Tag: Stax

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Otis Redding Exhibit to Open at Stax

An exhibit of Otis Redding’s personal effects goes on display Monday, December 10 at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. Monday marks the 40th anniversary of Redding’s death in a plane crash in Lake Monona near Madison, Wisconsin.

You can read Ben Cauley’s account of that crash in the December issue of Memphis magazine, on newsstands now. He was the lone survivor.

The Stax exhibit features photographs and mementoes from Redding’s family and personal collection that are on display publicly for the first time.

In addition to the artifacts on loan from Otis’ widow Zelma Redding and daughter Karla Redding-Andrews, the exhibit contains several items on loan from private collector Bob Grady and never-before-shown artifacts from the Stax Museum archives.

“Stax Records was like a second home for Otis,” Zelma Redding said. “We are pleased to be able to share some of our personal family moments in this exhibit.”

The exhibit runs through April 30, 2008.

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Music Music Features

Syl Johnson Concert Monday NIght

CREDIT: ready-steady-go.org

Chicago soul man Syl Johnson will reunite with Memphis’ own Hi Rhythm section — which includes guitarist Mabon “Teenie” Hodges, bassist Leroy Hodges, organist Charles Hodges, and drummer Howard Grimes — Monday night in a special concert at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

Johnson, born down Highway 78 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, back in 1936, recorded several memorable songs along with the Hi Rhythm gang for Willie Mitchell’s Hi Records back when they all were much younger men.

Their collaborations include “We Did It,” from 1972, and a version of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” released in 1975.

They’ve since recorded a comeback CD in 1994, and gotten back together for a few performances at the annual music geek convention known as the Ponderosa Stomp.

The show runs from 7-9 p.m. with general admission tickets setting you back $20 and Stax Museum member admission $5.

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News

Knock On Wood! It’s Eddie Floyd at Stax Tonight

Tonight marks October’s version of “Last Mondays in Studio A” at the Stax Museum. Performing from 7-9 p.m. will be Stax legend Eddie Floyd and the Bo-Keys.


There will be complimentary hors d’oeuvres and soft drinks — and a cash bar. $20 General Admission; $5 Stax Museum Members.

Doors open at 7 to the general public and at 6:45 for members. Seating is limited.

For more information, see the Stax website.

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Music Music Features

Soul You Can See

In this year dedicated to celebrating the 50th anniversary of Stax Records, the hits just keep on coming, with the latest batch of Stax product: independently packaged DVDs, two released this week, one released in late September.

Co-directed by local filmmaker/writer Robert Gordon and his partner Morgan Neville, the two-hour documentary Respect Yourself was broadcast this summer as part of PBS’ Great Performances series, but an expanded version was released on DVD October 2nd.

Consisting of interviews — both new and archival — with most of the key players, including a rare contribution from Stax founder Jim Stewart, Respect Yourself gives a chronological telling of the Stax story that mostly hits the obvious high (and low) points.

For those who know the music and the story behind it, much of Respect Yourself may feel like rehash. It is a primer, but with so much attention given to Stax locally this year, it’s easy to forget that most people — most music fans, even most Memphians — still aren’t that familiar with the details of Stax. And Respect Yourself reinforces what an amazing story it is: an artistic entity whose very success was rooted in racial partnership and shared/mixed culture in the middle of the civil-rights-era South; a record label whose thrilling music embodied — like perhaps no other cultural product of the time — the hope and ultimately broken promise of racial integration in the ’60s and ’70s. This story can’t be told enough, and Respect Yourself tells it well.

Early on, tireless label booster Deanie Parker allows that “Stax Records was an accident,” pointing out that siblings Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton never intended to start an R&B record label when they opened a recording studio in a converted theater on McLemore Avenue. The implication is that Stax was ultimately the product of the neighborhood it became a part of.

In terms of reviewing the basic spine of the Stax story, Respect Yourself offers a neat, multi-viewpoint retelling of the Otis Redding origin story — that day Redding showed up as another artist’s “valet” and pestered his way to the microphone — with Booker T. Jones speaking eloquently about knowing he was part of something special and staying in the moment.

There’s also a great segment on the Stax family’s visit to the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, with Memphis Horn Wayne Jackson talking about the culture clash between the long-haired, unkempt hippie crowd and the relatively clean-cut Stax crew, who showed up with matching suits and dance steps: “We must have looked like a lounge act or something. But it killed ’em. And when Otis walked out onstage, it was over for everybody.”

Those good times wouldn’t last, and Respect Yourself deftly shows how the tragic four-month stretch between December 1967 (when Redding died in a plane crash) and April 1968 (when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis) transformed the label.

There are also less obvious pleasures and insights in the film. During one interview segment, Jones sits at his organ and replicates the sax riff that, as a teenager, he played on the early Stax hit “Cause I Love You,” a duet between Rufus Thomas and his daughter Carla. Similarly, there’s a graceful moment when, during a newly filmed segment, William Bell stands in front of a piano manned by Marvell Thomas and sings his Stax standard “You Don’t Miss Your Water.” These dynamic segments are so good, you wonder why there aren’t more like it.

And even those who think they’re pretty familiar with the Stax story may learn a few things: the extent to which the Lorraine Motel was used as a second home — for both work and play — for Stax artists (reflected, in part, by a vibrant color photo of Carla Thomas emerging from the Lorraine pool); the revelation that the label’s iconic finger-snap logo was the brainchild of later-period executive Al Bell and thus post-dates most of the classic music it’s associated with; the level of violence that infected the label in the aftermath of the King assassination.

