could engineer his own productions. “The first song Pop engineered was ‘20-75,’” says Boo, “and you can hear the difference: The music just jumps out of the speakers. So he spent the next several years perfecting the sound of the room. And after he finally bought Ray Harris out in 1968, he was the lead engineer, full-time. That’s when he really got the room the way he wanted it.”
Willie Mitchell (Photo: courtesy Yvonne Mitchell)
Hi Rhythm Bit by bit, he was coming closer to realizing the sounds in his head. His sonic perfectionism paid off with more instrumental hits on Hi, made all the more compelling by the house band he assembled. By the mid-’60s, Willie’s stepsons, Horace and Archie “Hubbie” Turner, were playing in an R&B band called the Impalas with two brothers, Mabon “Teenie” Hodges on guitar and Leroy “Flick” Hodges on bass. Willie brought them in to his sessions at Royal, starting with Flick.
Speaking from the studio’s tracking room floor today, Flick points to where he stood. “Right here. I was 17 years old. I’d never done a recording in my life. And I was right here with Al Jackson Jr., Joe Hall, James Mitchell, Willie, and Reggie Young. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing!”
The compelling grooves of Mitchell’s solo records argue otherwise, especially after Willie assembled a new house band derived from the Impalas. By 1968, the Hi Rhythm Section boasted a young Howard Grimes on drums, who had played on early Stax hits and whose beat was so insistent that Willie dubbed him “Bulldog.” Teenie joined on guitar and Hubbie on keyboards, and the band took on a chemistry all its own.
When Hubbie was drafted and left for Vietnam, another Hodges brother, Charles, stepped in on keys and the group carried on both in the studio and on the road. And, as Flick notes today, that time together was key. “The five of us worked together every weekend. We really knew one another.”
To this day, as Charles Hodges notes, “We are as one. And there are not many musicians that can say that. You just feel each other.” One of their early successes, a cover of King Curtis’ “Soul Serenade,” led them to tour the country. In Texas, they met one Al Greene, a soul crooner struggling in the business with one modestly successful single, and Willie invited him to record for Hi in Memphis.
Wisely having dropped the “e” from his surname, Al Green was getting closer to the stardom Willie imagined for him, but he had an unremarkable start on Hi. “Al Green’s first record, Green Is Blues, didn’t sell anything,” Boo Mitchell notes. But as Willie and the band worked with Green, the producer was working toward a new goal: breaking away from the instrumental hits and reinventing the Memphis sound again.
Listen to the Room Willie’s daughter Yvonne remembers that time well. “He wanted a new sound,” she says. “When I would drive him to the studio, we couldn’t play the radio. He’d say, ‘Would you please turn the music off?’ He said, ‘People steal from me, I don’t steal from them.’”
Once they were at Royal, he put the acoustics of the space under a microscope. “It took him almost two or three years to find his sound,” says Yvonne. “He’d be buying burlap and putting all this stuff on the walls. Then he would just sit here in the middle of the floor, beating on a snare drum. He’d say, ‘No it’s not right’ and beat on the snare drum some more. Finally he said, ‘I got it! I got it! Come listen to the room!’ I said, ‘Listen to the room?’”
The sound of that room colors Green’s second album, Al Green Gets Next to You. The LP took a quantum leap musically as well, chiefly in perfecting the simmering, slow funk of the rhythm section. With slamming tracks like “I Can’t Get Next to You,” “I’m a Ram,” and “Right Now, Right Now,” Green’s naturally silky voice turns on a dime to growls and shouts. But the singer insisted that his original, the more pensive “Tired of Being Alone,” was the hit, and, after lingering low in the charts for months, this proved true.
As Boo says, “Al Green Gets Next to You was right before Pop perfected the room. And then he gets to ‘Tired of Being Alone,’ and that’s more like the Al Green sound that you’re used to.” To Boo, this expresses Willie’s drive to reinvent himself. “See, people kept jacking his sound. He basically invented the Memphis soul sound in the ’50s, before anybody. So at the height of soul music, he was like, ‘Okay, everybody’s doing what I did. Let me change my sound again.’ So he started making his stuff with Al a little more sophisticated.”
Soul music was getting more sophisticated everywhere at the time, but where some artists, like Isaac Hayes, took their jazz influences in a more orchestral direction, Willie Mitchell combined sophistication with the intimacy that came from “listening to the room.” When “Tired of Being Alone” finally clicked in the charts, just when Hi Records co-owner Joe Cuoghi died and left his company shares to Mitchell, the producer was encouraged on all fronts to go with his instincts. The next Al Green single, released in November 1971, embodied that.
“This Could Be Something” As Willie himself says in Robert Mugge’s documentary, Gospel According to Al Green, “The style came about because Al was singing; he was really singing hard. I used to tell Al, ‘You need to soften up some.’ … I said, ‘Al, you’ve got a good falsetto. You need to settle this music down.’ All my life, I’d tampered in jazz chords, and I began to write some jazz chords, trying to get another sound for Al. Finally one Saturday afternoon, I was tampering around on the piano, and I came up with this melody of ‘Let’s Stay Together.’ And I said, ‘This could be something.’”
