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.
Alix Brown is no stranger to Memphis Flyer readers, who likely recall this 2019 profile of her work as a DJ in New York. Even before then, she was a player as well, lending bass to a Jay Reatard track and recording with bands like Golden Triangle. And she was also branching out into film-music supervision.
Since 2016, she’s been playing in a combo that combines a bit of both. Daisy Glaze, her duo with guitarist Louis Epstein (HITS, Jump Into the Gospel) that often performs live as a five-piece, brings a dark cinematic sweep to their songscapes, full of reverb-drenched guitars, atmospheric lyrics and somber melodies. And they’ve been productive, with their third single and video, “Ghost of Elvis Presley,” going live today, just ahead of Friday’s release of their eponymous debut LP on The Sound of Sinners label.
The video brings Brown’s Memphis ties to the fore, having been shot in some of this city’s most iconic locations, with a noirish twist.
Directed by Michele Civetta (The Gateway, Agony), who has helmed music videos for Lou Reed and Sean Lennon, among others, much of the video was filmed at the Arcade Restaurant. Other segments shot at the historic Molly Fontaine Lounge feature a guest appearance by producer Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell of Royal Studios.
Photographer Jamie Harmon was on hand as the musicians and crew shot the video over the weekend of January 22-23, offering a rare glimpse into the making of a video with rather cinematic ambitions. In some particularly striking scenes, the duo catch glimpses of themselves as elderly Arcade workers, serving coffee in a kind of all-night diner purgatory. Look for some familiar Memphis faces like Stevan Lazich and Mitchell in these revelatory shots.
Stevan Lazich
Director Michele Civetta
Boo Mitchell tickles the ivories
Filming Daisy Glaze’s “Ghost of Elvis Presley” in Memphis (Credit: Jamie Harmon)
Despite taking their name from a Big Star song, Daisy Glaze is not so much power pop as what they call a “psych-outlaw sound.” The dank atmospherics come courtesy of producer Peter Kember, aka Sonic Boom, who gained prominence as a member of Spacemen 3 and has distinguished himself as a solo artist and producer since the 1990s. He’s clearly in tune with the Memphis scene, having produced MGMT’s Congratulations and the under-recognized synthetic cult classic, An Arabesque by Cloudland Canyon. Daisy Glaze, who already considered Kember “an outsized influence on their sound and songwriting,” recorded their debut at his studio in Portugal in 2019.
Syl Johnson performing at the Royal Studios 60th Anniversary Celebration in 2017 (Credit: Ronnie Booze).
“When I was growing up, Syl was one of my favorites. It was him and Al Green.” So says Boo Mitchell, co-owner of Royal Studios, when reminiscing about Syl Johnson, the electrifying soul singer who passed away this Sunday, February 6th, at the age of 85. And of course, Mitchell was likely the first kid on his block to hear Johnson’s recordings, as it was his late father Willie who produced the singer’s biggest hits.
For that reason, Johnson, who lived in Chicago for most of his life, is often associated with Memphis. And he’s often compared to Al Green, primarily because they were both backed by the Hi Rhythm Section on their records. But careful listeners focus more on what distinguished him from his better-known label mate. If Green was certainly sensual, a few listens to Johnson reveal a singer who is decidedly more carnal than the Reverend-to-be.
As Mitchell puts it, “That voice! You can’t compare him to Al Green; it’s just apples and oranges. If you listen to his version of ‘Take Me to the River,’ his voice just went right through you. He’s a different kind of artist with a different kind of voice. It was a different kind of energy. It was raw.”
Even before connecting with Willie Mitchell, Johnson was distinguishing himself as a soul singer with his own particular edge, often more overtly political than many performers of his time. “He was a bit of an activist,” says Mitchell. “He had his own label before he signed with Hi Records. Twinight Records. Is It Because I’m Black was on that label.” Beyond the title track, that same album included titles like “Concrete Reservation,” “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” “I’m Talkin’ ‘Bout Freedom” and “Right On.”
As Johnson’s family noted when announcing his death, “He lived his life as a singer, musician, and entrepreneur who loved Black music. A fiery, fierce fighter, always standing for the pursuit of justice as it related to his music and sound, he will truly be missed by all who crossed his path.”
But his most enduring track may be “Different Strokes,” from his debut LP on Twinight. Clearly skewing more to the carnal side, various elements of the track have lived on through repeated sampling. The track’s horn parts were used by the Wu-Tang Clan, its vocals were used by Kanye West and Jay-Z, and other elements can be heard on De La Soul’s “The Magic Number,” Eric B & Rakim’s “I Know You Got Soul,” and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.”
Though he released other material after he left Hi, Johnson focused much of his energy on his Chicago-based chain of restaurants, Solomon’s Fishery, through the ’80s and beyond.
As the current century dawned, he reappeared on the music scene once again. Part of that included his return to Memphis, to work at Royal once more. As Mitchell recalls, “He came to Memphis to record stuff with his daughter, Syleena. That was the first time I worked with him. He wanted Rev. Charles Hodges to put some organ on there. And then when [the 2015 film] Take Me to the River came out, we had a big concert at South by Southwest and Syl performed. He was hanging out backstage with Snoop Dogg and the banter was incredible!”
He was the main feature of another 2015 film, Syl Johnson: Any Way the Wind Blows, featured at the Indie Memphis Film Festival that year, complete with a performance by Johnson backed by the Bo-Keys.