But as fine as Respect Yourself is, most established Stax fans will crave more depth, and the two other recent label-specific DVD releases provide it. Released concurrently with Respect Yourself is The Stax/Volt Revue Live in Norway, 1967, which captures one set on the fabled Stax European tour. Filmed in black and white, this 75-minute concert features performances from Booker T. & the MGs, the Mar-Keys, non-Stax performer Arthur Conley, Eddie Floyd, Sam & Dave, and Otis Redding.

This is a more subdued affair than you might expect, with an extended Conley performance of his hit “Sweet Soul Music,” in particular, coming across as filler. But just having sustained footage of Sam & Dave performing is a revelation, even if the material here isn’t as exciting as the concert footage featured on Respect Yourself. Certainly, the footage reinforces the degree to which Sam Moore outshines Dave Prater vocally. And Redding, closing the show with “Try a Little Tenderness,” towers over them all.

For more Redding, check out the hour-and-a-half-long documentary Dreams To Remember: The Legacy of Otis Redding, which was released on September 18th and, for serious Stax fans, is the most interesting DVD in this current batch.

Though the interview subjects are oddly limited — Steve Cropper, Wayne Jackson, Jim Stewart, and Redding’s widow, Zelma, mainly — Dreams To Remember offers the depth that Respect Yourself — charged with covering an entire label rather than just one artist — can’t match.

Because Cropper co-wrote so many songs with Redding (in addition to working on the recording sessions themselves) and because Jackson, as a trumpet player, was uniquely attuned to Redding’s musical instincts, these men are positioned to offer considerable insight into Redding’s music. And they do not disappoint.

Cropper talks about coming up with the idea for “Mr. Pitiful” after hearing WDIA disc jockey Moohah Williams tab Redding with that moniker for his begging, pleading vocal phrasing. Cropper tells of how Redding took Cropper’s song concept and immediately worked out the song’s chorus.

For “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” Cropper reveals that there wasn’t time before the session to write multiple verses, so Redding kept repeating himself to keep up with the energy of the song, resulting in a recording that functions like the classic Stax instrumentals.

Cropper also talks about how his guitar playing for Redding, in particular, was rooted in country music and how Stax liked to try and reinvent songs they covered, turning ballads into fast songs and fast songs into ballads, or writing new intros and outros unconnected to the original songs.

The most famous example of this was Redding’s take on the standard “Try a Little Tenderness,” which Stewart dubs the best record Stax ever made. Cropper talks about how drummer Al Jackson’s double-click beat with his drum sticks and Cropper’s own Latin-style guitar lick create a “Drifters kind of groove” before Redding carries the song away into something else altogether.

“Nobody will ever sing ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ the way Otis Redding sang it,” Cropper says.

The most interesting area of this technical talk comes in a discussion on the horn work on Redding’s records. Jackson gives a colorful explanation of how Redding would gather his horn players together and instruct them on what to play by singing the various horn parts.

This dynamic was made explicit on “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa,” which Cropper says he and Redding wrote at a Memphis Holiday Inn on Third Street. (Because of Redding’s touring schedule and because he didn’t live in Memphis, he was only available to Stax two to three days out of a three-month period, according to Cropper, which made for some intense, prolific writing and recording sessions.) The nonsense syllables that make up the song’s title (and chorus) were Cropper’s interpretation of the saxophone sound Redding would make when arranging horn parts.

“When I wrote with Otis, I wrote about Otis,” Cropper says, before launching into song himself: “I keep singing these sad, sad songs/Sad songs is all I know.”

The relationship between Redding and his horn section that “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa” takes as its subject is given visual accompaniment here in a splendid bit of black-and-white footage (also seen on Respect Yourself ) where Redding sings the song, sitting down, with his horn section around him. This performance literalizes the call-and-response quality between Redding and the horn section, Redding turning to Jackson or one of the other players after the chorus with a generous offer of “your turn.”

Stewart ties this all together with an insight about the absence of back-up singers on Redding’s recordings. Stewart points out that Redding used his horn sections as a stand-in for what back-up vocalists would be for other artists.

This performance footage isn’t exactly real, however. It seems to be lip-synched, which is the case with many of the television performances shown on Dreams To Remember. Zelma Redding talks about how much her husband struggled with these lip-synched performances, because he rarely sang his songs the same way and often forgot the exact lyrics on the recordings. “I look at some of the footage and say, Lord have mercy,” Zelma says.

In addition to this insight, Dreams To Remember is packed with plenty of standout footage, including a goofy promotional video for the duet single “Tramp,” with Redding wearing overalls and riding a donkey around a farm to play up the “country” character he plays on the song.

Concert footage includes an awesome rendition of Sam Cooke’s “Shake” at Monterey and, most poignantly, a performance of “Try a Little Tenderness” on Cleveland television the day before Redding’s death. Unlike the other television appearances, this one is live, as is clear when Redding ad-libs the phrase “mini-skirt dress” in the opening lines.

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Music Music Features

Willie Hall’s Journey

While the official 50th anniversary celebration of Stax Records might be winding down, several of the label’s alumni are getting together for a group show Wednesday, August 8th.

Bar-Kays trumpeter Ben Cauley and Soul Children vocalist J. Blackfoot will join Queen Ann Hines, The Total Package Band, and others for Willie Hall‘s birthday blowout at the Executive Inn.

