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Everything Blues is Hot Again

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram (Photo: Justin Hardiman)

“This city’s filled with reasons to kill, but everyone wants to play the blues.” So lamented the Lost Sounds over 20 years ago on their Black-Wave album, and that sentiment, that palpable frustration, was easy to relate to at the time. For youth on the edge of alternative culture, the blues could feel soul-crushing, especially in Memphis, especially on Beale Street. Somehow, it felt like the sound of complacency. I was certainly too snobbish to play Beale Street back at the end of the last century, and I was not alone.

One group, though, worked Beale Street to their advantage in those days. Luther and Cody Dickinson formed the North Mississippi Allstars with Chris Chew and played Beale Street clubs almost from the beginning, relentlessly refining their blues-based rock and funk there, night after night. Over the decades, with a few other like-minded souls, the two brothers have stayed the course, and their ceaseless experimentation has left in its wake a revelation: The blues are extremely mutant-friendly.

Indeed, the blues may be more open to cross-pollination, hybridization, and evolution than any other genre, and that’s never been more apparent than today. After decades of bubbling under the surface, from the Delta to the Hill Country to the gritty, grinding streets of Memphis, the blues have soaked up something from the sands. And now, once again, the creature is stirring.

A New Era
“The blues is dead!” quips Bruce Watson, co-founder of Fat Possum Records, the label that first made its mark with hitherto under-recognized artists like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, among others. Then he laughs out loud. “I’m kidding. That’s been our catchphrase for 30 years. Actually, the blues may kind of die down, but there always seems to be somebody who starts the flame again. If you look at The Black Keys’ record from last year [Delta Kream], they were reaching back into the old Fat Possum catalog for most of that. That’s pretty great. It introduces a whole different audience to the blues. These days, it definitely feels like something’s happening.”

That sentiment is shared by many with their fingers on the pulse of the music. “There is a new appreciation for what the blues is and what the blues is all about,” says Judith Black, president and CEO of the Blues Foundation.

Rapper Al Kapone, who we’ll return to later, also knows a thing or two about the blues, and agrees with Black. “A new era of the blues has begun, and it’s needed,” he says. “It’s a great thing to witness. We’re right at the beginning stages of something going on. It’s really cool to see.”

And Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, whose 662 won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album earlier this year, says, “There’s definitely a new vibe. A crop of young people are coming out of the woodwork, more young people of color. So there’s a big resurgence of the blues at the moment.”

Cedric Burnside (Photo Courtesy: Reed Watson)

Nostalgic and Futuristic — at the Same Time
Just what specifically is changing is harder to define. One sign came with last year’s release of I Be Trying, by Cedric Burnside, grandson of the great R.L. Burnside. Originally a drummer, he came of age on the road with R.L. and close family friend Kenny Brown, during a time when R.L. enjoyed a revival of sorts, on Fat Possum and elsewhere. Now, being steeped in the North Mississippi Hill Country blues that his grandfather typified, Burnside has appropriately been named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, a sort of guardian of the Hill Country tradition.

The irony is that, despite such historical bona fides, Burnside has forged a style all his own. With a clean, percussive guitar style, likely derived from his years behind the drums, he lays down riffs and snatches of melody that lean heavily on the blues but also evoke echoes of soul and gospel. As with classic Hill Country blues, there’s still a hypnotic quality, but with less distortion (an innovation in itself in R.L.’s day) and a greater sense of playfulness. With the quality and care put into this very intimate-sounding recording, it’s no wonder he took home the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album this year, and yet Burnside defies tradition as well. As producer Boo Mitchell says, “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.”

Paradoxically, such innovation sits comfortably within the Hill Country tradition. At Kenny Brown’s North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic, taking place this week, June 24th-25th, and now in its 16th year, tradition and innovation sit side by side. Many of the region’s great musical families are represented by performers like Robert Kimbrough Sr., Kent Burnside, Duwayne Burnside, and Garry Burnside, not to mention Shardé Thomas and R.L. Boyce, who both started out in the great Othar Turner’s fife and drum corps, but the tradition of innovation will also have its hour, with longtime blues genre-benders like the North Mississippi Allstars and Alvin Youngblood Hart.

Though Cedric Burnside will not perform there this year, his unique sound may be a direct result of the tradition’s innovative side. As David Evans, a former ethnomusicology instructor at the University of Memphis and highly regarded authority on local blues, notes, “People have identified Cedric, either rightly or wrongly, with this Hill Country sound or style. And he’s supposed to be upholding that, and that might be a little restrictive. He seems like a guy who likes to explore.”

Or, as Burnside himself puts it, “Different, to me, has always been a great thing. I always wanted to be different.”

