Rev. Jesse Jackson (second from right) and members of the clergy gather to lay the ceremonial wreath on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King last stood. Jackson was present at the Lorraine on that fateful day.
The National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel will present a commemoration in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life and legacy on Thursday, April 4, the 56th anniversary of his death. Martin Luther King III, wife Arndrea Waters King, and daughter Yolanda. Renee King will participate in the ceremony, which will be live streamed for those who cannot attend in person. This year, the Museum introduces a youth component with the performing winners of its Youth Poetry and Spoken Word Competition.
The event entitled “Remembering MLK: The Man. The Movement. The Moment.” will be held in the Museum’s courtyard at 4:00 pm Central with a musical prelude followed by the commemorative service at 4:30 pm. Participants can also join the live stream via the museum’s website, YouTube and Facebook platforms.
Martin Luther King III, the oldest son of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, will deliver the keynote address. Mr. King is a civil rights advocate and global humanitarian, focusing on addressing the most pressing social justice issues of today. Amplifying his father’s work, Mr. King has devoted his life to promoting global human rights and eradicating racism, violence, and poverty, earning a reputation as a respected international statesman and one of the world’s most passionate advocates for the poor and oppressed.
As chairman of the Drum Major Institute (DMI), a nonprofit rooted in his father’s work over 60 years ago, Mr. King collaborates closely with his wife, Arndrea Waters King and daughter, Yolanda Renee King, to advance Dr. King’s vision of a more just and equitable world. Founded in 1961, the organization focuses on continuing the King legacy through education, action, engagement with world leaders, and collaboration with socially conscious organizations.
Arndrea Waters King, social justice activist and President of Drum Major Institute (DMI), has championed several nonviolence, anti-hate and social change initiatives throughout her life, designing programs to advance understanding and activism. She is a strong supporter of youth activism and believes in helping young people take a peaceful, effective stand for the world issues that concern them most. As president of DMI, she plays a critical role in creating strategic partnerships and managing the daily operations of this active social justice organization.
At 15 years old, Yolanda Renee King, the only grandchild of Dr. King, is an activist and children’s book author having recently published We Dream A World, a tribute to her grandparent’s legacy. Having appeared on the world stage and in national media interviews, she uses her voice to speak up on key issues including gun violence, climate change, and racial equality.
As a teen creative, Yolanda King will lead the youth segment of the commemoration with words of inspiration and introduction of the “I AM the Legacy” poetry and spoken word winners to be announced this month. The competition is designed for high school students to use the performative art of poetry on topics that identify their thoughts, solutions, or designs on how they envision freedom, equality, and justice for their future. The competition is made possible by The Memphis (TN) Chapter of The Links, Incorporated.
“This year, the commemoration is poignant as we elevate the ‘drum major instinct’ Dr. King expressed, but with the fierce urgency of now,” said Dr. Russ Wigginton, Museum President. “Given today’s climate, we recognize we all must move toward greater justice, peace, and righteousness from wherever we stand,” he said.
Each year, the Museum commemorates the tragic event that occurred on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in 1968. This year’s event features a keynote speaker, special performances, fraternal tribute, and changing the balcony wreath with a moment of silence at 6:01 pm Central when Dr. King was slain.
Rev. Dr. Dorothy Sanders Wells, the Rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church, will give remarks. Wells has recently been elected the first woman and first Black person elected as Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi.
W. Crimm Singers AKA Wakanda Chorale, a professional ensemble-in-residence of Tennessee State University’s Big Blue Opera Initiatives, will perform music of the Black experience throughout the diaspora and every genre connected to it with major emphasis on the Negro Spiritual, African American operatic, and concert repertoire, hymnody, and anthems.
During the 4:00 prelude, recorded speeches by Dr. King will broadcast in the museum courtyard. In the event of rain, the event will be held inside the museum’s Hooks Hyde Hall. For more information, visit April4th.org.
Members of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc. gather to present a wreath in memory of their fallen brother. Dr. King was a member of the fraternity.
This article is sponsored by National Civil Rights Museum.
For the next four weeks, Hattiloo Theatre is putting on a production of The Mountaintop, written by Memphis native and Pulitzer-winning playwright, Katori Hall.
“The Mountaintop is a reimagining of what was it like for Martin Luther King Jr. in his room the night before his assassination. It is — without giving anything away — a supernatural reimagining,” says Ekundayo Bandele, founder and CEO of Hattiloo. In a stripped-down version of Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, King, played by Emmanuel McKinney, orders room service, and a mysterious waitress Camae, played by Bianca McMillian, brings him coffee, and the two delve into a deep conversation about King’s life and legacy. “At the end of the day, you have a man who was constantly putting himself in harm’s way. And he possibly knew at some point that his time was going to come, so how is it in that room by himself the night before he is called home to God? It is the same night he delivered his ‘Mountaintop’ speech, and that’s where you get the title.