His final performance in the Bluff City came shortly after that, in honor of the place where so many Hi artists had made history. Says Mitchell, “He performed at the Royal Studios 60th Anniversary Celebration in 2017. And his energy … he was on fire! He was about 80 then, but man, he brought it. And he’s one of the most underrated harmonica players of the time. He had his own style. It was more of an R&B approach than blues.”
Syl Johnson at the Royal Studios 60th Anniversary Celebration in 2017 (Credit: Ronnie Booze).
As Mitchell sees it, Johnson represented much more than just his own formidable talent as a singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist. He captured the spirits of the two great American cities with which he’s associated. “If ever there was a dual ambassador of Chicago and Memphis, it was Syl Johnson. He personified both cities. Otis Clay did too, in his own way, but Syl really captured the grit of both cities. He had a little Chicago in his Memphis and a little Memphis in his Chicago.”
Ultimately, Mitchell says, it was Johnson’s dynamic personality that people found so energizing. “Syl was hilarious, man. He was a funny cat. And he didn’t take no stuff from nobody!”
Boo Mitchell, Gary Bolen, Wendy Moten,
and Richard Bolen (Photo: Maxene Harlow)
“Yeah, boy! We’ve got some material, man!” When Rev. Charles Hodges, organist with the Hi Rhythm Section, says that, you’d best give the material a listen. “I’m telling you: Gary’s a great writer.” High praise indeed from a keyboard virtuoso who worked so closely with Willie Mitchell, one of the greatest writers and producers in the history of popular music. The man Hodges speaks of is one Gary Bolen, not exactly a household name. And yet, though he’s in his golden years, there’s a good chance he could be before long, due to a project happening at Royal Studios now. Bolen’s songs are coming to life in a way he never could have imagined.
The songs Bolen has crafted over the years have prompted the formation of a supergroup of sorts, now in the final stages of recording three albums’ worth of material. The rhythm section features Steve Potts on drums and Jackie Clark on bass; the keyboards are handled by Rev. Hodges and longtime Hi Records arranger Lester Snell; and the guitarist is Bolen himself, with an assist from Memphis great Michael Toles III. The singers include Bobby Rush, Charlie Musselwhite, Wendy Moten, Jim Lauderdale, and Tower of Power’s Marcus Scott. And in the control room are Boo Mitchell and Gary’s older brother, Richard.
Richard had the organizational skill to make it all come together. Though he had a successful career in film production and marketing, music was always a great love of his. As he puts it, “It started when my brother was in his early twenties, and he started writing some of his first songs.” This would have been in the early ’70s. “I realized that my brother had some real talent. Even his first songs touched me, they had significant meaning. That caused me to stop everything and get ready for him, so I went out and bought a copy of This Business of Music. In 1975, I put a band together around my brother’s songs. Arista almost signed us, but it fell apart.”
Still, even as he took other work to survive, Gary kept writing. And the two brothers stayed close. “We both lived in Lake Tahoe — I could see out of my house into my brother’s — but we had to move to Clarksdale, Mississippi, because of our parents’ age. Now, because we were military kids, I left Clarksdale when I was 5 [years old], but my extended family has always lived here. The house I was born in has had four generations of my mother’s side of the family in it since my great grandparents. So that was always home.”
Gary, for his part, set up a studio in the old family home, and soon they were putting it to use, having recruited the old band from Austin to make demos. Still, the brothers were thinking bigger than that. A few years earlier, Richard had seen the musical documentary Take Me to the River, shot primarily at Royal Studios, and now those impressions fired his imagination.
“I really wanted to go to Royal to get this done. I even talked about it when we were doing the demos. Some of these guys from Austin just don’t play well enough for us to say we did the best we possibly could with this record,” Richard says. “Early on, we realized we needed another bass player and another drummer. So I interviewed Jackie Clark first, then Steve Potts. They heard those demos, and two stanzas into ‘Bad Alligator,’ they both said, ‘I’m in!’ They were very passionate.”
The new rhythm section in turn led the Bolen brothers to Royal Studios’ Boo Mitchell, and work has progressed steadily on making their dreams a reality ever since. The band, now called the Royal Brothers, is a songwriter’s dream team. “You get the right folks,” Gary says, “and you go, ‘Wow! Did I have anything to do with that? That sure sounds good!’”
“Once the nucleus of the band formed a year and a half ago,” Richard says, “the lineup hasn’t changed. There’s nobody there that’s wrong. And all of the people are basically Boo Mitchell’s extended musical family. Lifelong friends of Boo and his father. Gary and I can’t believe we’ve been invited into that family.”
“The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.” — George Carlin
The term “family values” is bandied about in political discourse a great deal, but what it really means is hard to pin down. While some bemoan the loss of the family life portrayed in Cold War textbooks, a look at the institution at street-level reveals a more complex picture. For many, leaving the family can have a liberating effect, as with countless alienated youths, be they counterculture or LGBTQ, who establish their own “family” of friends. And that’s not just a contemporary phenomenon. Memphis Minnie regularly ran away from the hard scrabble farming life of Walls, Mississippi, to play on Beale Street in the years before World War I, eventually staying gone for good while still in her teens. It all started when they gave her a guitar.