“I’m turning 57,” says Hall, a former Stax session drummer who will also perform with The Bo-Keys on Wednesday night.

After developing his chops in the marching band at Hamilton High School, Hall contributed to Isaac Hayes‘ Oscar-winning “Theme From ‘Shaft'” and provided the backbeat for The Blues Brothers.

“We were in the studio, with everyone squeezed in front of a small monitor,” Hall says of working on Hayes’ trademark song. “Isaac said, ‘Watch Richard Roundtree‘s steps and give me those 16th notes.’ That gave us the tempo for ‘Shaft’.”

The job offer from John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd — aka Jake and Elwood Blues — came at an admitted low point in the otherwise unflappable drummer’s career.

“It was the summer of ’79,” remembers Hall. “Stax had closed, and Hot Buttered Soul, Isaac’s studio, had closed, so I was driving a popsicle truck. After I got off work one night, I picked up my kids and, with what little money I had, I took them to McDonald’s. Paul Compton, who worked as an engineer for Shoe Productions, lived around the corner, and I decided to stop by. He said, ‘Hollywood’s looking for you.'”

Universal Studios was ready to begin filming The Blues Brothers, but the original band (Tom Scott, Paul Schaeffer, and Steve Jordan) was tied up with a Gilda Radner project, so Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn — who’d just wrapped up a tour of Japan with Levon Helm — were hired instead.

“Duck said, ‘I know a son-of-a-bitch we can get on drums,’ and as fate would have it, I just happened to pull into Paul’s house, and he gave me the message,” Hall says.

Ironically, he didn’t approve of the act at first. “I thought it was a farce. Even though they were playing Stax songs, I’d turn the TV off because I thought they were mimicking us in a bad way,” he says of the Blues Brothers’ Saturday Night Live appearances. “Little did I know. During the nine months of filming the first movie, I got a chance to hang out with John and Danny in their camper. They had a Rock-Ola jukebox with every soul and R&B record I’d ever heard in my life. That’s when I knew they were serious about music.

“I didn’t have to pretend. We just had fun,” Hall claims of his work in the 1980 film and its ’98 follow-up, Blues Brothers 2000. “When John was sober, he was one of the greatest people to be around. Everything he did was funny. And because I knew Duck and Steve personally, John and Dan took me in and made me feel welcome.”

After relocating to Atlanta for several years, Hall and his wife Deborah (she’s a veteran of the Isaac Hayes Movement and KC and the Sunshine Band and a current minister of music at Eastern Star Baptist Church) moved back to Memphis in October 2000. He signed on as a teacher at The Stax Music Academy and joined the Bo-Keys soon after, returning to the silver screen with Craig Brewer‘s Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan.

Since returning to Memphis, Hall also has reconnected with his eldest son Patrick, better known as rap pioneer Gangsta Pat.

“I remember when he was just 3 years old, and we were living in Whitehaven,” Hall says. “Patrick had fallen in love with KISS, and he’d put on a wig and pantomime in the mirror. Then I came home one day, and he was playing the drums. I’d take him on the road and to recording sessions. His mother and I separated when he was 9, and I didn’t see him again ’til he was 16.

“He grew up in the business,” Hall says, “although I was frightened for him in his early days as a rapper. I thought that style of music would lead to his ruin, but he’s prolific and an excellent musician and producer. Patrick’s been working with Eric Gales and David Banner, but we haven’t had the chance to get into the studio together. I hope we get to do that this fall.”

Willie Hall’s Birthday Party

The Executive Inn, 3222 Airways Blvd.

Wednesday, August 8th

7-11 p.m., $10

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Cover Feature News

Blue Heaven

This is our year of musical remembrance. Stax is 50. The King’s been gone for 30 years. Forty years ago this December, Otis Redding and four harmonious young Memphians known as the Bar-Kays died in a plane crash.

This year also marks an anniversary for another giant of our city’s musical past — one that won’t draw legions of shrine-building visitors to Memphis or inspire reunion concerts or documentary films. Sixty years ago on July 12th, the swing orchestra leader Jimmie Lunceford died — either by a heart attack or poisoning depending on whom you believe — while signing autographs in a record store on a tour stop in Seaside, Oregon.

Despite the lack of recognition in the City of Good Abode, Jimmie Lunceford represents a legacy that has meant as much to Memphis music as more recent and celebrated figures. The man who once beat Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, and others in a battle of the big bands now lies buried, mostly forgotten, in Elmwood Cemetery.

It can be difficult to quantify the success of an artist who died before Billboard charts began to define musical success. Sheet music outsold records for most of Lunceford’s career, spanning 1930-1947, and a musician made a name and a living on the road then.

“Lunceford had the best of all bands”

Lunceford’s peers and competitors, however, knew what they were up against. No less an authority than Glenn Miller — himself leader of a top-shelf swing outfit until his plane vanished crossing the Atlantic during WWII — summed it up: “Jimmie Lunceford has the best of all bands. Duke [Ellington] is great, [Count] Basie is remarkable, but Lunceford tops them both.”

He spent barely three years of his life here, from 1927 to 1930, but began a tradition of public school music education that pipelined talent to the Memphis scene for generations to come. Not only is Lunceford overlooked in our storied history, his legacy of education is absent from the civic discussion surrounding the revival of our once vital music industry.