Too Young to Remember, Old Enough to Know
If Cedric Burnside, now 43, seems to have reinvented the blues based on years of playing with his elders, followed by a lifetime of painstaking craftsmanship in search of something different, others are doing the same simply by virtue of their youth. Clarksdale’s Christone “Kingfish” Ingram is the perfect example, and the twin Grammys won by Ingram and Burnside this year are, in a sense, two sides of the same shiny new blues coin.

Twenty years younger than Burnside, Ingram has brought a new energy to the blues of the Mississippi Delta by virtue of having grown up with all the world’s music at his fingertips, even as he matured into a die-hard devotee of the blues. “When I was growing up, my mom played everything, from ’60s soul to Bon Jovi to Patti LaBelle,” he says. “I was always hearing different styles of music. And pretty much all of that inspired me to infuse that into the blues and make my own little genre, for lack of a better term.”

At the time, simply embracing the blues felt like a radical act. “When I went to school, other young kids were more into rap and everything like that. The blues was almost taboo. But now, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen more kids in my generation gravitating toward it.” Ingram himself led the charge, diving wholeheartedly into educational programs sponsored by the Delta Blues Museum in his hometown.

“My instructors were actual bluesmen, Bill ‘Howl-n-Mad’ Perry and Richard ‘Daddy Rich’ Crisman. They were my teachers and my mentors of the blues, from the time when I played bass through when I got into guitar. And when they found out I had a little voice, they even pushed me to sing. There were even times when we would do readings. It was a full-on educational class, for sure. And it still goes on today.”

It’s an outcome that historians and supporters of the blues, such as those behind the Delta Blues Museum, can only dream of — until their efforts actually culminate in a phenomenal artist like Kingfish Ingram. And much of that can be put down to Ingram’s unique personality, his uncanny feel for the traditions that came before. “I’m too young to remember,” he sings on one track, “but I’m old enough to know.”

While the overall sound of 662 (name-checking Clarksdale’s area code) has an up-tempo drive and bounce that ranges from the hard rock power chords of “Not Gonna Lie” to the mellow soul stylings of “Another Life Goes By” or even alternative balladry like “Rock & Roll,” his voice grounds it all with a weathered worldliness. And somehow that voice comes through his guitar as well. As Boo Mitchell says, “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.”

Not all blues fans feel that way, however. The blues genre in particular has always been plagued with fans who love only that which does not evolve: the purists. “It’s been something I struggled with because trying to get accepted by the purists has always been something I wracked my head over,” reflects Ingram. “In some ways, I’m just getting over it. But I look at it like this: One of the ways I’ve gotten young people into the blues is by mixing other genres into it. But here’s where the tricky part comes in: You don’t want to mix too much, to where it becomes something else. But as far as keeping it pure, I think the more you hear the blues or things that are blues-inspired, it’ll always be pure. When Albert King did his funkiness, you could hear the blues in his funkiness. For me, it’s all pure. Whatever comes from the heart is pure.”

Memphissippi Sounds (Photo: Peter Lee)

The Soundtrack of Our Lives
If Ingram felt like an outsider among the Black peers of his youth, who gravitated more toward rap, that distinction is coming to mean less and less as the new blues arise out of the landscape today. It’s something that Judith Black noticed soon after taking the helm at the Blues Foundation. “A new duo called Memphissippi Sounds performed at the Blues Music Awards, and right before the ceremony I saw them practice and had an opportunity to meet them. And they don’t necessarily look like your typical blues artist. They look like hip-hop artists. And their sound is kind of a combination of hip-hop and soul and blues. More blues than anything — they’re definitely blues. And I think artists like them are starting to attract a younger crowd, listeners who would not typically choose to listen to blues. So it’s emerging.”

To Black, whose childhood was steeped in older blues thanks to her father, a collector and independent scholar, such emerging connections make perfect sense. “I think there’s a new appreciation for the history that comes with the blues. In this time of racial reckoning, the blues puts that history in perspective. It was the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement, the soundtrack of our lives as we’ve moved from the late 1800s all the way up to now. I’ve looked at the lyrics of artists from, say, the early 1900s, and some of us talk about young hip-hop artists and their lyrics nowadays, but once you listen to those early lyrics, they make most rap lyrics look like nursery rhymes!”

Al Kapone (Photo: Jenny Max)

Black’s words unwittingly echo the thoughts of one of Memphis’ most iconic rappers, Al Kapone. Appearing at the Beale Street Music Festival this spring, Kapone sealed his legendary status once more as he led a crowd of thousands in the chorus of “Whoop That Trick,” the song he penned for Craig Brewer’s film, Hustle & Flow, now chanted regularly at every hometown Memphis Grizzlies game. But mixed in with Kapone’s classics was a new batch of tunes, the culmination of an epiphany that struck the rapper only recently.