And yet families need not be so oppressive, as so many of us know. Indeed, families are a distinctive feature of this region’s musical heartbeat. The late Herman Green’s father played in W.C. Handy’s band, and his stepfather was a pastor whose church piano further sparked Green’s love of music. Phineas Newborn Sr. led a local orchestra that fostered the storied careers of his sons Calvin and “Junior,” the latter becoming one of the 20th century’s greatest pianists. Al Jackson Sr. fostered the talent of Al Jackson Jr., celebrated worldwide as the pulse behind Stax Records. From that same milieu arose Rufus Thomas, his daughters Carla and Vaneese destined to become celebrated singers, his son Marvell a distinguished soul pianist, composer, and arranger.
Though a full listing of contemporary performers with musical family roots would take a book, we highlight three such artists here whose kin inspired them. Once upon a time, people talked about the “generation gap,” with rock-and-roll marking the hard divide between young and old in the ’50s and ’60s. Now, in the 21st century, it’s all about the Generation Jams.
Meet the Burnsides
True, Cedric Burnside’s latest release, I Be Trying, might be seen as the culmination of his family’s story, grounded in the talent and guidance of his legendary blues-playing grandfather, R.L. Burnside. But Cedric’s latest, perhaps the greatest of his career so far, also represents the confluence of several families. Around here, when families befriend families, you wind up with a lot of kin.
The haunting collection of sparse blues, their unique aesthetic echoing African bluesman Ali Farka Touré at times, was produced by Boo Mitchell, himself the keeper of a family legacy. Willie Mitchell went from success to success as a band leader, then as a producer of megahits for Hi Records; he treated and taught the three musical Hodges brothers like family, and they became the Hi Rhythm Section. Along the way, Willie raised his grandson Boo as his son. “Every night he’d come home, I’d be messing around on the piano, and he’d come lean over my shoulder, those whiskers hitting me, and show me some stuff,” Boo recalls.
Now Boo co-manages Willie Mitchell’s Royal Studios, and working on Burnside’s album took on a uniquely cathartic aspect after Boo’s son fell victim to a vicious gun attack that left the Mitchells wondering if he’d ever walk again. “I didn’t know I Be Trying was going to become the soundtrack to my life,” Boo reflects. “When that thing went down with my son, all I kept hearing were Cedric’s songs. ‘The world can be so cold. …’ It was stuck in my head for a long while. Because he means that stuff. It is not an act.”
Cedric has inherited the gravitas and heartfelt approach to the blues of his grandfather. “I was born into this music,” Cedric says. “It was in my blood when I was birthed into this world. I have a very musical family. My Big Daddy [grandfather] and Big Mama [grandmother] had 13 children. Just about everybody turned to music, to have as their passion.
“My first instruments was the cans and buckets. We’d get done cooking, clean all the grease outta the jug, and I’d use that jug for a drum, you know? And my Big Daddy and my dad would play house parties around, and somehow I just found the courage to step up on the drums when they took a break. Instruments were all around me as a kid.”
Having been raised in his grandparents’ home, long before he mastered guitar, drumming for R.L. Burnside gigs at juke joints was an easy jump for Cedric. “It was fascinating, being that young, knowing I wasn’t supposed to be in the juke joints, me or my Uncle Garry. I was 10, he was 12, and we were in the juke joint! But there was something so special about that. Being kids that young, we’d know that we weren’t supposed to be there, but every grown-up in there welcomed us. They would hide us behind the beer coolers when the police came in because if we left, they didn’t have no band to play music! It was really, really cool, just knowing that you were one of the cool kids, at the juke joint with all grown-ups. It was scary, it was weird, and it would get your adrenaline pumping. You think of any scenario, and we probably went through all of those at that juke joint.”
Nowadays, Cedric is able to pay the tradition forward. “My youngest daughter, Portrika — she just turned 16 — sings on ‘I Be Trying.’ She always loved to sing, which makes me proud. And I’m just trying to feed her all I can give her, you know? While I’m here to do it.”
Direct descendants aside, for Cedric, “family” was never merely the classic nuclear arrangement, but an extended flock, some not even related by blood. Among the latter were Jim and Mary Lindsay Dickinson and sons. “With some musicians I play with, I have been around them for so long that they are like family to me. Like the North Mississippi Allstars. Luther and Cody Dickinson, we’ve been around each other since we were kids. Luther was the big brother of the group, the first one who could drive. That’s 30-plus years we’ve been knowing each other. So they are really like family to me. Even though we wasn’t blood. Just the closeness that we had made us family.” To this day, when Luther makes a cameo on Cedric’s album, you can hear the telepathy between them.
Sid and Steve Selvidge (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Meet the Selvidges
It turned out the Dickinsons weren’t the only family bonding with local geniuses of the blues and forging whole new family legacies. While Jim Dickinson was an early champion of under-recognized blues musicians of the area, he wasn’t alone. Standing right by his side at those first blues festivals of the ’60s was Sid Selvidge, whose family in Greenville, Mississippi, had not been particularly musical, but who nonetheless made his own way in the musical world of Memphis with the raw talent of his voice and fingers and his deep understanding of the blues and other song forms.
Today, Sid’s son Steve carries the tradition forward, best known as a guitarist in The Hold Steady. He says his early love of the guitar was sparked by his father’s encouragement — albeit with a light touch. “He was absolutely perfect,” recalls Steve. “Because he was not a stage dad. He was just so smart about it. He made everything available but didn’t push it on me or my brother. There was music around a lot, but all he offered was his enthusiasm.”