“The supernatural element adds to the question of martyrs and how they feel,” Bandele continues. “Sometimes, we see figures like Malcolm X and so on as super-beings, but at the same time they’re human and they have fears and premonitions, so this play really shows the humanity of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
As for the impression the play leaves on the audience, Bandele says, “I think they’ll take away the courage that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had to exhibit to continue the civil rights path that he was on, despite the constant threat of assassination. That’s what they’ll take away — that this was a man, he was a flawed man. Sometimes, we fictionalize individuals who are martyrs and who are superstars and think about them one way. Well, he was a lot more complicated than that.”
The one-act play will run for an hour and 15 minutes, and performances will continue Thursdays through Sundays until February 13th, with matinees at 2 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at hattiloo.org or by calling (901) 525-0009.
The Mountaintop, Hattiloo Theatre, 37 S. Cooper, Opens Friday, January 21st, 7:30 p.m., $30.
On Easter Sunday, the National Civil Rights Museum will present a virtual commemoration in honor of Dr. Marin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy on the 53rd anniversary of his death. This year’s event will feature a conversation with Rev. James Lawson, a key King ally in pursuit of nonviolent philosophy who trained a number of activists on civil disobedience. A performance of “Precious Lord,” Dr. King’s favorite gospel hymn, will be presented by the vocal ensemble Adajjyo. A keynote from Dr. Bernard Richardson, Dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University, will explore King’s last days. The broadcast will culminate with a moment of silence at 6:01 p.m., the time King was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
Following the commemoration is the world premiere of “Caged,” a commissioned Chamber Orchestra piece by African-American composer Brian Nabors, performed by Iris Orchestra and Memphis Symphony Orchestra Diversity Fellows. The piece takes listeners on an energetic, rhapsodic journey through a range of emotions.
“This work embodies our need to ‘let loose’ and release the restrictive tension that quarantining and the pandemic as a whole brought upon us,” Nabors says. “This piece pairs the barbarous with the deeply introspective and brings listeners to an inward reconciling of the grief many are feeling during this difficult time. Although we may feel ‘caged’ at the moment, the power of music is what continues to lift our spirits and will eventually pull us through to the other side.”
Both groups of artist fellows will also present a live outdoor performance in Overton Square on April 11th at 3 p.m. The concert will showcase underrepresented composers and feature a live premiere of “Caged.” Nabors will attend and give an exclusive introduction to his work.
Remembering MLK, online from the National Civil Rights Museum, civilrightsmuseum.org, Sunday, Apr. 4, 5 p.m., free.
This coming January 15th, Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 92 years old. Though his life was tragically cut short, his legacy lives on through service for others and the community.
“Doctor King said, ‘Life’s most persistent and urgent question is what are you doing for others?'” says Andrea Hill, director of Volunteer Memphis. “MLK Days of Service asks people to ‘Care Like King’ and volunteer to help themselves and their communities through service.”
Facebook/Volunteer Memphis
MLK Days of Service volunteers
Those who would like to participate in MLK Days of Service can choose to volunteer during this King birthday week in a myriad of ways through a plethora of organizations. Visit the Volunteer Memphis website for a listing of available opportunities. Everything from outdoor cleanups to virtual webinars designed to educate people on financial literacy, leadership skills, and much more will be available to honor King’s legacy. Last year, volunteers completed more than 5,000 hours of service across 10 Mid-South counties for MLK Days of Service. This year, our community can lead the way to exceed that number.
If service is beneath you, leadership is beyond you. King was a great leader because of his dedication to serving others.
“Everybody can be great because greatness is determined by service,” said King. “You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love.”
It’s time for us all to be great and care like King.
Care Like King: MLK Days of Service, choose your volunteer opportunity online from Volunteer Memphis, volunteermemphis.org, Thursday-Monday, Jan. 14-18.
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said.
Dr. Noelle Trent, director of interpretation, collections, and education at the National Civil Rights Museum and the project leader for the museum’s annual King Day celebration this Monday, says that this was one thing King told fellow citizens to encourage them to activate themselves in society.
“Being silent on an issue means that you’re being complicit,” she says. “The idea [of this event] is that people can go to the museum and see regular folks making some very basic decisions about their lives and making some sacrifices. It’s something that helps move the movement forward. And that was what Dr. King encouraged people to do.”
National Civil Rights Museum
Still dreaming
Vitalant (formerly Lifeblood) and the Mid-South Food Bank will be on site to encourage attendees to give back. In addition to receiving free entry to the museum during the event thanks to FedEx, guests who donate nonperishable foods will receive a $2 coupon toward admission on any future visit to the museum this year, and guests who donate blood will receive free admission for four people (in exchange for the four people a pint of blood could help) on any day in 2020.
“We’re offering people reasonable ways to engage with Dr. King’s story and the story of the movement, but also to do good for the medical community,” says Trent.
