Jared ‘Jay B’ Boyd – Memphis Flyer

Looking out the window onto Broadway, Booker T. Jones seemed to be seeing New York on both that day of July 12, 2023, and the many days past when he frequented the area around Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. “I would walk right through here,” he reminisced, speaking of his earliest trips to the city with the M.G.’s. “Our agent was on 57th. … We would stay at the Essex Hotel and walk past here on the way to Atlantic Records over on Broadway. And it made me question my age because I thought I remembered them building this Lincoln Center here, but I wouldn’t be that old,” he added with a wink and a grin. “I don’t think so.”

Truth be told, the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, where a packed house had gathered to hear WYXR’s own Jared “Jay B” Boyd interview Jones, had not even been built then. Jones’ memory was correct, however — the first building on the Lincoln Center campus opened in 1962, the same year that Booker T. & the M.G.’s became a household name with the hit “Green Onions.” Now, over 60 years later, Lincoln Center was hosting Booker T. Jones: A Career Retrospective to a rapt New York audience.

Yet there were more gripping things in store that day than hearing the world’s most famous organist’s stories, for the forum was a continuation of a multifaceted series of events dubbed City Soul on the Move, three days in July when Memphis held Manhattan in the palm of its hand.

SMA students in NYC. (Photo: Chris M. Junior)

It began, as so many things do, with Tom Hanks. The actor and director is passionate about his music and, it turns out, his radio. Rock ‘n’ Soul Ichiban, with DJ Debbie Daughtry on WFMU, was a longtime favorite of Hanks, and when Daughtry launched her own internet station, Boss Radio 66 on the Tune In app, he became a DJ for the station himself.

“He’s a huge fan of Booker T.,” Daughtry says of Hanks. “He said that he would love to interview him, and then it just kind of spiraled from there. But the date that we decided on was today, and Tom couldn’t be here.” Asking around for suggested interviewers during a visit to WYXR, Daughtry landed on Boyd, who’s interviewed Jones before at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. And WYXR’s program manager rose to the occasion, his rapport with Jones only amplified by the fact that Boyd’s mother and Jones shared a piano teacher, Elmertha Cole.

Once the interview was locked in, Daughtry says, “Lincoln Center is the one that said, ‘Why don’t we get the Stax Music Academy [SMA] to come up and play?’ And my mind just exploded!”

With the interview and SMA performance as a centerpiece of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City series, other Mempho-centric events materialized. The night before, renowned songwriter Greg Cartwright, host of WYXR’s Strange Mysterious Sounds, played a quiet but powerful acoustic set at Union Pool in Brooklyn, accompanied by longtime Reigning Sound keyboardist Dave Amels on harmonium. The stripped-down arrangements only made Cartwright’s songs more powerful, whether they were old recorded favorites like “Reptile Style” or the more subtle songs Cartwright has been writing recently. His encore solo performance of “She’s the Boss,” dedicated to the late Rachel Nagy of the Detroit Cobras, brought the house down. Meanwhile, that same night, Boyd was featured in a lively DJ set at BierWax NYC.

Shortly after Wednesday’s interview, Cartwright and Daughtry played DJ onstage in the Lincoln Center plaza as an audience gathered, several hundred strong, bursting with expatriate Memphians. When the show began, the SMA students handled themselves with a striking professionalism, especially when Jones sat down behind the organ and led the SMA Rhythm Section through some classic M.G.’s numbers. As the students played their parts with precision and passion, backing both Jones and charismatic SMA singers Pasley Thompson, Nicholas Dickerson, Rachael Walker, Khaylah Jones, and Joi Stubbs, Jones looked them over with an unmistakable wonder, the words he’d shared with Boyd earlier still echoing: “Right now I’m full of joy. I was moved by the music and the rehearsal. … They played so well. They didn’t play the music exactly like we did. They put their own twist to it. But it felt so good.”

During the mid-20th century, Memphis became influential in the music industry, being dubbed the Birthplace of Rock-and-Roll and the Home of the Blues, pushed along by then-up-and-coming blues, soul, and rock-and-roll innovators like Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Sam Phillips, and others.

Memphis continued to gain steam in these genres through the 1960s, but when the 1970s spurred a revolution of dance music and electronic means of instrumentation, Memphis artists caught on and joined a musical movement that would affect music throughout the world and in Memphis to this day.

Artists Anita Ward (singer known for her disco hit “Ring My Bell”), Dexter Haygood (frontman of glam rock/soul band Xavion, known for MTV video hit “Eat Your Heart Out”), Perry Michael Allen (songwriter and producer who was influential in synthesized soul as member of Kilo), and Larry Dodson (vocalist in The Bar-Kays and the Temprees) are just a few Memphis artists who were involved in this era of Memphis music, which has often been overlooked or under-recognized by fans and critics alike.

Just in time for Black Music Month, We Are Memphis celebrates these artists’ and others’ contributions to this time in musical history by hosting “The Lost Generation,” an online panel discussion led by local hip-hop musician and journalist Jared “Jay B” Boyd.

“These artists have done so much good work, and I want to honor them,” says Boyd. “I thought this was the best way to tell their stories and that this would be a cool way to connect with them and show them that I care about their story and that I’m very much interested in who they are and what they’ve done.”

Boyd’s interest in Memphis music started in college when he began collecting and spinning records after the death of his cousin Andrew Love, saxophone player for The Memphis Horns.

“I started collecting records to find all the records he played on,” says Boyd. “I built up quite the collection of Memphis records.”

This became the impetus for Boyd’s disc jockeying career, and since then, he has continued to regularly honor Memphis music during his DJ sets at venues like Eight & Sand at Central Station Hotel.

“My DJing starts with Memphis music and pretty much ends with Memphis music,” says Boyd. “I think I’ll probably continue to collect music from all other places, but at the end of the day, Memphis music is what fuels my interest in records.”

According to Boyd, much of the uniqueness of what we hear and see in Memphis music and culture is passed down by generations of different heritages and brought together in the melting pot of our city.

“I definitely think that there’s something about the confluence of energies and expectations and ideals that flow through this town, maybe particularly because of the river and where we are geographically,” says Boyd. “There’s just the right mix of people and their ideas and their cultures. Being that many of them fit together in this puzzle so seamlessly, we can kind of learn from one another and pick up on cues from one another. And I really think that it’s important to note that during Black Music Month, because a lot of that comes from the black music heritage.”

Boyd adds that it’s important to honor all genres Memphis musicians of all backgrounds have been a part of, whether that be soul, funk, punk, metal, or glam rock.

“When we talk about Memphis music, we always sort of go back to this era of soul of the ’60s and early ’70s, when that’s just not necessarily the only important era of music,” he says. “What we’re doing right now matters to someone 20, 30, 40 years from now. And so we have to make sure that we cover all these histories.”

Telling stories of unsung heroes who have had lasting impacts on musical history is important to Boyd, and he says that he is thankful to be able to do so in his own way.

“I’m grateful that We Are Memphis reached out for this particular project,” says Boyd. “I think I’m celebrating black music all year ’round, every day when I wake up. So whether or not they would have reached out, I’d still be celebrating black music and celebrating these artists.”

The Lost Generation: Panel Conversation with Jared ‘Jay B’ Boyd, follow We Are Memphis on Facebook to view the live video, Thursday, June 18th, 7-8 p.m., free.