Showing young Steve a handful of chords was enough to get him started; from there, the son taught himself licks by rock gods like Led Zeppelin while the father looked on, adding only the occasional detail. “The biggest thing he showed me was open-G tuning and how to play ‘Cassie Jones’ and stuff. And while I played, he’d be shouting at me from downstairs, ‘It doesn’t go to the V chord!’ That’s literally something that happened,” laughs Steve.
Perhaps more than the technical niceties, Steve picked up a unique feeling for the blues via his father’s friends, namely the composer of “Cassie Jones” himself, the great Furry Lewis. “I only got fully hip to North Mississippi when Luther started digging deep down in there. My dad knew who R.L. Burnside was, but we hung out with Furry because they were friends. I have lots of memories of going over there and sitting on Furry’s bed and him being really sweet and really cool. And as he got older, the visits fell off a little bit. And I got into other things. I was still in single digits when he died.”
But there were other friends to learn from. As it turned out, Sid Selvidge, Jim Dickinson, Lee Baker, and Jimmy Crosthwait had a little band known as Mud Boy and the Neutrons. They were mostly local heroes but, by forging their own brand of heavy roots rock, have become highly regarded in hindsight. And the band itself was a kind of family. “They were still holdling on to the ethos of the counterculture,” muses Steve. “Even though they were middle-aged men by that point, there was still that ‘don’t trust anyone over 30’ vibe. I remember the smell of marijuana, and it was all very attractive. It was all connected with fun.”
Sons of Mudboy (Credit: Stevan Lazich)
Indeed, for young Steve, the visceral elements of musicianship were as alluring as the actual playing. “I can remember on Sundays, or after the weekend, I would open my dad’s guitar case, and this almost visible plume of aroma would come out, a cigarette smell, basically. Which is not that great, but it was really intoxicating as a kid. I would open it up and you could almost see the vapors, the smell of the bar. I was like, ‘Wow, man!’ I wasn’t even able to put it into words, but it was like, ‘This is a working musician’s instrument. He did something. And now he’s done for the weekend.’ It was like battle scars and it took on its own energy. It was almost like a living thing.”
Today, with Crosthwait the only Mud Boy member still living, Steve, Luther and Cody, and Ben Baker carry on that living thing as Sons of Mudboy, playing their fathers’ classic repertoire at free-ranging gigs that often include an extended family of other players. As he continues playing his father’s songs, Steve’s appreciation for what he achieved only grows. “Later, I got hip to how intricate and deep my dad’s self-accompaniment on guitar was. Originally I was looking for flash and guitar solos and crazy stuff,” Steve recalls, “but later I realized his whole playing and singing by himself was so hard to do. I can remember being in the first grade and being asked what your parents do. I said my dad was a magician. And maybe that was true, after all.”
MonoNeon (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Meet the Thomases
Steve and Sid Selvidge came to play together, including the time Steve accompanied his father at Carnegie Hall at age 19. Luther and Cody also joined their father Jim starting in their teens, Jim often dubbing the Dickinson family outfit the Hardly Can Playboys. But one local virtuoso didn’t have a chance to do that until very recently. Dywane Thomas Jr. bears the name of his father but mainly admired him from afar as a kid. “My dad, the bassist Dywane Thomas, is my first music hero,” writes the son in an email. To clear up any confusion, the son goes by a different name: You likely know him as MonoNeon, also a bassist, so renowned for his jazz, funk, and soul chops that he even played with Prince in the Purple One’s final days.
“Even though my dad moved to Europe when I was young,” MonoNeon writes, “his influence was just in me (the blues, funk, Southern-soul). Till this day I’m always searching for records my dad played on. I actually found an old vinyl record my dad played bass on with J. Blackfoot, entitled Physical Attraction (1984).”
Searching for records involving his family has been a long-time obsession for the bass wunderkind, for the family ear for music goes beyond his father. “My grandfather, Charles Thomas, a jazz pianist, was a later influence on me. I became aware of who my granddad was musically in my early teens. My granddad played with Ron Carter and Billy Higgins on the album called The Finishing Touch! by the Charles Thomas All Star Trio. I used to listen to those recordings a lot during high school wishing I had a chance to play with my granddad Charles.”
Grandma Liz with MonoNeon (Photo: Courtesy MonoNeon)
More recently, MonoNeon has taken to celebrating his grandmother Liz as well. It’s most obvious in the song “Grandma’s House,” on his 2021 album Supermane, a Funkadelic-tinged celebration of piling into the car to visit his grandmother and eat her fine cooking. “I’ve always just wanted to play some music with Grandma Liz,” he reflects. “I used to go to choir rehearsal with her with my bass and play. The whole thang with me and my grandma jammin’ together started when my mom brought her over to come hang and I told my grandma, ‘Let’s do a quick jam thang’ on a song she use to sing in church, ‘Oh, When I Come to the End of My Journey.’ Since I’ve started singing more, I’ve noticed I kinda sound like my grandma. My early gospel influence comes from going to the Baptist church with my grandma and aunties. Now I’ve just taken all those influences and made it neon I guess.”
As MonoNeon has become more celebrated, he seems to value family more than ever in his work, and recently he too was able to accomplish what the Selvidges and the Dickinsons did: create music with his father, keeping the cycle of family influences ebbing and flowing — “a living thing,” in the words of Steve Selvidge. As MonoNeon relates, “Me and my dad had a chance to record and jam recently at Niko Lyras’ Cotton Row Studio, with Steve Potts on drums. That was a dream I had to bring to realization in some way.”