To help celebrate King’s life and legacy, entertainment will be provided by the Soulsville Charter School choir, Karen Brown, and more; and kids will be able to partake in face painting and balloons.
“We’re celebrating who he is and what he means to us,” says Trent. “This is not a somber moment.”
King Day, National Civil Rights Museum, Monday, January 20th, 8 a.m.-6 p.m., free.
Willie Earl Bates, owner of the Four Way Restaurant in South Memphis’ Soulsville, USA community, died from cancer last week. I’m not sure the city of Memphis knows what it has lost.
Willie Earl Bates
In 2001, after 50-plus years in operation under Clint and Irene Cleaves, Bates purchased the tiny but famous restaurant. He had been an executive with Universal Life Insurance, a real estate developer, and, early in life, delivered The Commercial Appeal in a red wagon, of which he was quite proud. The wagon sits outside the restaurant today in a fenced garden courtyard, dedicated to Bates’ mother, the late Magnolia Gossett Bates.
Bates was also proud to be the owner of a restaurant that helped change history — and served some of the best soul food in the world. Clint Cleaves was Mayor E.H. “Boss” Crump’s driver, and Crump told all of his friends that they needed to support the Fourway Grill (as it was known then) and it soon became the first truly desegregated restaurant in Memphis.
It was also a popular gathering spot for civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and others. The Fourway was immensely popular among musicians, hosting the likes of Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Gladys Night & the Pips, Ike & Tina Turner, and practically every artist who ever recorded around the corner at Stax Records.
I’ve been eating at the Four Way every couple of weeks since starting to work at Stax back in 2004. In 2014, I wrote a piece on Bates for Memphis magazine, and when I asked Mr. Bates what he thought about all of the celebrities who had eaten there (including hip-hop superstar Drake, who had just been there weeks earlier), he said: “I had a mother and daughter from Oklahoma in here not too long ago who had come from St. Jude. They had found out about the restaurant, and the little girl wanted to eat here. That was so touching, so satisfying, to know that we were able to make her happy during a time like that.”
That pretty much sums up Willie Earl Bates and why Memphis may not really know what it has lost.
Bates was a successful businessman and could easily have retired long before his death at 76, but he was too intent on making Memphis — and particularly Soulsville — a better place. He worked with numerous nonprofit organizations to help improve life in the community and often donated food to children’s organizations and other causes.
Former Mayor A C Wharton told me, “The Four Way always has been, and continues to be, a gathering place for community leaders. It may seem a bit quirky, but it was a status symbol to enter The Four Way through the back door and dine in the back room. Principals, doctors, lawyers, and accomplished entertainers, and occasionally, a skinny, hungry black Ole Miss law student like me could often be found in the ‘back room’ being served by Miss Dot.”
Various crews from the Food Network and Travel Channel featured his famous catfish, turkey-and-dressing, yams, peach cobbler, and chitterlings, which Bates always told me never to order, as he made a face and shook his head.
Last year, author Dave Hoekstra published the critically acclaimed The People’s Place: Soul Food Restaurants and Reminiscences from the Civil Rights Era to Today, and the first restaurant he visited was the Four Way. Hoekstra was asked by the New York Times, “If someone wanted to follow your path, but had time to visit only one city, what would it be?” Hoekstra’s answer: “Memphis. I know at least seven or eight soul food restaurants in Memphis. But to get to what we’re getting at in the book, with the whole combination of the food and the civil rights movement, the Four Way holds a special place in my heart — they were so giving with their stories and with their hospitality. Just the whole history of Memphis and the civil rights movement .”
When I wrote my story for Memphis magazine, it was pretty much standard journalism and storytelling. What I didn’t get to include was how much I loved Mr. Bates and what an important friend he was to me. He had a genuine light-show twinkle in his eye every time I saw him. He was one of the kindest people I have ever known. Memphis was lucky to have had him. I’m luckier to have been his friend.
Though his own early recordings are highly regarded by critics and collectors, Terry Manning‘s best known for the records he’s made as a music engineer and producer working with artists like the Staples Singers, ZZ Top, Isaac Hayes, and Led Zeppelin. Before cofounding the storied Compass Point recording studio in the Bahamas, Manning spent time in Memphis, working with both Stax and Ardent, and he can spin terrific yarns about things like the time he walked into Chips Moman’s American Studios on Danny Thomas to discover grown men chasing a rat around the room swinging electric guitars like clubs. Manning’s also a dedicated photographer and has been since the 1960s. “Scientific Evidence of Life on Earth During Two Millennia,” an exhibit of urban landscapes mixed with images from his long and storied career opens at Stax this week. He’s also playing concerts at Stax, the Hard Rock Cafe on Beale, and an intimate showcase in “Elvis’ Living Room” on Audubon, in conjunction with Rhodes College’s Mike Curb Institute for Music.
Memphis Flyer:I want to talk music, of course. But your photography is the bigger mystery for me. You’ve obviously been shooting for a long time, but was your first exhibit really last year? What brought about the move from serious hobbyist to what you’re doing now?