“Being a rapper from Memphis, I realized no one from the rap community has embraced something that’s so uniquely Memphis as the blues. When it hit me, I was like, ‘This can’t be!’ It just hit me, I’ve gotta really, fully embrace it and represent the blues. And I wanted to do that in the Memphis rap style. Because the Memphis rap sound is unique in itself. So I figured if I could marry the two, I’d be coming up with something that’s doubly unique.”

Marrying the two genres has been the focus of Kapone’s most recent singles, and at the Beale Street Music Festival, it hit home in a powerful way. As doom-laden beats pounded on in classic Memphis fashion, a new layer of sound also appeared: the dark, heavy wail of an electric guitar, pushed to its limits, ricocheting off the walls of the nearby Mid-South Coliseum and across the cityscape. It was an aesthetic shot across the bow.

“I was like, ‘How can this not have been done, this far into the musical era we’re in? There’s no way!’ I felt it was my duty and my honor to marry those genres together in a way that only a Memphis OG rapper could. And I’m very happy to wave the flag.” For Kapone, independently echoing Black’s remarks, it provides a direct connection to history. “I listen to a lot of the older blues records, and when I listen to the words, I’m like, ‘Lyrically, this is just as raw as hip-hop!’ The lyrics are as raw as the street. They talk about gambling, somebody getting their gun, somebody messing with their whatever. [laughs] You can get a glimpse of street life way back then, listening to those songs. I feel their era connecting with our era, with the same kinds of stories.”

Now the rapper has just released the culmination of this epiphany, an EP titled Blues Rap Music, which gathers a handful of singles he’s recently done that capture this approach. One track, “Dead and Gone,” even features a renowned Memphis guitarist who first rose to fame when Al Kapone was just getting started in the hip-hop game: Eric Gales. And his very involvement serves as an object lesson that the generic boundaries between blues and hip-hop are not hard and fast.

“In the ’90s,” Kapone recalls, “a lot of people in the blues world had no idea that Eric rapped on a lot of Three 6 Mafia mix tapes. He went by the name of Lil E. And he had a cool personality and identity. So I knew him from then. The underground Memphis rap world, the mixtape world, had no idea he was a guitar player, and people in the blues guitar world had no idea he was a rapper!”

Now it’s come full circle, as the two musical cultures that have put Memphis on the map converge. The blues, as Judith Black likes to say, is continually emerging. And lately, the blues has got a whole new bag. As Bruce Watson says, “The blues is dead!” Long live the blues.

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Elder Jack Ward’s Original, Time-Tested Take on Sacred Soul

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Elder Jack Ward, age 83, may be the greatest gospel singer you’ve never heard of. True, Bruce Watson’s Bible & Tire Recording Co., founded on the older aesthetic of “sacred soul” rather than modern jazz/funk/fusion gospel, has given new life to a few singing careers in the field, and many of them were not well-known at the time. Yet some, like Elizabeth King, were quickly embraced by media outlets like NPR, vice.com, and American Songwriter. Ward’s name hasn’t received as much attention but may soon follow suit, now that his album of songs, freshly recorded with the Sacred Soul Sound Section at Delta-Sonic Sound, has been released.

One thing distinguishing his album, Already Made, from other Bible & Tire releases is Ward’s songwriting. While many gospel singers focus on breathing new life into classic church music, Ward composed every song on the album. As he tells it, it has always been thus. “I’ve been writing basically since I started singing, when I was 8 or 9 years old,” he says. “I grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry and such … Ernest Tubb, a lot of guys, I used to pattern after them. I never did try to record them. But when I was in the cotton field I used to sing, ‘I’m walking the floor over you. I can’t keep awake and it’s true.’ [laughs] Yes. It was just a gift that was in me, and I can just about sing any type of song. But I had stuff of my own. What you’ve been listening to [on the new album], that is my way of singing, ‘This is what I like. This is me. No one else.’”