Cedric Burnside plays an album release party, featuring Luther Dickinson, at B.B. King’s Blues Club, Wednesday, August 25th, 7 p.m. $20. He plays the 2021 Memphis Country Blues Festival at the Levitt Shell Thursday, October 7th, 7 p.m. $35.
Steve Selvidge plays with Big Ass Truck at the Levitt Shell, Saturday, September 11th, 7 p.m. Free.
MonoNeon plays Railgarten, Wednesday, September 1st, 8 p.m. $10.
Memphis is rightly known as a city of musicians’ musicians. Whether they stay planted here, like MonoNeon, or move to the coasts where the music industry and its stars are based, they bring a feel and a groove that few others can match. But the city also attracts brilliant players from elsewhere, in search of that Memphis sound. More than any formula or ingredient, like our much-touted horn players, there’s an elusive ambience, a holistic character, that emerges when one works in this city. And one element of that is simple: It’s in the rooms.
That doesn’t mean our well-appointed lodgings, but rather the classic studios that have dotted the city for over half a century. But it wasn’t always thus. At the dawn of the 2000s, digital technology led many to retreat into the safety and economy of home studios, to such an extent that many studio owners wondered if they’d go the way of the dinosaurs. Was there any money in the studio business?
In recent years, that question is being answered with a definite maybe. The pendulum has swung back to the advantages that only dedicated studios can offer, especially larger rooms, classic gear, and efficient engineering. As Boo Mitchell, co-owner of Royal Studios, one of the oldest continuously operated spaces of its kind in the world, recently noted, “It’s shifting back to the way it used to be, when we were a recording destination.”
All such history is new again, as many artists and producers clamor for a sound that some call retro and others call classic. One indication came in 2019, when what was once unthinkable came to be: A new studio opened in town. And the classic sound was crucial to it. As Memphis Magnetic Recording Co. co-owner Bob Suffolk reflected, “Our studio is brand-spanking new, although it’s done in what I call a purpose-built vintage style.”
Matt Ross-Spang (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Memphis Sounds, Southern Grooves
Now, a new “purpose-built vintage” recording space is opening with an even more local provenance. Matt Ross-Spang, who distinguished himself first at Sun Studio and then as a Grammy-winning engineer and producer based at the renowned Sam C. Phillips Recording Studio and elsewhere, is custom-designing a new room, to be called Southern Grooves, in what was once the Sears cafeteria on the second floor of Crosstown Concourse. As he puts on the finishing touches, it’s clear that this one project embodies all Ross-Spang has learned from multiple studios around Memphis for over a decade, a distillation of the city’s legendary history of recorded music.
“On these walls, we used a polyurethane paint. And that doubled the length of the room,” Ross-Spang says. When you get a tour of a studio, you hear such absurdities regularly. Wait a minute, I think, the paint alone can double the length of the room? That’s when I realize he’s talking about the length of the room’s echo. In a studio, what matters is how your ears measure a room, not your eyes or your yardstick.
In this instance, the room is basically a closet, but it’s a closet designed to always remain empty: another absurdity. “This is what I’m most proud of, our echo chamber. Steve [Durr] designed it. Here’s what it sounds like,” says Ross-Spang as he claps a single time. “It’s about four seconds. Of course, our bodies are soaking up some of the sound.” When in use, the room will have only speakers, playing audio from the control room, and microphones to record how those sounds bounce off the walls. To build such a room, Ross-Spang and Durr studied Phillips Recording intensely. “Phillips has three chambers. The one behind the pink door at the end of the hall there is the greatest echo chamber I’ve ever heard. It’s about six seconds. I didn’t have that much space, but we had height.”
Ross-Spang is one of the few to have seen the Phillips chambers in detail. As Jerry Phillips, son of the late Sam Phillips, says, “We’ve got some of the greatest echo chambers in the world in that building. And we keep them kind of a secret. We don’t let anybody take pictures in there. It’s proprietary. We have three different sizes. And the combination can really give you a great sound. You cannot duplicate it in any kind of digital process.”
That’s true of all such physical spaces, be they echo chambers or the large rooms in which bands record. Stepping into the tracking room at Southern Grooves is like stepping back in time, both sonically and visually. Wood panels alternate with orange fabric on the walls; a wooden chair rail runs along the room’s perimeter; linoleum floor tiles sport geometric patterns here and there; perforated light fixtures, reminiscent of the Summer Drive-In, hang from a ceiling with similarly perforated panels, arranged in an uneven sawtooth pattern. All of it seems to invite a band to set up and record in the old-school way, all together, playing live in the room that time forgot.
A session at Phillips Recording, with (l-r) Rev. Charles Hodges, Matt Ross-Spang, William Bell (behind piano), Leroy Hodges, Ken Coomer, and David Cousar (Photo: Jamie Harmon)Southern Grooves, the new recording studio in Crosstown Concourse (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Memphis Soul Stew, or Ingredients of a Sound Studio
“I kinda stole from all my Memphis heroes. At Sun, the V-shapes on the ceiling went long ways, and at Phillips they go like this. And then Chips Moman’s thing was latticework,” Ross-Spang explains, referring to the producer/engineer who helped found both Stax and American Sound Studio. “So the ceilings here are about 15 feet high; the panels drop down and are angled, but the sound goes through the perforated metal, and then there’s insulation so it stops before it comes back down. So you still get the big room, but you don’t have the parallel surfaces. You never want parallel surfaces.” Such surfaces cause sounds to bounce around too much. “That was another big Sam [Phillips] thing. The angles throw off the flatness of the floor.”