Terry Manning: About five or six years ago another music friend from Boston who’s the head of the photography department at MIT called me up. I’d let a couple of my pictures go into some magazines. Like I have Dusty Springfield sitting with Tom Dowd when they were recording Dusty in Memphis. That got into Mojo magazine. So my friend called up and said, “Look, I know you take these photos. I know you mentioned you have some of Martin Luther King. We need to do a show. I said, “Sure!” Then I’d always go back to music. On to the next album and the next album. Finally he called back and said this exhibit was never going to happen. Well, he said “never.” So I started going through thousands of pictures and getting things I thought might work.
And it was a big success. Great reviews. Tons of attention.
It got so much coverage online with Facebook and Twitter and social media that people started calling and asking, “Can we do the show?” I got a phone call from China from a bunch of the principles with Hard Rock Café. They are building a lot of new hotels. Very exclusive, five-star hotels where they want more things going on than just butts in beds. They want lots of opportunities for experience and one thing they wanted was art galleries. They’d seen this online and asked if they could get my show to open their galleries when they come on line. I said, “Sounds great.”
You mentioned the King photographs, which are incredible.How did that opportunity come about?
Al Bell was a friend of Dr. King’s and of course at Stax we were all involved in the Civil Rights feelings if not being actual protesters. Stax was such an island of racial harmony in a time and place where that shouldn’t have been. It was wonderful to be around Stax where nobody cared what color you were or what religion you were or anything like that. All that mattered was what kind of person you were and what kind of music you made.
Did Al Bell make the introduction?
Al had been a DJ in Washington and was quite well known there. And he’d been friends with Dr. King and Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy and all the people involved in the movement. So you could occasionally be the Stax offices on Union Ext. and see him walking down the hall. He was so charismatic and just exuded goodness. So what happened was, I just bought a new car. It was one of the first cars I bought with my own money without my dad helping me. Actually John Fry helped. But I got a brand-new Ford Fairlane. It was wine red. I’d told Al Bell about it, so he called up one morning and said, “I know you’ve got that car and we need people to go to the airport because Dr. King’s coming in, and he’s got a lot of people with him.” Of course King had been back-and-forth with a whole “I Am a Man,” march that was going on with the sanitation workers. I wasn’t chauffeuring Dr. King or anything, but I went and he was just coming off the plane when I got there. Him and Ralph Abernathy and the whole crew— all of the people involved in the movement. And then bunch of newsmen came up. l had one of my cameras with me. In this case I think it was a Nikon SLR. So I thought, “Heck, why not take some photos?” I took 13 shots. All my pictures are literally normal focal length. I don’t use telephoto lenses or crop pictures. What you see is all from my viewpoint. So I had my camera literally in his face. In a couple of the shots his face takes up the full frame. Just inches away. You can see the stubble on face or where he may have nicked himself shaving. Stuff you don’t see normally. I took those, then I got a couple of bags and drove to the Lorraine Motel and everybody got out. And then I drove on to Ardent out on National for a session. Then that night I went down for Dr. King’s speech at the church — what turned out to be the, “I have been to the mountaintop” speech. And there was a terrible storm going on. It was lightning and thundering. Really electric.
“One day she’d had enough. Couldn’t stand any more of me being a pestering little idiot, I guess. So she leaned around, took her pencil and jammed it right into my leg. Right into my right knee. And a piece of lead that broke off in there. I still see it every day, right under the skin.”
So those were all taken the day before he was assassinated. I didn’t think there were any pictures from that period we hadn’t seen already.
Nobody knew what to do. I told Al I had these photos. He said maybe we should get them to Time magazine or something because they’re really historic. But I never felt right about it. So I put everything in a box and until this last August. So for 47-years nobody saw them.
And now they’re back at Stax. A literal homecoming for you and these photographs.
Such a homecoming. I’m really kind of in shock doing all of this.
Terry Manning On photographing MLK, Recording with Chris Bell, and Being Stabbed by Stevie Nicks
I’ve got to be honest. There’s so much I want to ask you about music I don’t know where to begin. That Texas rock scene where you get your start with Bobby Fuller is underappreciated, I think. But you’ve really surfed the wave of rock-and-roll working with Isaac Hayes, the Staples Singers, Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top — even Iron Maiden. I wish there was a question in there, but I’m hoping you can maybe share personal high points.
Mostly, it always seems to me, like I’ve been very lucky in the places I’ve been and the times I was in them. Such as being at that airport when Dr. King came in. For instance, when I was in junior high school, the girl in front of me in homeroom was really, really cute. I mean I really had a crush on her. Probably my first real crush. But I didn’t know how to deal with girls, and to be honest still don’t. So I’d poke at her, or pull her pigtail if she had one, or whatever. Just stuff. You know, thinking maybe she’ll notice me. One day she’d had enough. Couldn’t stand any more of me being a pestering little idiot, I guess. So she leaned around, took her pencil and jammed it right into my leg. Right into my right knee. And a piece of lead that broke off in there. I still see it every day, right under the skin.