Elder Jack Ward (Photo: Matt White)

That talent for composition served Ward well when he first journeyed to Memphis from his hometown of Itta Bena, Mississippi, at age 18, determined to make a life in music. He fell in with a group called the Christian Harmonizers, and their 1964 single on the Stax subsidiary Chalice stayed on the charts for an impressive stretch of time. “‘Don’t Need No Doctor’ was a hit for about two years, off and on,” says Ward. “Isaac Hayes was playing piano on both of those sides. The flip side was ‘Jesus Will Send Down His Blessings.’ Those are the two songs I wrote. And I can tell you about the fast one, ‘Jesus Will Send Down His Blessings.’ I was walking when I was in my 20s. I heard someone saying ‘Help me!’ from down in a deep ditch. I couldn’t see it so good. It was almost dark, and I was headed back home from going to see a girl. And he said, ‘Help me out!’ The guy was drunk, and I pulled him out and he appreciated that. And I went from there on that particular song.”

From there, Ward and a new group, the Gospel Four, recorded his originals with Pastor Juan D. Shipp’s D-Vine Spirituals label, which Bible & Tire has gone on to acquire and reissue in recent years, and whose roster from the ’70s has continued to supply Watson’s new imprint with much talent, including Elizabeth King. As Watson notes, “Elder Ward has a notebook” full of compositions. “We had a tough time narrowing the list down to 10 songs. Ward has an otherworldly gift.”

In true Bible & Tire style, the songs are arranged and recorded using the same house band featured on other releases by the label, including Will Sexton and Matt Ross-Spang on guitars, George Sluppick on drums, and Mark Edgar Stuart on bass. Lucero’s Rick Steff adds keyboards (full disclosure: so do I), but the really captivating sounds come from Ward’s own family.

“I’ve got two sons in Ohio, and they’ve been up there for a spell. But I’ve got my three daughters and my son here, they do the background,” says Ward. “I started them off when they were about 7 or 8.” Now, they are deeply involved in his ministry and often sing with him. “The First Temple Holiness Church, 701 Pearce Street. Smokey City. My wife is the evangelist, and our daughter is in the ministry. Sometimes my wife sings with us, and most of my children and grandchildren. I’ve got some great-grandchildren coming, too. So I’m still in it. I love to sing, love to preach, love to teach. That’s me!”

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Shake a Leg with Bruce Watson’s Just Leg It Compilation

“Just Leg It” sounds like slang somebody made up in the ’30s or ’40s.

It’s not. It’s the title of a new album produced, mixed, and recorded by Bruce Watson of Fat Possum and Big Legal Mess Records.

“It’s a term for dancing I made up,” says Watson. “When people hear the record, I hope they ‘just leg it.’”

The album includes 19 party instrumentals from Memphis and North Mississippi artists, including Matt Ross-Spang, Jimbo Mathus, Will Sexton, Jack Oblivian, and Memphis Flyer’s Alex Greene.

There was “really no idea” behind the album, which Watson began working on nine years ago. “It was an excuse for a bunch of friends and musicians to get together and hang out. And make up songs, basically.

 “I would come in with old records and say, ‘Okay. Let’s kind of build something inspired by this.’ Someone would come up with a riff and we could record it on one-inch eight-track tape.”

Watson began recording with a few musicians at Dial Back Sound, a recording studio he owned in Water Valley, Mississippi. 

He recorded nine tracks and then put the album away for a while. “I sold that studio and moved to Memphis five years ago,” he says. “I put a little studio in a building in Memphis and started working with guys like Matt Ross-Spang, Will Sexton, George Sluppick, Jack [Oblivian] Yarber, Mark Edgar Stuart. We would just kind of hang out and do the same thing. So, that’s how the whole thing came together. There wasn’t any big plan.”

Also, he says, “I had been in production for about 10 years and hadn’t been engineering. I used this as an excuse to get my engineering chops back. It was really to go back in the studio and twist some knobs and do the engineering thing.”

Why did it take nine years to complete? “We did two songs, and then we wouldn’t do anything for six months. There was no urgency. I was producing and recording a lot of other records, running Fat Possum Records.

“About two years ago I said, ‘Well, I’ve got all these songs. Why don’t I do something with it?’ So, I reached out to Kerri Mahoney, a graphic designer, and said, ‘Let’s come up with a concept. I’ve got this idea — Just Leg It. People dancing on the front. And just a fun party record.’ So she came up with the design.”

The cover and selections evoke the ’60s, Watson says. “And it also ties into a whole tradition of instrumental music. It was really inspired by the Hi Records catalog of instrumental records.”

Watson didn’t just make up the album title. “All the titles on the record I just made up. Man, when I would go on trips — especially driving around small towns — I would see stuff to give me inspiration for a name and I’d jot it down. When I was putting it all together, I had a list of about 100 names, and I’d pick one and assign it to a song.

 “I can’t remember if I was in the Arkansas Delta or Mississippi Delta, but I saw a pawn shop that said, ‘We have machine guns.’ I thought, ‘That’s a good name for a song: Delta Machine Gun.’”