“He had a very good effect on the students here”

The Memphis City Schools have churned out professional musicians like Penn State has linebackers. Players diverse in style and age, like former Ray Charles Orchestra music director Hank Crawford and renowned jazzmen Phineas Newborn Sr., his sons Calvin and Phineas Jr., cerebral horn-blowers Charles Lloyd and Frank Strozier, and soul men Booker T. Jones, Isaac Hayes, David Porter, the Bar-Kays, Earth, Wind and Fire vocalist Maurice White, and members of the vaunted Hi Rhythm section, among dozens of others, all came through Memphis public school music programs.

This legacy, unparalleled in any urban school system nationally, began in 1927 when Lunceford landed at Manassas High School, fresh from Fisk University in Nashville.

Ninety-two-year-old classical pianist Kathryn Perry Thomas — one of three living graduates of Manassas’ class of 1932 — is the last surviving Memphian to have played music with Lunceford. She recalls Lunceford’s presence on campus. “I was going to school when he was there,” she says. “He had a very good effect on the students there. He taught football, baseball, and music.”

The first Memphis city school orchestra

Orchestra leader Jimmie Lunceford

Lunceford had no budget for a music program. In fact, he wasn’t hired as a music teacher at all, but instead as an instructor of English and Spanish and coach of the Manassas football and baseball teams. The school had no instruments, no music curriculum, no idea what music education could do for the community. But like the football coach that he was, Lunceford brought a group of young men together, motivated them, equipped them — with help from community donors — and refined them as a unit. He named them like a football team too, drawing on local history: the Chickasaw Syncopators.

“Manassas had the first orchestra of any school in the city with Mr. Lunceford,” Thomas says. “He was a good disciplinarian, a good teacher, and the students just had a fit over him. Lunceford played sophisticated jazz. I used to practice with them.”

The Chickasaws included drummer Jimmy Crawford and bassist Moses Allen, Manassas students who continued playing with Lunceford’s orchestra longer than any other players. Two of Lunceford’s Fisk pals, pianist Ed Wilcox and saxophonist Willie Smith, also had joined up by 1928. These four comprised the nucleus of the Lunceford band through the early 1940s.

The orchestra had come to the attention of the press by early 1930. The Chicago Defender, a national African-American newspaper, wrote that Lunceford’s 11-piece band included musicians who sang and doubled on different instruments.

Chickasaws define new sound

The Chickasaws recorded a two-sider on their leader’s 28th birthday, June 6, 1930, at the Memphis and Shelby County Civic Auditorium (then located at Main and Poplar) for Victor Recording Company. Allen, the band’s bass player, preached with tongue firmly planted in cheek through “In Dat Mornin’.”

He goaded the trumpet solo:

“Oh, Gabriel, I want you to go down this mornin’, I want you to place one foot on the land and the other foot on the sea; I want you to blow that silver trumpet calm and easy … I imagine I can see him bust the bell of that trumpet wide open.”

The flipside, “Sweet Rhythm,” could have served as the Lunceford anthem, in both name and sound. (These early recordings can be heard at http://www.redhotjazz.com/chickasaw.html.)

The Lunceford sound distinguished itself in a crowded field of talented swing bands with its two-beat syncopation, a sonic ancestor of what came to be known as the “Memphis sound” heard in the 1960s and 1970s in Stax Records’ trademark echophonic rhythm and in the laid-back Willie Mitchell groove of Hi Records. Bertil Lyttkens Collection

Musicians Ed Wilcox, Jimmy Crawford, Moses Allen, and Al Norris, left to right, at the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1934

“When he left Manassas, those who had finished went with him. He became famous with that orchestra,” Thomas recalls.

More importantly for the city, orchestras became standard in public schools. Manassas hired a replacement for a position that hadn’t existed previously: band director.

Lunceford’s band officially turned pro in late 1930 and hit the road, changing their name to the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra because the Chickasaw Syncopators didn’t resonate with national audiences.

“Rhythm Is Our Business”

Though the band would gradually grow to 18 musicians at the time of Lunceford’s death, their double-duty as players and entertainers distinguished the orchestra throughout its existence. Lunceford biographer Eddy Determeyer states that the orchestra “pioneered the use of choreography in black music.”

Jack Bradley Collection

On stage, members of the Lunceford orchestra tossed their instruments in the air in unison, danced and sang interchangeably, as the leader — decked in white tails and his glowing grin — conducted. Their uptown vocals can be heard on recordings like “My Blue Heaven” and “Rhythm Is Our Business,” a Lunceford composition that later served as the title of his biography.

Between 1930 and 1947, Lunceford’s group challenged the giants of jazz, Ellington and Basie, for orchestral supremacy. They drew raves for their showmanship and instrumental ensemble work and returned to Memphis for one-nighters at Beale Avenue Auditorium at Church Park. Lunceford remained friendly with Memphis, wooing Crystal Tulli, a teacher at Booker T. Washington High School whom Lunceford had met at Fisk. They married in 1934, the year of Lunceford’s arrival at Harlem’s Cotton Club, known then as the greatest nightclub in the world.

Renewing personal remembrances

Local appearances stirred up the Bluff City. The African-American Memphis World newspaper reported that tickets to Lunceford’s August 1944 show sold out in hours. Visits usually included a reception at the home of a prominent citizen. One concert preview said that Lunceford looked forward to “renew[ing] personal remembrances.”