At the same time, the final pieces of the recording puzzle fell into place for the producer. “Let’s Stay Together was the album where he perfected everything,” says Boo. “He perfected Al on microphone #9. That’s why that album sounds different from Al Green Gets Next to You. It has a smoother, more deliberate sonic tone to it. Every record after that had that smooth, silky sound, like Al Green is in your living room.”
Willie Mitchell perfected Al Green’s sound on microphone #9 while recording Let’s Stay Together. (Photo: Brandon Dill, courtesy Boo Mitchell)
The singer’s delivery went hand in hand with the production. “Really, ‘Let’s Stay Together,’ the song, was where Al discovered himself,” says Boo. “[Al and Willie] had a big fight about getting the vocals to that song. Al was singing hard like the other soul singers at the time. And Pop was like, ‘No, I want Al Green.’ And Al said, ‘Well I don’t know who that is.’ And he left! But when he came back, Al said, ‘Well I’m just not gonna try at all.’ And that ended up being the sound.”
Yet, beyond Willie Mitchell’s painstaking craftsmanship, another facet of the Hi sound from 1972 onward was the producer’s openness to the unpredictable. That, too, was captured in the single that started it all. “We put the track down, and that’s when everything happened,” Willie explains in the film. “We are in the ghetto area, and there’s a bunch of winos out there, and they were all out there drinking. So Al said, ‘Why don’t you go and get four or five gallons of wine, let’s bring these people into the studio.’ So we brought about 50 people in here. All the winos were drinking wine, laying on the floor when we cut the record. And we’d all tell ’em to be quiet.” Careful listening still reveals the guests who were present that day.
Perfect Imperfection The loose atmosphere extends to the band itself. Indeed, the Hi Rhythm Section, who still records as a unit today despite the deaths of Al Jackson Jr., Teenie Hodges, and Howard Grimes, brings a magic to Let’s Stay Together, I’m Still in Love With You, and subsequent albums that transcends even Willie Mitchell’s vision. And that’s just how Willie wanted it.
As Hubbie puts it, “Willie was kind of like Miles Davis, when Miles got his [mid-’60s] group together, with Herbie Hancock and those guys. They were really young when Miles got them. Willie was the same way. Like an older guy with the young guys. ‘You guys do you guys. Do what you do.’ He’d let you go ahead and do it. Be creative.”
Speaking of his dramatic organ swipe on the track that brought Willie to tears — “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” — Charles recalls just such a creative moment. “Al was the type of singer that could lead you to a chord. I’m right there listening and I want to be on him like a duck on a june bug. So when he sang, ‘I can feel the breeze,’ I thought of a breeze in the trees. I just felt it. And I felt self-conscious about it when I heard it back. I wanted to do it again, but Willie said, ‘No, no. This is the take right here. You all can go home.’”
Ultimately, of course, Willie was always alone at the mixing console and thus had the final say. This extended even to the unique string arrangements by his brother James, more edgy string quartet than symphonic bombast, and yet another novel element introduced to the Al Green sound in 1972. As Boo reflects, “Uncle James was an absolute genius. I’ve been studying his arrangements recently, both the strings and horns, and they were so unorthodox and unpredictable. That’s why they work.” Listening to the multitracks reveals “even more there that Pop would take out on the mix. Like extra horn parts and stuff you don’t hear on the record. He just muted them. … He knew how much to take from Uncle James and how much not to take.”
Willie’s exacting approach to mixing meant he always did it on his own, right there at Royal. It was partly a point of pride. After finally being allowed to engineer himself in the ’60s, then ascending to partial ownership of Royal and Hi, he’d personally pieced together the gear with the same ear for detail that had shaped his acoustic room design. As Boo describes it, the studio was such an extension of Willie’s vision that working elsewhere was unthinkable. “That’s the most ridiculous idea. It never happened. It would be like Michael Jordan wearing another player’s basketball shoes.”
Instead, Willie Mitchell remained comfortably ensconced in the sonic temple of his own making, never changing his approach after perfecting it with Al Green in 1972. He made stars out of many singers through the decade, but as the flashier sounds of disco and new wave became ascendant, Hi Records’ star dimmed. Al Green, of course, made a sharp turn to gospel and is the bishop of his Full Gospel Tabernacle Church to this day. When he finally returned to Royal to work with Willie on his return to secular soul, 2003’s I Can’t Stop, sure enough, Royal was there just as it was back in the day. And since Willie’s death in 2010, Royal continues under the stewardship of the Mitchell family, with nearly all of its vintage gear intact, albeit with a few upgrades to digital capabilities as well.
Perhaps most importantly, the Hi Rhythm Section and the Mitchell family carry the torch of Willie’s philosophy, mixing spontaneity, sophistication, and simplicity. As Boo puts it, “I grew up watching him produce. There’d be a studio full of world-class musicians, and everybody’s playing their thing perfectly, and Pop would — Pzzzew! — stop the tape. And he’d be like, ‘Hey man, it’s got a false feel!’ Then they’d do it again, and even if someone hit a clam or something, he’d be like, ‘That’s the take!’ He was more concerned with the spirit and the vibe and feel of a record than the technical correctness. Talk about perfect imperfection! Pop knew when God was in the room.”
Join Alex Greene, Boo Mitchell, and Rev. Charles Hodges as they discuss the making of these classic 1972 albums at the Al Green Listening Event, Memphis Listening Lab, Saturday, March 12, 6:30-8 p.m. Free.