Watson currently is involved in recording gospel music at his Bible & Tire Recording Co. in Memphis. “We are approaching sacred soul or gospel music kind of in the way it would have been recorded in the ’60s and sounded in the ’60s — pretty stripped down, pretty raw.”

 Meanwhile, Watson is pleased with Just Leg It. “There’s something about improvising a song on the spot, capturing it in one or two takes, and that’s it.” 

Then there’s “the party aspect,” he says. “Something you can put on and not really think too much about it. It’s fun. You don’t have to sit there and analyze lyrics. You don’t have to think about this. 

“The songs are happy. A couple are dark, but for the most part, it’s a pretty happy and upbeat record.”   

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Bailey Bigger: Confronting Traumas Through Music

CREDIT: Adrian Berryhill

What a difference a year makes. Last October, Bailey Bigger released her debut EP, Between the Pages, on Blue Tom Records (the label run by the University of Memphis), and certainly her skills as a songwriter and vocalist were obvious. Her unaffected alto, reminiscent of Buffy Sainte-Marie, was the perfect vehicle for her simple, deft turns of phrase. But now, as she is poised to release Let’s Call It Love, her first EP for Big Legal Mess Records, those songs seem a world away. It’s hard to believe she’s made such a journey with only 20 years under her belt.

Her trademark qualities are still on full display, but are now complemented with an even more refined band, assembled at Delta-Sonic Sound by producer Bruce Watson.

“Bruce brought a little bit of soul into my music,” she says. “He brought in the organ and the electric guitars and things like that that I never would’ve thought to do on my own. It’s Americana but Memphis.” She speaks the truth: With players like Mark Edgar Stuart (her mentor of sorts), Joe Restivo, Will Sexton, Al Gamble, George Sluppick, and Jana Meisner, the record represents the state-of-the-art Bluff City sound.

Adrian Berryhill

Bailey Bigger — she’s a keeper of the fire.

And yet Watson’s first pivotal move in making this record was simply rejecting her first batch of songs, forcing Bigger to come up with her best material yet. To compose the new songs, she dug deep into the turmoil she’d recently faced due to an unpleasant breakup, her grandmother’s death, and her feelings of alienation in moving from Marion, Arkansas, to the big city across the river. Now that she’s happily relocated to a farm near Marion, she’s gained some perspective on those earlier struggles.

Memphis Flyer: Was it emotionally difficult to delve into your personal backstory to create the songs on the new EP?

Bailey Bigger: Well, in my poetry-writing class, we were talking about trauma in poetry and how it’s really hard to write about traumatic experiences. You have to put yourself in that headspace again and relive it, in a way, to get those truths out on paper or in songs. And a lot of times that’s easier to just avoid. But I live for that stuff, in a way, because I think it’s one of the most important parts of the human experience, to be open and talk about things that people are afraid to talk about.

That makes for better songs, don’t you think? But is it tough to sing those songs once you’ve written them?

I think it becomes like muscle memory, in a way, performing these things live. If I were to really dig in and relive those moments every time I played it live, I don’t think I’d make it through the performances. When I was recording “Let’s Call It Love,” we cut several vocal tracks and we were like, “Yeah, that’s fine. Pitch is good.” But I was thinking, “I’m not singing this how I felt it.” And that’s one of the worst things ever, where your voice isn’t delivering what you felt. I hate that. So I said, “Okay, just one more time.” And I remember how I channeled the take that I wanted to keep. It wasn’t by thinking of the person the song’s about. I did not want to picture that person at all. I thought to myself, “Sing to the girl who is in the same place as you are. Sing to that person that it hasn’t happened to yet. She still has a chance to get out. Sing to that person that you were a year and a half ago when you didn’t see it.” So that’s what really got me to perform it the way I wanted to.

I also get that feeling from the bonus track, “A Lot Like I Do” — “I remember a girl who looks a lot like you do” — as if you’re looking back at yourself.

That was probably the hardest one for me to perform. That one still evokes strong emotions in me every time I play it live. It’s probably the most personal song I’ve ever written in my life. It doesn’t even say anything specific about what happened to me, but I think it tells it perfectly at the same time. I can’t rely on muscle memory with that. That’s a rough one. All three songs are about this transformative time in my life. But the person I was at the beginning of all those traumas is not who I am now.

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Bible & Tire Records Debuts Two Gospel Albums

CREDIT: Bill Reynolds

While much of the music made in Memphis over the decades has been rightly celebrated, public awareness of it has skewed toward the secular. But many of the local rock-and-roll, soul, jazz, and pop performers that have won renown grew up playing in churches, and there are more still who never left gospel in the first place. As Bruce Watson, head honcho at Fat Possum and Big Legal Mess Records, began discovering rich veins of religious music in the area’s history, an idea began to germinate: Why not create a new label, so all of that material could have a home?