Among those remembrances renewed were the students at Manassas. “He would come over to the school each and every time he would play Memphis,” recalls Emerson Able Jr., who took Lunceford’s old job as Manassas band director in 1956. “His band would perform for the [Manassas] student body, and our band, the Little Rhythm Bombers, would play for him. This is where most of us, as students, saw him. He would bring the big band over to Manassas and perform.”

Forgetting Jimmie

Memphis music, if you believe what you read, is a story of iconoclasts, renegades, and visionaries whose disdain for rules and conformity forged original sounds. Lunceford doesn’t fit into the pantheon of gritty working-class heroes who embody the Memphis sound, though. The big-band Lunceford sound required discipline, education, polish, and a collective approach to performance. For this reason, it seems, he’s been overlooked in Memphis music history.

In Goin’ Back to Memphis, James Dickerson wrote of the period Lunceford spent in the city, “Throughout the twenties, Memphis music underwent significant changes. The sophisticated blues of the teens … were replaced on Beale Street by its long-neglected country cousin, the down-home blues.”

Lunceford bucked the more celebrated trend of unsophisticated down-home blues in Memphis, as he groomed a group of city school kids into a jazz orchestra later noted for its precision and technical ensemble work.

Dickerson suggests that the bandleader’s urbanity sacrificed his soul: “I am sure black activists would today consider Lunceford an Uncle Tom. He led his orchestra with a long, white baton and dressed elegantly but I don’t think he was being accommodating to white society so much as living out a fantasy of how society should conduct itself. Considering his disdain for any deviation from his strict Protestant behavior, it is not surprising Lunceford left Memphis at the first opportunity.”

Dickerson offers no facts upon which to base any of these observations, including the false understanding of Memphis as a city without religion. Nor does he account for Lunceford’s choice to be buried in a city the bandleader supposedly couldn’t wait to leave. Ultimately, Dickerson prefers to tell the Memphis music story in a way that doesn’t grasp the complete picture.

Similarly, the over-quoted music producer Jim Dickinson explains the upward thrust of Memphis music history in terms of “racial collision.” Robert Gordon wrote in the influential It Came From Memphis, “The forces of cultural collision struck thrice in the Memphis area, first with the Delta blues, then with Sun [Records], then with Stax,” thus excluding Lunceford, who was no Delta bluesman and had died before Sun or Stax came into being, from the discussion.

“My Blue Heaven”

Today, barely a trace of Lunceford remains in the city. Imagine the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown without Willie Mays or the courtyard of Graumann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood without the imprints of Jimmy Durante’s nose or Marilyn Monroe’s hands. Our own walk of fame down on Beale Street feels just as empty thanks to the omission of Lunceford.

A historical marker in front of Manassas High School commemorates alumnus Isaac Hayes, but there’s no public display of affection for Lunceford, the onetime king of swing.

Finally, locals trying to learn about the life of Lunceford would be hard-pressed: The acclaimed biography Rhythm Is Our Business isn’t available at local bookstores or any public or college library.

Coda

Jimmie Lunceford, a healthy, teetotaling, non-smoker, dropped dead at a personal appearance in Seaside, Oregon, on July 12, 1947. The official cause of death was a heart attack, though his bandmembers claimed that the owner of the café where the band lunched had taken exception to serving the group of African Americans. Several of them complained of illness after their lunch and speculated that they had been poisoned.

Lunceford’s Memphis funeral procession traveled up Wellington Street (now Danny Thomas Boulevard) to Mississippi Boulevard. You could have seen it pass from the front porch of Lunceford’s last Memphis residence at 678 E. Iowa Avenue (now E.H. Crump Boulevard), as it crossed that street and turned up Walker toward Elmwood Cemetery. Fans lined the streets along the route.

After a star-studded New York funeral service attended by top black entertainers Pearl Bailey, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Noble Sissle, the Memphis ceremony brought out his inner circle. Fisk classmates served as pallbearers, while Lunceford’s father, brothers, widow, and in-laws stood out among the reported thousands who stacked the mahogany casket with flowers.

Nationally syndicated columnist Nat D. Williams, himself an educator in the Memphis City Schools at Booker T. Washington High, eulogized Lunceford in his weekly “Down on Beale Avenue” column, offering still poignant views on the man’s meaning to Memphis:

“Jimmy Lunceford was buried here in Memphis. The spot he occupies should have something of a special significance. … He took a group of relatively unsophisticated Memphis colored boys and welded them into an organization which scaled the heights of musical eminence. … He presented something new in the way of musical presentations by Negro orchestras.”

Williams praised Lunceford’s commitment to his race. While other great African Americans abandoned their people, so Williams wrote, “Lunceford and many others like him chose to remain at home, and with their people. [His death] should have meaning in inspiration and guidance to others. If we permit it, Lunceford’s burial in Memphis can mean this.”

Very special thanks to Eddy Determeyer, author of the Lunceford biography Rhythm Is Our Business, who supplied key facts and photographs for this story.

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Music Music Features

Starting All Over Again

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Memphis and, it seemed, the whole world were watching when American Idol judge Randy Jackson stepped onto The Orpheum stage and asked, “Are you ready for some heat?”

Jackson and rap pioneer Chuck D. were co-hosting Stax Records’ 50th Anniversary Concert June 22nd, a local coming-out party for the Concord Music Group, which purchased the Memphis-founded label in 2004 and initiated its relaunch earlier this year.

