Tag: WDIA

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Memphis Has the Blues

It’s Saturday morning and Memphis has the blues.

The rain is coming down, slow and persistent from a low gray sky. It soaks the grass, fills the gutters, and falls hard on the flowers left on the Beale Street sidewalk outside of B.B. King’s club.

The King of Blues left us on Friday, gone after 89 years, one of the last living links to a long-ago Memphis — the era of WDIA and the old pre-tourist Beale Street — an era we’ll never see the likes of again.

And on that same Friday, just a block away on the now-booming Beale Street, our beloved Memphis Grizzlies were eliminated from the NBA playoffs. Grit ‘n Grind came up short against the flashy, splashy hotshots from the Golden State.

It’s Saturday morning and Memphis has the blues. A double shot.

I’d spent that Friday on a 12-hour drive back from a vacation in Western Pennsylvania. I listened to the radio all day, and on almost every show — from NPR to sports-talk radio — B.B. King was discussed and eulogized. His music was everywhere; past interviews were replayed. His humanity and humility came through as clear as one of his signature guitar lines. He spoke as he played — with elegance, dignity, and perfect timing. He was seen, without question, as a national treasure. And he belongs to Memphis.

Now, Mayor Wharton is suggesting that we honor B.B. King by naming a street after him. This is a great idea, and certainly not unprecedented. One of our major thoroughfares is named after Danny Thomas, who founded the world’s greatest children’s hospital, St. Jude. Another is named after Elvis Presley, the king of rock-and-roll. B.B. King deserves no less.

The mayor has suggested Third Street, which runs through the east side of downtown before trickling into a hodge-podge of less-than-stellar retail mini-malls and decaying urban sprawl, before it hits the I-240 loop south of town. I think we can do better for the King of the Blues.

We should rename Riverside Drive for B.B. King. It’s one of our most beautiful and iconic streets. Coming from the South, from the bluff, you get a wonderful view of the Mighty Mississippi and Tom Lee Park below, and the M-Bridge in the distance. It runs along the riverfront, past the boats and the harbor and the cobblestones, where cotton from the fields was once loaded and unloaded — and where the blues were born. It’s the best way to enter the city, the way I drive all my first-time-in-Memphis visitors from the airport.

I’d like to see a statue of B.B. King in Ashburn-Coppock Park, just before the street that would bear his name descends to the river, a river named for the state where King was born.

Lots of cities have a Riverside Drive. If Memphis is going to have a B.B. King Boulevard, let’s do it up right. We’re Memphis and we can have the blues every day.

And in this case, that would be a very good thing.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

B.B. King, the Maestro

CREDIT: Randy Miramontez | Dreamstime.com

Randy Miramontez | Dreamstime.com

B.B. King

For all that has been written about Memphis as a popular-music foundry, as the major originating point of blues and rockabilly and soul and so much else that the world now takes for granted, there is one aspect of the city’s endemic sound that is often overlooked, even in otherwise reasonable and authoritative accounts. 

That has to do with the elements of precision and control that underlie all the city’s characteristic musical products. From the tightly energized backing given to Elvis Presley’s earliest Sun recordings by Scotty Moore’s electric guitar and Bill Black’s bass to the massed harmonics of the Memphis Horns over at Stax/Volt, our city’s musical exemplars would pioneer in all the ways in which the raw and elemental stuff of life can be captured live and contained. That, if you will, is “the Memphis sound.”

No one represents this defining characteristic better than B.B. King, the maestro of the blues guitar, who died last week at age 89 and rightly received plaudits and eulogies from all over the globe. What distinguished B.B.’s playing was his unique single-string style, in which notes were played one at a time, rather than in ensemble or chord form, and each note sang its own song of sadness or joy or playfulness or indefinable longing. Each note — held or clipped, bent or played straight, isolated or in sequence — was an infinite universe of meaning.