“One of my jobs is collecting old masters and buying old labels and stuff,” Watson tells me. “And that gospel stuff from the 1960s and 1970s was always just so amazing. I just didn’t hear that in modern gospel music. So basically I wanted to create a Memphis-based label that concentrated on recording gospel music and trying to make it sound like it was recorded in the 1960s and 1970s, but could also reissue stuff.”

The result of that idea is the newly minted Bible & Tire Recording Company, the latest label in the Fat Possum family, which officially announces its debut this Saturday at the Crosstown Theater. The two flagship releases being debuted also happen to capture the twin missions of the new imprint: recording new tracks with a vintage vibe and reissuing gems from back in the day. The former approach is embodied in the new record, The Sensational Barnes Brothers, and the latter in the new collection, Elizabeth King & the Gospel Souls’ The D-Vine Spirituals Recordings.

Bill Reynolds

The Sensational Barnes Brothers

“I guess it all started for me 15 or 16 years ago, when I found my first Designer Records stuff,” says Watson of his discovery of one decades-old catalog of gospel material. “And I was like, man, this stuff rocks so hard! And that started me researching who Designer Records was, and how do I put this stuff out? So that put me down the path of really appreciating deep soul gospel stuff.”

The first result of that discovery was The Soul of Designer Records, a box set of the old label’s best material, released by Big Legal Mess. But the Designer catalog lives on in Watson’s new imprint as well, supplying the material reinterpreted by the Barnes Brothers on their debut. “The first time I used the Barnes Brothers was on a Robert Finley record I did at Scott Bomar’s studio. They sang background vocals, and I was blown away.”

While brothers Chris and Courtney Barnes came up singing gospel with their parents and their siblings, bringing the two brothers to the fore as a headliner act in their own right was initiated for this new record. “All the songs on the new Barnes Brothers record were songs that artists on the Designer Records catalog had done. Basically, they came in, I used my studio musicians, and we made that record.”

One song from over 40 years ago resonated with the brothers. “We were listening to the song, and the guy on the recording sounded just like my daddy,” says Chris Barnes. “I was like, ‘We gotta do this song!’ And the message really stuck out to us.”

“You can hear all the conversations he used to have with you through that one piece of music,” adds brother Courtney. It’s a poignant moment, for only three months after the brothers invited him to sing on their album, Duke Barnes passed away.

Meanwhile, the vintage tracks by Elizabeth King and company reflect another label from that era, D-Vine Spirituals. One key player in unearthing that catalog was Michael Hurtt, best known as a member of the Royal Pendletons. “Mike’s really the one who saved these recordings. Clyde Leopard was an early Sun musician who started the Tempo Recording Service, where Pastor Juan Shipp, who owned D-Vine Spirituals, produced and recorded all the D-vine tracks.  And the tapes were being stored in Leopard’s recording studio in his house,” Watson says.

Hurtt then saw to it that they were properly stored until Watson was able to acquire them. More of the vintage tracks will be released as Bible & Tire grows. Meanwhile, Saturday’s show will also feature Gary “Lucky” Smith, The Vaughn Sisters, the D-Vine Spiritualettes, and Elder Jack Ward — all artists from the heyday of the D-Vine Spirituals label. As Watson has noted elsewhere, “It’s soul without the sex.”

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In a Groove!

CREDIT: Josh Miller

AudioGraphic Masterworks (AGMW) began in 1997 as a project of Brandon Seavers and his partner, Mark Yoshida. The company was located on Summer Avenue in a 500-square-foot office, where Yoshida and Seavers would first begin their journey into multi-media productions. Seavers and Yoshida were the only employees.

The company later relocated to Midtown, before building its current facility in Bartlett, in 2008.

Through the years, AGMW developed a strong relationship with Oxford, Mississippi-based label Fat Possum Records (the Black Keys, Wavves, Iggy and the Stooges), manufacturing most of the label’s CDs for more than a decade. At the end of 2013, Fat Possum manager Bruce Watson approached Seavers about what he knew about pressing vinyl records. Vinyl sales were booming, and Watson needed a place close to home to produce his records.

“If you know anything about the vinyl industry, you know that it takes forever to get anything done,” Seavers said.

“The industry has grown to the point where it takes four to six months to get a record pressed and shipped back to you.”