Even before the house lights went down, however, confusion about Concord’s motivations made for a hot topic with some disgruntled Stax alumni, who have felt, at best, slighted by programming for the anniversary celebration, which was broadcast live over XM Radio. Case in point: The Commercial Appeal‘s interview with Marvell Thomas, Stax organist and son of legendary performer Rufus Thomas, who, with Marvell’s sister Carla, put the label on the map in 1960. The article cited the “marginalization” of the Thomas family’s contributions to the Stax legacy, yet on Friday night, when the house band took the stage, there was Marvell, sitting on his organ bench, stage right.

Stax songwriter-turned-powerhouse performer Eddie Floyd started off the revue-style concert with “I’ve Never Found a Girl,” getting everyone to their feet after tossing roses to fans in the first few rows. Looking, in local parlance, as clean as the Board of Health, William Bell followed with a searing take on “Private Number,” his late-’60s Stax hit (originally a duet with Judy Clay, who has since passed away), while Mable John simmered, then percolated, with the sassy “Your Good Thing Is About To End.”

When the Soul Children’s Norman West asked, “Can I get down tonight?” it was merely a rhetorical question; the homegrown talent that took turns onstage kept the crowd moving all night. The Soul Children’s take on “Hearsay,” off their ’72 album Genesis, was the first old-school theatrical, extended jam of the evening. Next, West’s co-vocalist J. Blackfoot introduced “The Sweeter He Is” by noting, “David Porter and Isaac Hayes wrote this song — let’s give ’em some applause,” setting the pace for the label’s original performers, who consistently gave credit where it was due.

Yet the canned banter between Jackson and Chuck D. threatened to derail the momentum between every act. WWRD (What Would Rufus Do?), I wondered, as I listened to them mumble through another round of accolades read from the TelePrompters, wishing that someone had done their homework and hired a real MC, someone who could have fun and get funky like in the WDIA Goodwill Revues of yore.

Jackson’s missteps were numerous. To the audience’s dismay, he squeezed Idol references into nearly every sentence, and, at one point, the co-hosts incorrectly announced that Stax co-founder Jim Stewart and Al Bell, the label’s final owner, were in the audience. No big deal, unless you consider that Stewart’s a recluse who has never stepped foot in the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and who was a no-show for his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Had Stewart chosen to attend the anniversary concert, it would’ve made a fine moment for the current stewards of the Stax legacy, but sadly, that wasn’t the case.

As for Bell, he explained by phone from his North Little Rock home on Sunday night, “I knew about [the concert], but there was no formal communication as to whether I was invited or expected to be there until three days before, and by that time, I’d committed to something else.”

With or without Stewart and Bell, the show went on. Memphis Horns trumpeter Wayne Jackson stepped into the spotlight for a splendid version of the Mar-Keys’ “Last Night,” the instrumental single that started it all for Stax Records, although it was actually released on the label’s predecessor, Satellite.

Justin Fox Burks

All-star lineup: Stax Records’ 50th Anniversary Concert at The Orpheum

“It’s a pleasure and honor to perform the record that put me at Stax Records,” the trumpeter announced, dedicating the number to his “best friend,” Memphis Horn saxophonist Andrew Love. “Put us all here,” retorted a distinctively Memphis voice, causing a mighty chuckle from the crowd. Other poignant moments followed, including Dexter Redding and Otis Redding III’s performances of “Try a Little Tenderness” and “Hard To Handle” and Mavis Staples’ renditions of “Respect Yourself” and “If You’re Ready (Come and Go With Me).”

Midway through the evening, when Booker T. & the MGs suddenly appeared to play “Green Onions,” the audience collectively and audibly exhaled, then rose to its feet with a roar. Flanked by bassist Duck Dunn, guitarist Steve Cropper, and drummer Steve Potts (who’s stood in for Al Jackson Jr., since his murder in 1975), Booker T. Jones, the group’s organist, began a moody vamp that took the audience to church, before erupting into the frenzied dance number “Time Is Tight.” The MGs, Stax’ legendary house band, performed not as showmen but as earthy studio players with their feet firmly planted onstage as their music swirled upward to the Orpheum’s ceiling and beyond.

The pompadour-sporting Rance Allen — who looks and sings like a Motor City Solomon Burke — rode out the MGs’ swell, preaching in a falsetto that brought down the house and declaring, “I don’t think I would be out of place if I asked everybody to praise the Lord” during “That Will Be Good Enough For Me,” his hit for the Gospel Truth, Stax’ religious-themed arm.

In the shadow of such greatness, new Stax signee Angie Stone still shined with her version of Shirley Brown’s “Woman to Woman,” showcasing the work of the house band, which included Stax session guitarists Skip Pitts and Bobby Manuel.

Rising neo-soul singer N’Dambi dazzled the audience with her version of Luther Ingram’s “If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don’t Wanna Be Right)” and her Barbarella wardrobe, which consisted of turquoise knee-high boots and a matching mini dress.

On “Mr. Big Stuff,” Lalah (daughter of Donny) Hathaway hit the right notes but lacked the punch that Jean Knight utilized to make the song a number-one hit. And Soulive, a New York-based organ-heavy quartet which had the duty of re-creating Sam & Dave’s “I Thank You,” sent most of the audience out to the lobby for drinks.