“I’ve always seen myself as a sponge. Imagine a very young teenager sitting in with Steve Cropper, and Willie Mitchell, Teeney Hodges, and Bobby Fuller.”
You know, I have the same story. I think most guys probably carry a piece of lead from failed early flirting experiments.
Well, shortly after she stabbed me, the teacher announced that we were having a class party and that it would be a dance. Every boy in the class was supposed to ask a girl to go with him, and the parents would chaperone. We’d all be learning manners, and ballroom dancing or whatever. So I asked the girl in front of me whose name was Stephanie. She was still new and didn’t really know anybody because she was an army brat. El Paso’s got a big army base with lots of military. Anyway, she said okay and we went to the dance. Dad took us. Mom spent the whole week before teaching me how to dance and it was so embarrassing. So awful. Because musicians don’t dance, anyway. And I knew immediately I didn’t like to dance.
So we went to the dance and Bobby Fuller happened to be playing. And we tried. But the girl said, “I don’t really like dancing.” And then I said, “I REALLY don’t like it. Would you mind sitting over here on these chairs in the corner while I go try to sit in with the band.” Because I’d been banging away on a guitar. And I loved Bobby Fuller and hadn’t met him yet. He was quite a bit older, but he was kind and sweet and come the break he said band could go but, “Me and my new friend Terry are going to do a couple of songs.” So, for my class I did “Peggy Sue,” and “Donna.” We both had Strats and Bobby accompanied me. Now here’s the thing.The girl got in a band later too and changed her name from Stephanie to Stevie Nicks. She was my first date. How lucky is that? There was Bobby Fuller and me and Stevie Nicks together in a room doing or listening to music at one time. Just a freaky coincidence. So, to me so much seems like luck. I guess I have some talent at music and whatever. But a whole lot of any of this is just getting up early, working hard, and doing a good job, and meeting people, and making friends. Turned into an incredible journey.
Terry Manning
Dusty in Memphis
But you and she have never worked together, have you?
We have but… See, I didn’t know for a while that Stevie Nicks was her. I remember seeing that first Buckingham Nicks album where she’s almost partially nude on cover. The second I saw that, I fell in love. I fell in love with the album cover. There was just an attraction. But I didn’t realize it was the same girl. We did indeed work together on a record by a guy named Rick Vito. He was in Fleetwood Mac after Lindsey Buckingham left. He got Stevie to sing. By that time I realized it was her, of course, but we didn’t talk about it at all. I’d love to do that some day though.
You’ve been making your own music again, which is a good thing in my opinion. Was the time just right?
You have to make a living. You keep working, keep working, keep working. You get into music to do what you want in it. You love music. You love playing music. You love writing, or singing. And that’s what you want to do. In my first year I didn’t think, “I’ll become an engineer and a producer.” It was about writing songs and singing and playing, and whatever. Then other things take over. And it paid me pretty well and it was alright, and it was able to get me through life. And I was able to have houses and do the stuff you do. So, at that point, if you stop to do the things you want to do for you, you’re depriving your family part of their livelihood while you have fun and experiment. So it becomes a job rather than fun, although it is a fun job. But my wife had passed away, and I just got to a point where I was like, “I don’t have to work all day, every day every month of every year.” And we closed Compass Point in Nassau. So I said, I’m taking two weeks or four weeks for me. I’m not taking a job, I am the job. I don’t know if other people will like what I do, and it’s really not important if they do. If they do, great. Of not, I like it so there. I just got to a point in life where— It’s like the guy in Boston bringing up the photo thing and then saying it was never going to happen. Well, everything’s, “never.” Everything’s finite. There’s an end to all of this, and this isn’t all I was meant to do. So let’s do that.
Terry Manning On photographing MLK, Recording with Chris Bell, and Being Stabbed by Stevie Nicks (2)
Which is great. I was listening to your recording of “Savoy Truffle” right before this interview, with that crazy Moog intro from before many people had even heard of synthesizers. And it made me think about Jim Dickinson for some reason. He’d worked on everybody else’s projects for his entire life, but had so very little that was just his. Then one day all of that changed. He started recording his own material and putting out records fast. And it was all great because you could hear his thing, but you could hear all the places he’d been musically. And then I think about your early stuff and all the artists you’ve worked with since. You’ve got to take away a little bit from all that, don’t you?
Oh yeah, I’ve always seen myself as a sponge. Imagine a very young teenager sitting in with Steve Cropper, and Willie Mitchell, Teenie Hodges, and Bobby Fuller. I met Robert Moog in 1968 and he taught me synthesis. I remember feeling like a sponge then and making sure I was taking it all in. I had guitar lessons with Jimmy Page. Stuff that most people don’t get. I was so lucky. Specifically, I thought in the front of my mind, “watch this, learn this, absorb this.” You do soak it up.