Watson knew this all too well. In 2013, Fat Possum had thousands of Modest Mouse records held in customs in the Czech Republic, costing the label thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

“We had gone through places like United Records in Nashville and Pirates Press, but we couldn’t wait six months for a record anymore, especially since we took on the Modest Mouse catalog and the Hi Records stuff,” Watson said.

“We already knew Mark and Brandon had manufacturing experience, and they were seeing the CD side of things going downhill, so this provided a new opportunity for them as well.”

Vinyl record-making machinery isn’t exactly the type of stuff you find on eBay. Most record presses are nearly 50 years old and are powered by steam. With vinyl’s increasing popularity among audiophiles and music fans, those in possession of a pressing machine know the kind of power they hold.

A few months into their search, Seavers and Watson got lucky. They learned about an old pressing plant in Brooklyn that had shut down — most of the equipment still intact and being stored in New Jersey. They contacted the owner, who said he would only sell if the buyer bought everything, down to the last bolt.

“We started looking for the equipment at the end of 2013, and by the spring of 2014 we were buying this whole pressing plant,” Seavers said. “My wife had a baby in late 2013, so my head was exploding with all this stuff going on. I remember Bruce calling me, and my response was just like, ‘Wow, really? You want to do this now?'”

“We didn’t ever think we would find the equipment in one place, and the guy who owned all this stuff before us looked at it all like it was his pet. He wanted all the parts to go to one family, and he wanted to make sure it was going to people who would take care of it. He was very involved from the beginning.”

The equipment arrived at the AGMW warehouse in May 2014, 10 steam-powered machines total. The Memphis Record Pressing team spent the next six months setting up their first machine, rebuilding valves, and nearly rewiring the entire thing. Anything susceptible to malfunction was replaced before the machine was used.

“You’re looking at 40- to 50-year-old machines. You put power and steam and pressure on those things, and something is bound to pop,” Seavers said.

“No one really knows what’s going to happen until you fire them up.”

Josh Miller

A worker at Memphis Record Pressing inspects a record before sending it to the listening station

The Vinyl Guru

When you’re dealing with machines that have been around for nearly half a century, finding the right mechanic can be just as hard as finding the machine for him to work on. Record Products for America is the only company in the country that supplies replacement parts for a record press, and when they can’t accommodate, Memphis Record Pressing has to have their parts custom-made. But what about everyday malfunctions that arise when working with these ancient machines?

Enter Donny Eastland, affectionately known as the “Vinyl Guru.” Eastland worked for Southern Machine and Tool Corp (SMT) in the late 1970s, a Nashville-based company that manufactured some of the machines that Memphis Record Pressing uses. In addition to building record presses at SMT, Eastland installed them and got them up and running in pressing plants all over the world.

Seavers said that after a long search, he was able to track down Eastland — who is in his 60s and nearing retirement — and ask him if he would be interested in making records again.

“Donny was the [potential] deal-breaker. We knew that if we couldn’t get an experienced mechanic that we’d never get this off the ground,” Seavers said.

“It took a little bit of persistence to get Donny on board, but he agreed to commute from Nashville to work for us and to teach all of our mechanics everything he knows.”

With Eastland on board, Memphis Record Pressing is able to run an average of three record presses a day. They are capable of pressing records at 120, 130, and 180 grams. Even with the Vinyl Guru at the helm, Watson said everyone is still learning as they go.

“We were pretty naive going into this. Nothing about it has been easy, and everything has cost twice as much as we thought it would,” Watson said. “I don’t think we were so naive as to think this whole thing would be easy, but it’s been a lot more difficult than we imagined.”

Josh Miller

Three of the Hamilton Machines at Memphis Record Pressing

A New Press in Town

Since entering the vinyl business, Seavers has doubled his work staff, going from 13 employees to more than 30 — two shifts of workers, whose jobs range from listening to and inspecting each record for flaws to shrink-wrapping and packaging records for FedEx to pick up. Everything is done in-house; even the drop cards (a card inside each record that features a download code) are printed at AGMW.

“The guys that are making these records are artists. It’s definitely an art form because there are so many things that can go wrong during this process,” Seavers said.

“Each job in the process is important. There are people who do nothing but listen to each record and make sure there are no audible mistakes. Then there are our assembly guys, maintenance techs, shipping managers, and customer service representatives. There’s a lot going on in this small workspace.”

Most of the orders Memphis Record Pressing takes on are from Fat Possum and Sony RED, a subsidiary of Sony Records that represents more than 60 independent labels. Between the demands of those two entities, Memphis Record Pressing stays busy, turning out thousands of records a day. Seavers said they aren’t currently taking on any new clients.