Collectively described as “21st- century Stax recording artists,” most of the younger acts were short of the grit that made stars out of performers like Staples, Bell, and Floyd, and only time will tell who possesses the chops to make it in the music biz. Granted, Memphis makes for a tough audience — particularly when a California-based record label is messing with its hometown legacy and when material is pillaged from artists like Shirley Brown, Sam Moore, and Jean Knight, who are still alive and well and performing at events like the Ponderosa Stomp and on the chitlin circuit.

The mellifluous Isaac Hayes, the first of the old Stax artists to sign a deal with the reinvigorated label, hit a home run with “Walk On By” and “(Theme From) Shaft,” demonstrating that he’s made a full recovery from last year’s stroke. Then, in a closing reminiscent of the local Recording Academy’s recent musical salutes, the whole gang came back out for sing-alongs of “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” and “I’ll Take You There.”

“I know a place/I’ll take you there,” Staples sang, a promise she’s continued to fulfill since cutting the powerhouse anthem 35 years ago.

With so many expectations from so many different people, there’s simply no way that the concert could’ve pleased everyone, but the originators of the Stax sound never failed to satisfy — and in the end, that’s what counts.

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Music Music Features

Stax Homecoming

CREDIT: Andrea Zucker

Memphis’ year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of Stax Records culminates this week with the “50 Years of Stax” concert at The Orpheum on Friday, June 22nd. The lineup is shaping up to be a super-sized version of the revue that highlighted this spring’s South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas.

In Austin, Booker T. & the MGs played a sizzling set then settled in as the backing band for classic Stax vocal stars Eddie Floyd and William Bell. Isaac Hayes introduced the show and then returned at the end for a group rendition of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.”

This week’s local celebration will duplicate that lineup and add to it: Vintage Stax stars such as Mavis Staples, The Soul Children, and Mable John will provide some gender balance. Otis Redding will be represented by his sons via their band The Reddings. And a new generation of soul stars will pay homage with performances by Angie Stone, N’dambi, Soulive, and Lalah Hathaway.

This last group of young neo-soul acts will join Hayes as the first slate of artists who will record for the new incarnation of Stax, relaunched by the California-based Concord Music Group, which acquired the rights to the Stax name (and much of the back catalog) a few years ago.

Concord is putting on this week’s concert, in conjunction with the Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau and Soulsville, which operates the Stax Music Academy and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

Public Enemy rapper and hip-hop activist Chuck D. and American Idol judge and music producer Randy Jackson will host the concert. Proceeds will benefit the Stax Museum. Tickets are $25, $50, and $100, available through Ticketmaster. There are also “Golden Circle” tickets available for $1,000 each. These tickets include VIP orchestra seating, parking, and a pre-show party at the Orpheum Broadway Club, admittance to the after-party at the Gibson Music Showcase, a private celebrity tour of the museum, and a copy of the two-disc 50th-anniversary Stax compilation that Concord released earlier this year. For information on Golden Circle tickets, call Deanie Parker of Soulsville at 261-6385.

Following the “50 Years of Stax” concert Friday will be an after-party at the Gibson Music Showcase, which promises further performances by Stax artists. The after-party starts at 11 p.m. Tickets are $27 and are available at the Gibson. See Gibson.com for more information.

Hopefully, this week’s activities will focus more attention on the museum as well. In addition to the museum’s fine permanent exhibits, current visitors can take in The Art of Stax: Essential Album Cover Photographs by Stax Photographer Joel Brodsky. To extend your Stax experience past the weekend, return for the museum’s Last Mondays in Studio A series, which will host soul singer Toni Green on Monday, June 25th. The concert is from 7 to 9 p.m. Admission is $20, or $5 for museum members.

As for Stax on wax: Concord is well into a rich reissue campaign and will get into the full relaunch of Stax as an active label later this year.

In the meantime, Concord is producing a series of digital-only releases exclusively through iTunes. These include a series of “Short Stax” EPs, which pair two of the best-known tracks by individual artists with a “lost gem.” The 10 “Short Stax” releases are for the following artists: Booker T. & the MGs, The Dramatics, The Emotions, Floyd, Hayes, Albert King, The Soul Children, The Staple Singers, Johnnie Taylor, Carla Thomas, and Rufus Thomas.

A second series of “Short Stax” releases will follow next month. In addition, Concord is offering digital releases of full Stax albums that have never gotten CD releases, including Floyd’s 1969 album You’ve Got To Have Eddie and David Porter‘s 1970 solo album Gritty, Groovin’ & Getting’ It.

Look for much more on this week’s Stax concert in next week’s edition of the Flyer. And for more information, go to Memphissoul50.com or Soulsvilleusa.com.

