Memphis in the 1960s – Memphis Flyer

“Memphis Birthday Blues Festival,” read the banner at the band shell in Overton Park in a recent concert film. It could well be another event tied to the bicentennial, but the texture of the film footage gives the date away: This is from the city’s sesquicentennial — 50 years ago.

Of course, the viewer already knows this, having begun the film with a journey up from the Mississippi Delta, cars whizzing by as WDIA announces that weekend’s main event: the fourth annual Memphis Country Blues Festival. And from those first few moments, the film offers total immersion in the world of a half-century ago.

Sleepy John Estes

Watching Memphis ’69, which screens at Crosstown Arts on June 7th (the very date on which the festival was held), is a bit like gazing upon some freshly unearthed treasure, a moment eulogized in decades’ worth of music history, captured in amber. Stanley Booth has written eloquently of the festivals (most recently, in a chapter of his new book), as has Robert Gordon in his essential tome, It Came from Memphis, and it’s a tale both inspirational and cautionary.

First staged in 1966 by a rag-tag group of beats and bohemians that included Lee Baker, Jimmy Crosthwait, Jim Dickinson, and Sid Selvidge (who eventually coalesced into Mud Boy & the Neutrons), the festival’s focus was originally the obscure local blues players — such as Sleepy John Estes, Furry Lewis, Bukka White, and Son Thomas — whose work inspired these ne’er-do-wells. From there, the festival gained a higher profile each year, and a recording of the 1968 event was even released as an album on London Records.

By 1969, as Gordon writes, there was “a struggle for ownership of the event between the hippies and the city government” that lent a bitter aftertaste to the memories of many of the original organizers. And yet, by then expanded to three days, that last festival featured many of the same blues legends that were honored in 1966, including a 106-year-old Nathan Beaugard, making this new film a remarkable thing to behold.

“It’s an absolute miracle that the footage ever saw the light of day,” says Bruce Watson, co-owner of Fat Possum Records and co-producer of the film. During a meeting between Watson and Gene Rosenthal (owner of the ’60s label Adelphi Records) about field recordings Rosenthal had made in Memphis in 1968, Rosenthal casually mentioned, “Yeah, I don’t know if you’re interested, but I recorded the 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival, and I have the footage and audiotapes in my basement.” Watson, having read about the festival for years, was very much interested and arranged to buy the rights. (He also plans to release a three-LP soundtrack from the film later this year.)

“There are probably 14 or 15 hours of film and audio,” Watson says. “The footage is remarkably good for sitting in his basement for 50 years. Some of it syncs up, some of it doesn’t. The audio engineer was tripping on acid, so the audio is kind of hit and miss. The solo performances with the blues guys sound pretty good, but when you start getting Johnny Winter and Moloch and that stuff, it’s really overdriven.”

After organizing the sprawling footage, Watson sought out the aid of Joe and Lisa LaMattina, a Los Angeles-based couple who have had a hand in many music documentaries. “When we saw the footage, we were like, ‘We have to make this movie,'” Joe says. Now the two, along with Watson and consultant Robert Gordon, have crafted a total immersion in that fabled era. And while casual viewers may believe they are seeing nearly raw footage, full of sprocket holes and jump cuts from backstage, it’s actually a carefully curated experience. “One of the things we wanted to do,” Joe says, “was try to edit the movie as if it were made in 1969, so it’s not a technique-heavy movie.”

Despite being a festival staged at the city’s behest, there was still plenty of countercultural influence: The local Jefferson Street Jug Band is joined by John Fahey and Robert Palmer for the anti-war “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag.” It’s all summed up by the banter of one emcee, who announces, “We don’t know what the heat says, but it’s cool to dance.”

I am a Southerner and a devotee of that lifestyle celebrated in the pages of glossy magazines. The delicacies of the South — the language, food, finery, and manners — interlace with the earthier elements of the hunt, bourbon, and humor: a tapestry one may explore for a lifetime and not exhaust. These present gifts are readily subsumed in a vision of the antebellum time, and one cannot help but mourn the passing of the society and culture that created them for us.

I grew up in Memphis, atop the Mississippi Delta and all the wealth that yards and yards of rich topsoil can produce. I came early to the conclusion that every man should have a shotgun, a tuxedo, a set of golf clubs, and the attendant know-how. In elementary school, we wore pixie-like costumes in the Cotton Carnival parade and waited for the arrival of the king and queen on their barge, accompanied by princesses and duchesses of the realm. In middle grades, we wore coats and ties to the Children’s Ball in E.H. Crump Stadium and danced, as our mothers instructed and required, until we could run under the bleachers to fight and spit. In college, we escorted a princess for the week-long party and knew that someday we would marry a duchess-to-be.