“We don’t want to do what the other plants have done, which is to take on more work than what they are actually capable of doing,” Seavers said. “Your quality drops, your reputation drops, and you lose your ability to turn things out quickly. Since the word got out that we bought the equipment, we get calls every single day from people all around the world wanting to send us work, because they can’t get it done anywhere else.”

Seavers said they are hoping to take on new orders by late summer, but the labels they have worked with in the past and local labels such as Goner Records and Madjack Records will still take priority.

Josh Miller

After a record is pressed, the excess must be trimmed before moving on to the inspection station

Let the Fat Possum Eat

While Sony RED might be keeping the press operators busy at Memphis Record Pressing, Fat Possum Records has also reaped the benefits of having a pressing plant at their disposal. Watson said that Fat Possum moved 300,000 vinyl units last year and that he hopes to be able to move at least 600,000 units this year. In addition to being able to double the company’s vinyl sales, Watson said the pressing plant helps attract bands to his label.

“It’s definitely a selling point when we are trying to sign a band. Everyone is so into vinyl now that it’s become a part of the record deal when we work with someone,” Watson said.

“It’s nice to be able to tell a band that we have our own pressing plant and they wont have to worry about delay. There are so many releases now, where the album comes out, and then the vinyl comes out two months later. That kills a release. Unless you’re a huge act, you have one shot at your release date. That first week is so important because that’s when you usually sell the most records; that’s when the limited editions come out and you start registering on sound scans. If you have to wait two and a half months for your vinyl, you’ve lost all of your momentum on that release.”

Courtesy of Memphis Record Pressing

A stack of finished LP’s awaits inspection

The Vinyl Ripple Effect

Fat Possum isn’t the only local label to benefit from Memphis Record Pressing. Goner and Madjack have also tapped Memphis Record Pressing to churn out their releases; meaning local bands of all kinds are also getting in on the action. Madjack recording artist James Godwin said he remembered hearing about a pressing plant coming to Memphis, but he wasn’t sure when and if the rumors would come true.

“I remember hearing about it and thinking that it could end up helping out a lot of local musicians, but to be honest, I thought it was one of those things that might end up happening 10 years from now,” Godwin said.

After cutting Bad To Be Here, Godwin’s first full-length as James and the Ultrasounds, Madjack expressed interest in signing the band and releasing the album on vinyl. According to Godwin, Madjack first contacted United Record Pressing in Nashville and was told that it would be months before the record came out.

“I was planning on touring around the release, and I had the dates already booked. I was told we wouldn’t even have my records when we got back from the tour,” Godwin said.

Instead, Madjack Records worked up a deal with Memphis Record Pressing, and the single was done in a month. Godwin called Memphis Record Pressing “one of the last missing pieces of the puzzle” for Memphis music.

“I think it’s really important to have a local pressing plant in Memphis. When you go on the road and take a box of CDs with you, chances are you’re coming home with that box of CDs. If you have vinyl on the merch table, people buy it, because they know it’s limited,” Godwin said.

“There are also a lot of things that can go wrong in the process of making a record. I’ve looked at the forms you have to fill out at United, and I remember thinking, ‘Man, I’m not trying to get a job here. I just want a record put out.’ Having something this close to home really makes a difference, it makes you feel more connected to what’s going on with your music.”

Goner Records has already had two singles (“Giorgio Murderer” and “Aquarian Blood”) and an LP (a repress of Nobunny’s First Blood) manufactured at Memphis Record Pressing, with a Nots single and a reissue of a Reatards album currently in production. The Midtown label has had a deal with AGMW regarding the production of its CDs for some time, so it made sense to label co-owner Zac Ives to let Seavers handle the label’s vinyl needs as well.

“The biggest deal is that those guys are really good with managing projects. If you give them a date that you need to have something done by, they do everything they can to make it happen. That’s just not the case with everyone else,” Ives said.

With less wait time in between record releases, Ives said that the label isn’t locked into a certain process dictated by the pressing plant.

“We can go out and listen to a test press and approve it and it’s ready to go, instead of waiting for a test press in the mail. You’ve also got more input on what you’re listening to. The overall hands-on experience is a major improvement from what we’re used to dealing with.”

Goner still has ties with United Record Pressing, where most of the record jackets and labels from their earlier releases remain. But even with the relationship between Goner and United, Ives said the more releases they can give to Memphis Record Pressing, the better it is for all parties involved.

“Anything that we can do [at Goner] to help other local businesses stay afloat, we want to do,” Ives said.

“The local music industry used to be one of the biggest things in Memphis, and now it’s slowly building back up again. The pressing plant makes the local music infrastructure more complete, and I think everyone from show-goers, to local PR people, to the venues where bands play will feel the ripple effect.”