Correction: Last week’s Local Beat column cited Kat Gore as a producer on the new album from local band Giant Bear. It should have been Kat Sage.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Let me just see how self-serving I can be. In the interest of full disclosure, I work for the Stax Music Academy, which is next door to the Stax Museum, where I also work. So know right off the bat that this is not objective. But I have to tell you that if you miss the Stax Music Academy’s annual Spring Concert this coming Saturday, May 12th, you will be missing something that’s going to be really great for a number of reasons: One is that Britney Spears will not be there. Nor will Paris Hilton (she’ll be in jail, apparently, doing what she describes as her “cruel and inhumane” jail time for breaking the law, the same amount of time any of us little people would do, which is what she gets for letting that dog of hers poop on a friend of mine’s floor in Nashville and calling it “hot”). Nor will that great singing talent Jessica Simpson. Nor will any rap groups going on and on about hoes. Nor will Ashlee Simpson be there lip synching. There are actually going to be special guests who have real talent, especially in the way of one Wendy Moten, one of the world’s greatest singers. If you don’t remember Moten, she is a native Memphian who had a Top 40 hit back in the 1990s with “Come In Out of the Rain” and has gone on to do some other great things, but she has never garnered that mass fame here in the United States like the aforementioned people who have despite being devoid of any real talent. Oh, Moten could have. She was compared all over the world to Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, but she did not want to be the next Houston or Carey. She wanted to do her own thing, which was more alternative. So she refused to let the major labels turn her into something she wasn’t, and she went her own way, and she’s a household name in Japan and other countries like many other Memphians who have that kind of independent spirit. And, to top it off, another native Memphian who has made his own great career and has moved back to make Memphis his home again, saxophonist Kirk Whalum, is on the bill as well. And not to be a name-dropper, but when I mentioned to Isaac Hayes and Steve Cropper of Booker T. & the MGs that Wendy Moten will be doing this concert with the Stax Music Academy students, both of their jaws dropped and their eyes lit up like headlights. I have a feeling they will be there. And so should you. If you don’t know a lot about the Stax Music Academy and aren’t yet a supporter in some way, I will be more than happy to go on at length about what the school is doing not only to mentor these primarily at-risk youngsters but also how really talented they have become. Some of them are already getting professional work, and two of them just got accepted to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. The academy is one of the greatest gems in our city, and you’d be surprised at how similar it is to the old Stax Records way of life. So be there at the Michael D. Rose Theater Saturday night at 7 p.m. and drop the big five-buck admission to actually support some people with talent. There. I have spoken my piece! On to other things: I was going to rant and rave about the big White House dinner for 130-something people for Queen Elizabeth, and how much that must be costing us taxpayers, and how I don’t want my tax dollars helping fund it because she was so mean to Princess Diana (and I still really don’t), but I have to give the queen a break. I read, “In a nod to global-warming concerns, the queen will offset the carbon dioxide emissions from her trip. The emissions from her aircraft travel will be calculated and their environmental cost reimbursed using reforestation projects or research into carbon-neutral forms of energy generation,” so I guess she’s not so bad. It’s more than our own fearless leader can say about his jaunting from D.C. to the ranch every hour for some vacation time or sending Condoleezza Rice all over the world to embarrass us. Heck, maybe the queen will scoot on down here for the Stax Music Academy concert. She could do worse.

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Cover Feature News

Postscript

“‘If Loving You Is Wrong’ sealed Stax’s distribution deal with CBS Records,” Eric Ingram proudly notes, describing Luther Ingram’s rise from Ike Turner’s opening act to Southern soul superstar.

The main act on Johnny Baylor’s KoKo Records — picked up as a Stax subsidiary when Baylor, a former Army Ranger and reputed member of the Black Mafia, came to Memphis to act as a strong arm for the label’s artists — Luther Ingram was born in Jackson, Tennessee, and raised in Alton, Illinois, where he sang in church and formed a family group called the Gardenias. After a dead-end deal with Decca Records, he struck gold with songs such as “Pity for the Lonely,” “My Honey and Me,” “Always,” “Do You Love Somebody,” and “Ain’t That Loving You (For More Reasons Than One)” during his KoKo era, which lasted from 1968 to ’78.

“KoKo was supposed to be equal to — if not better than — Motown,” Eric explains today. “My father wanted to be part of that, but he hooked up with a bunch of crooks, and it all went south.”

Case in point: “If Loving You Is Wrong,” which was originally written by Stax staff songwriters Homer Banks, Raymond Jackson, and Carl Hampton and recorded (but never released) by the Emotions. “The title was there, and a song had been written before my father got to it,” Eric confirms. “But it was up-tempo, and it had different words. When it was given to my father, he took it home and sat on the porch with my uncle Gene, working on it for hours. He changed the whole song around, but he never got credit for that.”

In ’72, the same year that “If Loving You Is Wrong” soared up the Billboard charts, the FBI detained Baylor, who was holding $130,000 in cash and a check from Stax Records for half-a-million dollars, at the Birmingham airport. The IRS seized the funds, spearheading an investigation that would eventually bring Stax to its knees. But for the time being, it was business as usual, and Luther continued his association with KoKo for several more years.

Fast-forward a few decades to when Eric hired attorney Fred Davis to regain ownership of his father’s songs. “So far, we’ve gotten 26 of them back,” he reports. “Some of them are really good songs — some are Top 20 songs — but “If Loving You Is Wrong” became such a monster that it drowned most of them out. I plan to bring them out as new songs with new artists. Of course, my dad had that unique voice. But I’ve got some good singers that he’d given the thumbs-up to.”

Just 69 years old, Luther Ingram died of heart failure on March 19th, following an extended bout with diabetes and kidney disease.

Eric is currently developing a feature film called If Loving You Is Wrong. “It’s a combination of Fatal Attraction and What’s Love Got To Do With It,” he says. “When I first heard that song, I was only 8 or 8 years old, and everybody wanted to know if that was happening with my family. They thought my father was having a three-way love affair. But it was actually happening with somebody my father knew. The movie’s story is about the song — about infidelity — rather than about my father, although I’ve got so many stories from him about what happened back in the day that I want to do a Stax Records story as well.”

On March 26th, Luther Ingram was buried at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Bellevue, Illinois. For more information about his career, visit LutherIngramMusic.net.