Guitar lessons with Jimmy Page. Of course. Did that happen when you were working on Led Zeppelin III?
No it was backstage at Yardbird shows. I’d ask, “How did you do this?” And he’d get a guitar and teach me little things. Not long lessons but tricks, and how he did things.
Was he a patient teacher? I require very patient teachers.
Jimmy was very patient. Teenie Hodges I’d get from sitting right in front of him in sessions. I’d sit right on the floor and just look at his hands.
I’ve got to play fanboy for a minute. You played a cover of Chris Bell’s “I Am the Cosmos” at the Hi-Tone a few years back that really stands out as one of the most magical performances I’ve ever seen in Memphis. Here’s this performance of a song I never expected to hear live, and it was incredible. After it happened I didn’t believe it had happened. That it could have happened.
You know, it’s funny. Several people have said almost those exact same things about that performance. But during it… whew. First of all, I was really channeling Chris. It was the first public acknowledgement or anything I’d ever done of Chris, and he was my best friend for 10-years. I told a little story before about how he asked me to finish a real recording of the song for him. Because what we know as “I Am the Cosmos” is just a demo. He really swallowed his pride. I got him started at Ardent. Got him started on my early solo stuff. Brought him into the Ardent fold and into John Fry’s world and everything. Mentored him for years, as did John. Then we had a big fight at a time when he’d gone a little off kilter. He was burning tapes and trying to blow everything up. And he had a fight with me. We literally had a fistfight. “I’m doing everything on my own,” he said. “I don’t need you or anybody,” and he went off to Europe. So, anyway, he’d come back and he knew “Cosmos” was great just like he knew #1 Record was great. It depressed him so much that #1 Record never made it at the time. And he doesn’t know it ever made it. But he knew “Cosmos” was great and he knew it was his next best chance. And he’d done it two or three times. Some of it at Abbey Road. Some of it other places. He’d asked me to do hand claps over the solo in the version that we know, which is the late last version. So we went into Ardent B and overdubbed some hand claps, just him and me. He had already apologized for some horrible things he’d said, and I told him, “No problem, man. It’s okay. We’re friends, we’ll get through anything.” So he asked me to help him re-record it because it never sounded technically great. It was kind of mushy, although I love it and I’m not putting it down at all. But it wasn’t what Chris had envisioned sonically. So I said I’d be honored to do it, but I was working on a ZZ album and it was probably going to be 2 or 3 months before I really had time. Of course he died before we ever got to do that. And so that got me very emotional that night at the Hi-Tone. I told some of that story while I was strumming “Cosmos” in D-minor so nobody would know what it was. Then I went to major which is probably part of what made it pop up. During the performance of it, especially the guitar solo, I remember looking over at Steve Selvidge, and he looked like Chris with his long curly hair and a bit of a beard. And I was freaking out. It was like it really was Chris over there, and it had me emotional.
All the Way isn’t nearly as straightforward as it seems. It’s not a piece of naturalistic theater you can just stage. It’s not a musical either, but with grand themes, leitmotifs of venality and an orchestra-sized cast, this overstuffed sausage-grinder about Lyndon Johnson’s first 11-months in the White House needs to be conducted like a tense modern symphony full of explosive tragedy and punctuated by brassy squawks, and soaring metaphoric strings. If careful attention isn’t paid to the show’s desperate melodies, and ever-shifting time signatures All the Way turns bloodless, like Disney World’s Hall of Presidents without the Morgan Freeman gravitas. Playhouse on the Square has transformed the show into a fashion parade of gorgeous vintage suits, and unconvincing wigs on a pink (marbled?) set that looks for all the world like it was wrapped in prosciutto. It’s a remarkable showcase of extraordinary talent grinding its wheels in a low-stakes historical pageant. When actors as sharp as Delvyn Brown and George Dudley can’t make historically large characters like Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson interesting, there’s something powerfully wrong with the mix.
I’m a fan of director Stephen Hancock, but have noted occasions where concept muddled clarity. The opposite is true this time around. Kennedy’s assassination can’t be treated like melancholy Camelot nostalgia. All the Way may open with a funeral march, but it needs to be bathed in horror and bubbling over with chaos that threatens to grow worse as the play progresses. The Gulf of Tonkin incident isn’t an aside, it’s an explosion. Every provision cut from the 1964 Civil Rights bill in order to get some version of the legislation passed before the election has to bleed real blood and stink of the strangest fruit.
George Dudley is a pleasure to watch. He’s whip-smart, and even when he’s badly used the man’s a damn powerhouse. But everything is different this time around. He’s not surefooted like he usually is. Like so many of the actors in All the Way, Dudley seems unfocused, and not entirely in control of his lines. Still, you can’t act height and vertical advantages aside, he’s still the only actor in Memphis I can imagine capturing Johnson’s crude and conflicted brand of Texas idealism. And when he’s on, he’s on fire.