And yet some bounce is desirable. Take the linoleum floor, also a design element from Sun (actually known as the Memphis Recording Service in its heyday). Those floors have often been celebrated as being critical to the roomy sound of early Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis, and Jerry Lee Lewis recordings. As musician Mark Edgar Stuart notes, one story among his fellow tour guides at Sun Studio is that once Bob Dylan himself walked in on a tour, looked at the floor, said, “Ahh, tile,” then walked back out.
As Jerry Phillips says of his father, “Memphis Recording Service was his baby, of course. And Marion Keisker helped him a lot. They laid the floor tiles. He would clap his hands and hear how the echo sounded in the room. How alive or dead it was. He wanted a combination of live sound and controllable sound. And he just built the acoustics in that studio by experimenting.”
Jerry Phillips at the bar in Sam C. Phillips Recording Studio (Photo:Jamie Harmon)
As Ross-Spang envisioned it, having such a “live” tracking room, with some echo (as opposed to a “dead,” echoless room) was critical. “In the ’60s, all the rooms were really reverberant,” he explains. “And then in the late ’60s, early ’70s, when they got 16 track machines and could put mics closer on stuff, they started to deaden stuff with burlap. And then they went so far, they would just really deaden it. So I wanted to have a ’60s room that just started putting up burlap. I always thought that was the coolest balance. ’Cause you can always deaden something more. I can always put more shag rugs down; I can put in baffles. But it’s hard to make stuff livelier. And I just love the old tile floor. Ever since Sun, I’ve always loved that sound.”
The wood and burlap on the walls, on the other hand, are inspired by the second location of Ardent Studios, built in 1972, where Big Star (and many others) made legendary albums. Once again, Ross-Spang leaned on his design collaborator for much of those details. “Steve Durr was really good friends with Welton Jetton, who built all the equipment for Stax and Ardent and helped John Fry [and Terry Manning and Rick Ireland] design the original acoustics at Ardent. So Ardent Studio A had these kinds of reflectors and absorbers. That was a Welton Jetton design. I brought that back because I always thought that was a great look, and they sound amazing.”
Yet there are some elements of Southern Groove’s acoustics that are completely unique, unrelated to the studios of yore. “You always want limitations, and I had the limitations of the columns,” Ross-Spang explains. He’s speaking of the huge concrete columns that pepper the entire Crosstown Concourse structure. There was no possibility of removing or moving them, but Ross-Spang was okay with that. “Acoustically, the columns are interesting because they’re three-foot-thick concrete, they’re smooth, and sound will bounce off that randomly every time. There’s no way to mathematically account for that, acoustically. You play guitar from here, you move and inch, and it’ll bounce differently. I think it’ll be interesting when we get mics in here because it will randomize the room a lot.”
For Ross-Spang, the randomness was a bonus. “A lot of acousticians have one design that they go for every time, but Steve [Durr]knows I wanted something weird and not necessarily correct. Because all the Memphis studios aren’t correct, but they’re cool. I didn’t want a perfect studio; I wanted a weird studio.”
As we move into the control room, where two electricians are painstakingly working, it becomes clear that weirdness is literally wired into the entire space, thanks in part to Ross-Spang’s forethought. Pointing to the electricians, he says, “They’re pulling 30,000 feet of cable, and we’ve got conduits and troughs running to all the rooms. I wanted to wire every room for sound ’cause sometimes you want something to sound perfect, and sometimes you want it to sound like it’s in a garage. The hallways and every other little room are wired. Sometimes a guitar in the main tracking room sounds too good. So you put it in the hallway and it sounds like Tom Waits, and that’s what you need, you know? I do that a lot. At both Sun and Phillips, I would use that front lobby all the time. So I wanted to keep that here. All the wiring is running through the floor in troughs, and the cables will come up into these old school ’60s one-fourth-inch patchbays.”
Ultimately, the wires will converge on a mixing board that, among all the design features, will make Ross-Spang’s commitment to classic Memphis studios more apparent than ever. “I actually have John Fry’s original board from the original Ardent on National Street, where they did the first Big Star stuff. It’s getting fixed up, and it’ll be the main board. It was built in Memphis by Welton Jetton. And I also have a later board that Welton built for Stax, when they upgraded to the bigger boards. We’re putting the Ardent console in the original Stax frame, this cool white Formica top thing.”
The influence of Jetton on the studios of Memphis is hard to overstate. As Terry Manning, the first engineer at Ardent and now a distinguished producer, says, “Welton was a genius. He was the chief engineer at Pepper [Sound] Studios, which at the time was the biggest jingle recording company in the world and had several studios that Welton had put in. Pepper was huge, and Welton was a prime part of that. And later he started his own company making consoles, which became the Spectrasonics consoles that Stax and Ardent had. Later he changed that to Auditronics, and they were used all over the world. It was all Welton and his crew — acoustic design, electronic design, building the consoles. ‘Hey, we need a direct box! What’s a direct box? I don’t know, but Welton will build it!’ It was an amazing time, where you made your own gear and recorded your way.”
Finally, aside from the collection of other vintage gear that Ross-Spang has amassed in his current home base at Phillips, there will be vintage amps and instruments, including a Hammond A-100 organ and one thing most home studios and even many professional ones simply do not have these days: a grand piano.