Though B.B. King was no academic scholar, his knowledge of musical properties was profound and arose both from the gigs he did and from his path-finding service in the late ’40s and early ’50s as a disc jockey on Memphis’ WDIA-AM, the nation’s first all-black radio station. 

It was as a performer, though, that he was best known and will remain so, through recordings that will be played as long as there are means to hear them and places on earth where people are free to do so. B.B. King was not just a musical maestro, he was an emissary of civilization itself. God willing, he is one thrill that will never be gone.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

On the Beat

It’s a question I’m more than occasionally asked: “How come you don’t do much news anchoring, Mr. Smith?” My reply is simple: If I’m going to report on the action, I want to be where it is. Last week the diversity of news I covered as a general assignment reporter only reinforced why I think what I do is the best job in journalism. So, consider this a reporter’s notebook, with my impressions at the time I was on assignment.

Monday: Even for reporters, it’s sometimes hard to jump into Mondays with a lot of enthusiasm. But hearing about six shootings that resulted in two murders in four days in Brownsville, Tennessee, piqued my interest. Were they drug- or gang-related?

When you’re doing a story in a small community, you usually aim high when it comes to gathering information in the short period of time you’ve got to make it happen. Mayor Bill Rawls, who we reported on after he was elected as the first African-American mayor of Brownsville in June, was candid about the shock people were feeling over the shootings. Nearly all of them involved young black teens, including the random shooting of a 17 year old by another 17 year old following an argument over a cell phone.

In a town the size of Brownsville, where the black population is primarily self-segregated into a certain area of town, asking who knows what — and who did what — can quickly produce solid leads for the police. Mayor Rawls was taking a personal interest in all the cases, so much so that he was patrolling the streets in his own car trying to find names. “Wow,” I thought. How refreshing to have a mayor giving more than lip-service to crime-fighting in his community.

Tuesday: I hate dealing with law enforcement when it comes to news conferences on drug busts, identity theft, or check-cashing scams. Late in the afternoon, former Shelby County District Attorney Bill Gibbons and current D.A. Amy Weirich were among those on hand to tout warrants that had been issued for the arrest of 99 people involved in a phony check-cashing scheme targeting Walmart stores. Most of the suspects made a couple hundred dollars each after splitting the profits from cashing checks totaling around $41,000. As usual, the questions from the media were plentiful, while the available details were sketchy. However, I did have a good hamburger for lunch that day.

Wednesday: Venerable WDIA radio did a live remote from inside the Shelby County Corrections Center, where there were more county officials than inmates, who made up a literally “captive” audience. Radio personality Bev Johnson asked insightful questions of a hand-picked group of inmates, who told the tragic stories of their bad choices that landed them behind bars. Memphis Councilwoman Janis Fullilove managed to provide some comic relief with her own reflections from when she’d been incarcerated at Jail East. In a way, I guess her honesty about her own human frailties makes her strangely endearing to her constituents.

Thursday: In anticipation of President Obama’s immigration speech, I talked with local immigration attorney Barry McWhirter about what I think is the Pandora’s Box Obama has dared to open with his executive order. McWhirter made a strong case that Obama’s ultimate intent was to keep families together, rather than having them victimized by deportations. To me, Obama’s approach was another example of his tunnel vision, one that feeds into the criticism that he’s failed to develop much political finesse in his six years in office. Why now? Why this method?

Friday: Week’s end brought a frenzy of new leads for possible big stories. On my way to cover a ground-breaking for a new park in Frayser, I was waylaid by a call from the assignment desk. Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong had called an impromptu news conference. I had to make my apologies before the Frayser event, which would have been a great feel-good story. Then on the way to see Armstrong, an informant gave me two bombshells: The first was that Shelby County Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos had filed a lawsuit against Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael. The second was that District Attorney Weirich had been accused of withholding evidence from the defense in a case that was on appeal and would have to testify in Criminal Court.

This is why there’s the term Freaky Fridays. And it’s why during this Turkey Day week, I’m thankful I am a reporter, not an anchor — so I can gobble, gobble.