‘All the Way’ Comes Up Short at Playhouse on the Square
For all of its shortcomings, All the Way is something of a landmark. I can’t recall when I’ve seen such a gifted assemblage of swinging D plopped down on a single stage. With a handful of exceptions, every noteworthy Memphis actor has been called on to do his patriotic duty, and most have answered with gusto. Curtis C. Jackson and John Maness stand out as NAACP leader Roy Wilkins and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Greg Boller relishes his time inside the skin of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Michael Detroit makes a sympathetic, if never entirely convincing, Hubert Humphrey and John Hemphill, Sam Weakly, and John Moore all do some fine character work. The women of the 60’are finely represented by Claire Kolheim, Irene Crist and Kim Sanders, but they are outnumbered, outgunned, out shouted, and pushed to the edge of the picture. It’s an historically appropriate dynamic, of course, but it could stand crisper translation to the stage.
Regretfully, Robert Schenkkan’s script requires more than quality acting.
All the Way is a fourth wall breaker. At the end of the show Dudley asks the audience if anybody was made to feel uncomfortable about by the things they witnessed as ideation becomes legislation, slaw, then law. He asks if we wanted to hide our faces or look away. That moment should be the key to reverse engineering an American “teaching play” that lists ever so slightly toward German Lehrstücke. It should make us want to look away. Not because of the sad black and white photographs projected on enormous screens behind the actors, but because when politicians “make the sausage” people are the meat in the grinder.
There’s a frequently repeated line in All the Way about how Johnson is the most, “sympathetic president since Lincoln [to African Americans].” It’s ordinary sloganeering, of course, and an uncomfortable truth when considered from even a relatively short distance. It’s also a helpful line for considering how easily mimesis fails this kind of play where dynamic interpretation makes the difference between horrorshow and hagiography.
Face full of Johnson. Michael Detroit and George Dudley in All the Way at Playhouse on the Square.
All the Way isn’t bad, it’s worse than that. It’s boring. It’s a play that should make us see that soldiers are blown up in boardrooms not on battlefields, and how even progressive politics can play out like a slow motion lynching. It should make us flinch and look away often. But it never does.
It’s an election year, of course — in case anybody out there in Flyer-land hasn’t noticed. I suspect there’s a certain crowd caught up in the pageantry who are in the perfect mood for a three-hour reminder of the “good old” “bad old” days when even an oil-funded politician as crude and bullying as Donald Trump could dream of a “more perfect union” and get elected. Once, anyway.
Even political junkies and policy wonks may wish to spend cocktail hour chugging coffee.
So says Malcolm Toussaint in Leonard Pitts Jr.’s latest novel, Grant Park. Or rather, that’s what he writes as a respected columnist for the fictitious Chicago Post newspaper. The column was not meant to be published, and, once it is, Malcolm is neither respected nor a columnist any longer.
The events that lead up to his downfall begin in Memphis in 1968 as a college-aged Malcolm returns home from school to a city atop a powder keg. His father is a sanitation worker on strike, yet the radical Malcolm sees the “I Am a Man” placards and philosophy of nonviolence as ineffective. The present-day action is in Chicago in 2008 as Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American president, is being elected into office.
But what happened in those 40 years? The evolution of a radical into a person who, in effect, has become part of the establishment is explored through characters such as Malcolm and his white editor Bob Carson, who long ago fell in love with Janeka Lattimore, a black woman with whom he attended college and fought on the front lines of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. She spurned him because of race all those years ago, yet has returned during the aftermath of his prize-winning columnist imploding his own career and going missing, kidnapped by two bumbling white supremacists with much larger plans for Obama’s rally in Grant Park on election night.
The question of civil rights during those 40 years after the assassination of King was also explored at story booth last week by Pitts and moderators Terrence Tucker, coordinator of African-American Literature at the University of Memphis; and Charles McKinney, director of the Africana Studies program at Rhodes College.
Pitts is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at the Miami Herald, yet he insisted that Malcolm is a purely fictional character while allowing that “Malcolm’s frustrations are definitely mine,” and that the racist email that finally pushes Malcolm over the edge is “cobbled together from emails I’ve received.” With the white supremacist characters, particularly, Pitts said he was going for a certain sense of absurdity in the racist overtones to exemplify a day and age where things are not as rosy as they may seem just because there is a black man in the White House. “I had to explain to [New Jersey Governor] Chris Christie that ‘Black Lives Matter’ is not a terrorist movement,” he said, adding that he gets at least one phone call a week with someone telling him, “Racism is gone if you just stop talking about it.”
Racism of today and yesterday (“There was a seriousness of purpose in the 1960s,” Pitts said. “Even hatred was of a different quality.”) is explored in his book through historical fiction.