For that, Ross-Spang received some sage advice from one of the pillars of Memphis’ golden era of recording. “I brought one of my heroes, Dan Penn, over here, and out of nowhere he said, ‘What kind of piano are you gonna get?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to get anything too big.’ And he said, ‘You need to get the biggest durned piano you can buy. Them little pianos, the sound don’t wanna come out of them. But them big pianos, they can’t wait to be recorded. They jump out the speakers.’ So I’m going to have a Baldwin from 1965 in here. It’s a 7-footer. It was really cool to get it from Amro Music ’cause it’s their 100th year of serving Memphis.”
James Taylor, Peter Asher, and Terry Manning at Ardent Studio in 1971, using the mixing board Matt Ross-Spang has acquired. (Photo: Courtesy Terry Manning)
I’ll Take You There, or Setting is Everything
And yet, despite all of Ross-Spang’s committment to the designs and instruments and gear of yesteryear, there’s another element that he may value over all others. As we wrap up the tour, he reflects a bit more on the simple fact of where Southern Grooves will live. The name screams out “Memphis,” of course, but there’s more to it than that. Something unique.
“Never has a studio been in such an ecosystem like Crosstown,” he says. “That was one of the biggest selling points to me. Think about with Ardent and other places with multiple rooms and who you might run into. You might be doing an overdub, but then Jack Oblivian’s in Studio A, and you’re like, ‘Hey, will you come play real quick?’ And that’s kinda gone now with home studios and one-studio facilities.
“But at Crosstown — like, we just ran into Craig Brewer! It’s kinda like having Jerry Phillips come visit Phillips Recording. Here, you can go next door to the Memphis Listening Lab and remember why we’re doing this in the first place. Crosstown is a million-and-a-half-square-foot lounge, essentially, filled with creative people. And I don’t think any other studio has had that opportunity. That’s what I feed off of: other people’s energy. If you put me in here by myself, I couldn’t create anything. But when I have the people here, I’ll go two days without sleeping because I’m so jacked, you know?”
Matt Ross-Spang plans to have Southern Grooves fully operational this August.
Long ago, North Mississippi Hill Country was overlooked in standard perspectives on the blues. While the Delta Blues had been a buzzword in music circles for generations, the variation to the east and north of the flatlands was little-recognized until artists like R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, Robert Belfour, Calvin Jackson, and Sid Hemphill gradually came to be known outside of the region.
Then the documentary Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads, released 30 years ago, featured Burnside, Kimbrough, Othar Turner, and Jessie Mae Hemphill. Fat Possum Records began releasing works by these and other artists shortly thereafter. And of course, the North Mississippi Allstars did much to further popularize the sound, albeit in a more hybridized form.
What they all shared in common was an emphasis on droning, hypnotic guitar riffs played over a driving, insistent beat. And the guitar sounds are unapologetically electrified and distorted, in a heavier and more stripped-down manner than the electrified urban blues guitar that came to prominence in the ’50s.
Since then, the sound’s reach has only seemed to grow. And this week, a new milestone was passed when R.L. Burnside’s grandson, Cedric Burnside, who began drumming for R.L. in his teens but grew into a songwriter and guitarist in his own right, was recognized as a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Folk and Traditional Arts program.
This award recognizes individuals who “sustain cultural traditions for future generations,” and Cedric Burnside could not be more illustrative of that quality. While he was long recognized primarily as a drummer, winning Blues Music Awards as an instrumentalist in that field multiple times, he has also grown as a gifted guitarist and composer. He was nominated for Grammy Awards in 2016, for his album Descendants of Hill Country, and in 2019 for his album, Benton County Relic.
Burnside is not the first artist with Memphis and Mid-South roots to be recognized by the NEA. William Bell received the same fellowship last year, as the Memphis Flyer reported at the time.
In a biographical essay on the NEA’s website, onetime Rhodes College associate professor Zandria Robinson, now an associate professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University, writes:
As an architect of the second generation of the Hill Country blues, Burnside has spent his career tending to the legacy of the genre by expanding the next, electric generation of the North Mississippi sound. In Burnside’s care, the sound leads with extended riffs that become sentences, pleas, or exclamations, rendering the guitar like its West African antecedent, the talking drum. These riffs fuse with Burnside’s voice, like the convergence of hill and horizon in the distance, carrying listeners to a deep well of Mississippi history whose waters reflect the present and the future of the state and the nation.
On June 25, Single Lock Records will release Burnside’s latest album, I Be Trying, recorded at Royal Studios. The album’s first single, “Step In,” was released in April.
Boo Mitchell and family, keepers of producer Willie Mitchell’s legacy and the ongoing musical productions at Royal Studios, are currently in the throes of tragedy, as they hope and pray for the recovery of Boo and Tanya Lewis Mitchell’s eldest son, Elijah. Friends and colleagues across the world were shocked to read a social media post by Boo on August 16th:
This is the most difficult thing for me to post. Please excuse me if I’m a little scattered. Yesterday our oldest son Elijah Mitchell (Elijah Lewis) was taken to Regional One Health for a gun shot wound to the back, broken ribs and other injuries. Suspect, his girlfriend’s ex lover, broke in her house and waited for him, shot him in the back then beat him after he was down. His front teeth were all beaten out. Unfortunately the bullet went through his spinal cord and he has lost all of the feeling in his legs. Suspect has been arrested and is in custody. We are grateful and thankful that Elijah is alive. We have a lot of work ahead of us. This is the most devastating [thing] that has ever happened to me or my family. We are thankful for the amazing team of doctors and nurses at Regional One Health; they have been nothing less than angels through this. Please keep Elijah and my family in your thoughts and prayers. We know that God is in charge and we are praying and hopeful that one day he will fully recover.