Our schools, churches, and clubs formed the scaffolding for our lives, and we all knew each other. High school fraternities and sororities were robust, and one or another would sponsor a weekly party, at which there was live music, abundant alcohol, and inattentive chaperones. The Memphis police looked the other way, and the few unlucky enough to be pulled over were usually admonished to “be careful.”

There were ball fields, gymnasiums, tennis courts, and golf courses everywhere. Even for those with private clubs or pools at home, the public swimming pools were a great draw for deflecting the brutal Memphis summer, meeting friends, and spotting the occasional celebrity.

Aleksander Kovaltchuk | Dreamstime.com

There were a few private schools, but the public system had a long list of graduates who had gone to the Ivy League. We roamed each other’s campuses at will, riding bikes or city buses when too young to drive, taking a carload of friends along when we got our keys. We also roamed the city, from East Memphis to Main Street and the riverfront, no matter the hour or day. We’d park in a dim side street and walk ’round to the dazzling marquees of the Malco Theater or Loew’s Palace for a Saturday night movie date. We stopped at Tropical Freeze, Dairy Queen, or Pig and Whistle afterward and invariably found our pals.

We loved our lives so much we didn’t even think about it. We did not often mention but knew full well that our good fortune descended directly from those who had wrought the grand South from the wilderness and bequeathed it to us. We mourned their tragic disenfranchisement by “The War.”

Aware of our heritage in so many ways, we were blind to the one great parallel. The grandeur of the Old South was founded upon the systematic oppression and commercial exploitation of African Americans. While slavery was not even a remote memory for me or my family, every facility and every privilege I enjoyed was a creature of racial segregation. Schools, churches, tennis courts: All were reserved for one race or the other, and those for blacks were distinctly inferior to those for whites.

“White” and “Colored” were the de facto and de jure categorizations for Memphians. “Latino” and “Asian” didn’t even come to mind. In Goldsmith’s department store, there were signs over adjacent water fountains: “White” and “Colored.” Blacks were allowed into the Malco only through an obscure side-street entrance that led directly to the balcony. The glitter of the main entrance and the plush seating therein were for me and people like me.

Tuesday was “Colored Day” at the Memphis Zoo and, though never present on the same days, the restrooms were designated as “White” or “Colored.” Dairy Queen had several front windows at which whites could place their orders. Blacks waited in line at a single window off to the side, by the dumpster.

Brown v. Board of Education may have been decided in 1954, but I still graduated from an all-white high school in 1966.

Integration had been initiated, though, and the prospect of white and colored kids dancing in the same room to the same music prompted the Memphis Board of Education to prohibit proms. The mandate that municipal swimming pools be accessible to all was parried by the city fathers’ closing of them rather than have mixed races share chlorinated water. I stood within 10 feet as the elders of my church denied entrance to black worshippers.

Although some scholars disagree, Abraham Lincoln declared in his second inaugural address that the cause of “The War” was slavery. He quoted Matthew: “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” He posited “The War” as the woe for the offense of slavery and offered prayer and hope that it would pass swiftly. He warned, however, that it might not pass until “all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword ….”

The tribulations suffered by the South during and after “The War” were of Old Testament dimensions and duration. After Reconstruction, most felt that surely sufficient price and penitence had been paid. But the offenses had not ceased; they were transmogrified into those that gave me front-row seats, new textbooks, and well-groomed baseball diamonds.

The woe has been similarly transformed from that of war and dislocation to that of racial antagonism and mistrust. Sharp operators of every hue have leveraged the antagonism and mistrust to personal advantage. Having ruled autocratically, many whites abandoned their cities and left the emerging black majorities without benevolent governance paradigms.

A member of the Memphis diaspora, I look back and see her indicted public officials, her surrendered public school charter, her crime and poverty rates, and the handful of servants struggling against the racial riptide. Memphis is not the only victim, just the one best known and dearest to me. Racial tension pervades our nation — even in those quarters where Jim Crow had no official presence — and international immigration has merely produced multilateral rather than bilateral tension.

The South’s natural, geographical, historical, and cultural advantages are held beyond our grasp by the current woes, and other regions are handicapped as well. Lincoln called for “malice toward none … charity for all.” Perhaps we can forgo our suspicion and resentment and each forgive the other for offenses real and imagined. As James Taylor sings in “Belfast to Boston”:

Who will swallow long injustice, take the devil for a country man …

Missing brothers, martyred fellows, silent children in the ground,

Could we but hear them, would they not tell us,

Time to lay God’s rifle down.

Maybe apologies all around would be a start. This has been mine.

Richard Patterson, who spent much of his life as a physician in Memphis, is now retired in South Carolina.