The day after his story booth appearance, and arranged by story booth director Nat Akin, Pitts visited Northside High School to speak with students who had been given a copy of Grant Park. He was peppered with questions by eager readers and hopeful writers. Though he’d visited Memphis numerous times before, when it came to writing the book, he came with purpose to the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library to peruse newspapers from the 1960s and look at photographs and maps. He needed to envision a Beale Street and Hernando without the FedExForum to imagine how the marches for the sanitation workers might have taken place. “There are two kinds of truths,” he told the small audience gathered in the school library, “factual truth and emotional truth — a novel strives for that emotional truth. Martin Luther King came to Memphis in 1968 to lead a march, everybody knows that, but what did it feel like to be an 18-year-old in Memphis then? What did it smell like? What did it sound like?”
He told his own story of becoming a writer — he was first paid for writing at the age of 18 by Soul magazine and became a music critic and stringer at that point — about rejection and the fact that, though he’d been a successful journalist for years, it wasn’t until 2009 that his first novel, Before I Forget, was published. “You’ve got to have a certain amount of discipline. … It has to be something you need to do, not what you want to do.”
As for the timing of Grant Park coming out and the real-life, present-day stories coming from places like Ferguson, Missouri, Charleston, South Carolina, and even Memphis, Pitts told the assemblage at story booth that night, “History is your story, history is your biography, and, as African Americans, we need to know our history. Our history is being swiped from us. …There’s a need for us to be more vigilant caretakers of our history.”
It’s not the kind of remembrance people like to attach to those we historically have deemed as heroic martyrs.
A man so disconsolate over what his critics and he himself viewed as abject failure, lying in a Memphis motel room bed, fully clothed, weeping and unable to move for 13 hours. Yet, in his book Death of a King, political commentator and talk-show host, Tavis Smiley, paints a sincere and honest picture of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a man whose human frailties are put to the test in the final year of his life — in a struggle to regain lost prestige, popularity, and his own moral compass.
Beginning with his controversial Riverside Church speech in New York, delivered one year to the day before his assassination in Memphis, King attempted to lay out a new direction for the nonviolent movement he had fostered. With monumental civil rights legislation already on the books, King wanted to expand the scope and participation of the fight against what he saw as the interconnected triad of poverty, racism, and militarism that he felt was tearing away at the fabric of America during the height of the Vietnam War era.
It was an effort to expand on the coalition, which had proven so successful in winning the hearts and minds of those previously drawn to the civil rights movement. But, like others who’ve risen to great heights of leadership on oratory or sheer will, King unwittingly allowed himself to become more insulated from what was going on around him.
Smiley’s book deftly portrays King as a man on a treadmill. No matter how fast he tried to run, everything and everyone in his life was still passing him by, and he couldn’t understand why. He was the same. But, the rest the nation, which he once briefly held in the palm of his hand, had moved on in fractious directions, including his own previous inner circle at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
In Smiley’s book, one of King’s greatest disconnects was with women, and most importantly, his wife, the long-suffering Coretta Scott King. When they first met when both were in their early 20s, King openly admired her not just for her stunning beauty, but also because she became the most strident and unflinching supporter of his nonviolent strategy. Once they started having children, however, King encouraged her to be more subservient, while at the same time he continued his dalliances with other women. So, entrenched in his chauvinistic attitude, King initially rebuked his colleague James Bevel’s suggestion to all male members of the SCLC and other black ministers to tell their wives about their affairs with other women. According to Smiley, King finally did come clean with Mrs. King about one affair, which he told her he put an end to.
I also was drawn to the turbulent final month of King’s life, when it came to how the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike had become a cause celebre’ with him despite warnings from his SCLC inner circle, including apparently Jesse Jackson, that the issues in Memphis were “small potatoes” and not worth getting involved in. But, coming in a year in which he’d been booed off stages, and he was jeered and ridiculed as out of touch with his own people, the reception King received in coming to Memphis was reinvigorating. Memphis had become to him the potential springboard for his still not fleshed out idea of having a “Poor People’s March on Washington.” He viewed it as a golden opportunity to reestablish the nonviolent movement as a viable form of effective protest.
However, as he did through most of that tumultuous final year of his life, King miscalculated, believing the power of his persona alone could bring together divisive factions. The ensuing riot on Beale Street in March of 1968 devastated him enough to seek refuge in a room at the former Rivermont Hotel. King would regroup. His unwavering faith in his mission would allow him to do no less. But, days later, a bullet would be unforgiving.
I applaud Smiley for his determined and compassionate attempt to humanize a man so many authors before have either lionized or demonized. The book provides a lesson, a study in our own mortality. It encourages us to never be so self-assured, so defiant in the face of unwelcomed truth, or so tunnel-visioned about what we believe is right that we ignore the sage counsel of friends and neglect the love and support of family.
For all of us, even the greatest among us, are only mere mortals in the end.
Facebook/Volunteer Memphis 
National Civil Rights Museum 
Terry Manning 