As a testament to the tragic situation — and the good will Boo and family have inspired throughout Memphis — hundreds have stepped up to help. Elijah, at 26, can no longer be covered by his parent’s insurance and has none of his own. Accordingly, the Memphis community has risen to the occasion. Yesterday, Vicki Loveland, a Memphis music veteran, launched a GoFundMe campaign, Elijah Mitchell Medical Emergency Fund, to assist the family with the coming onslaught of medical bills.
courtesy Boo Mitchell
Elijah Mitchell
Today, the campaign has gathered roughly 20 percent of its fundraising goal of $50,000. The fund is steadily growing thanks to contributors from all walks of life, but of course the Mitchell family’s importance to music is reflected in the list. Indeed, the importance of music to so many is evoked in Loveland’s statement on the campaign page:
Music lovers all over the world, and certainly the Memphis music community, know the beautiful history of Royal Studios. We have lived our lives listening to hits from Al Green to Bruno Mars. But the biggest reason Royal has continued to be so vitally important to this world is because of the Mitchell family and the love and kindness they show, not only for Memphis but for people everywhere. Now, they need all of us to reciprocate and show them what we all can do to lift them up from a horrible tragedy that has stricken their family.
Her words reflect the deep connection between music and community, but it’s the last word, family, that best expresses the heart of the matter. For what parent has not imagined what a crushing blow such events would be?
As of today, there have been no updates on Elijah’s condition, but Loveland did add this postscript to the GoFundMe page: “Just want to say THANK YOU once again for keeping the love train rolling around the world. It really does matter.”
Michael Graber has built a career outside of music, but he’s a fixture on the local scene. Back in the ’90s, he helped found Prof. Elixir’s Southern Troubadours; more recently, we’ve heard his work with the Bluff City Backsliders, who have mined similar territory, or with the group Damfool, who are harder to pin down.
Now, another of his groups, Graber Gryass, is stepping to the fore, and, as the name implies, it’s more focused on his own songwriting than any of his earlier projects. That’s partly due to the realities of life during the coronavirus.
Photographs courtesy of Michael Graber
Michael Graber with son Leo and Graber Gryass
“When Amy LaVere and Will Sexton were on tour in March, and suddenly every gig they had was canceled, I thought, ‘Shit, what can I do?'” he explains. “So I started that Microdose series [on Facebook every Saturday at 1:30 p.m.], where I do two originals and one cover, to raise money for full-time working musicians. And I raised over $1,000 dollars, just to give away to all my musical brethren and sistren. But by the fourth one, I ran out of songs that I had written. I had to start writing songs pretty quickly just to keep up because there was more interest than I thought there would be. I challenged myself to do more songwriting, and after I had about 24 of them, I thought, ‘Hmm, some of ’em fit into a mold, some of them are way out, but we should record all of them.'”
Graber booked a couple days with Boo Mitchell at Royal Studios, and, fully masked, the band cut one song after another, mostly live in the tracking room. The players were so prolific and inventive that Graber is sorting the final tracks into two batches, to be released under different names. (An Indiegogo campaign under the name of Graber Gryass has been launched to fund the releases.)
Michael Graber w daughter Rowan Gratz & grandson Ellery with Graber Gryass
Sometime next year, he’ll release the most left-field compositions, which developed as the band grew more and more uninhibited in the studio. “The one with the weirder songs, I’m gonna call Spaceman’s Wonderbox. In one band I play in, called Damfool, they started calling me Spaceman. And they’ll never tell me why. It just kinda stuck. You can’t really fight it, right?” Moreover, the name is a good fit with the material itself, which Graber describes as “this mix of shamanic spoken word and ecstatic love poetry, and everybody’s playing behind me.”
While the songs were written in the downtime of shelter-in-place, Graber notes that they apply to life more generally. “There may be some emotional truth, but there’s no topical or literal way of talking about this time of quarantine. These songs run the gamut of the emotions, everything from jumping into a river to turning into light. It’s crazy stuff. It’s really more like a celebration of living fully, no matter what. Just flourishing. It’s springtime!”
Meanwhile, the other batch is already being released online. These are more traditional numbers, in a folk/bluegrass/country vein, albeit touched with Graber’s own old world-inspired lyrical imagination. These celebrate living fully as well, but in a different way. The first single, which dropped in late June, is simply titled “Marijuana.” “An ancient herbal brew, it could take care of you too,” he sings. Other tracks have dropped since, such as “Drinkin’ Forties,” celebrating another ancient brew, and “When the Water’s This Low,” which begins, “Now Daddy and Red been drinking since dawn and now the sun’s waning low. Twilight crept in like a ghost as we rode through a cypress grove.”
These first releases, which will emerge on a Graber Gryass album in August, are especially meaningful to Graber. “I’m gonna call [the first album] Late Bloom. I’m 50 and this’ll be the first thing ever released under my name, other than the Backsliders, 611, Prof. Elixir, all that stuff. It’s taken a while. It’s a way to say, ‘Hey, it’s never too late to create. We can always blossom, we can always flourish.'”
courtesy Boo Mitchell 
courtesy Boo Mitchell 
Photographs courtesy of Michael Graber 