Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  Willis is weighing the beauty of his river life against the potential turmoil and hazard of another winter on that dirt road. He does not want to move.

  He sits back in his chair. He looks at the cottonwood tree, points to the top branches. They are browning, beginning to die. He points to the bottom of the tree. The cottonwood still stands strong, but the river has eaten away at the bank. The roots are exposed, groping for dirt. Willis postulates that two, maybe three more floods will pull the tree away.

  “I don’t want to stay here until the water washes me away, bank and all.” His eyes are wide, his face is serious.

  Ernest Willis knows the strength of the river. He knows the Old Man must always be reckoned with. It is stronger than him. Willis has given a large part of his life to this river, and the river has taken more. And the river has provided—a living, and thirty-six years of beauty. Ernest Willis appreciates the Mississippi River. And it may be just this appreciation that tells him it is time to go.

  MOSE VINSON

  I know the year because the bar served Billy Beer, the cans endorsed by President Jimmy Carter’s brother. It was 1977; I was sixteen, in tenth grade, a passenger in a car when I spotted a new bar sign: BIRTH OF THE BLUES. Sounded like a place I and my friends needed to go. It was across the street from the Ritz, a movie theater turned concert hall. We weren’t old enough to enter either place, let alone be served, but we became frequent patrons, stumbling from one to the other when bands went on break. The bartenders knew us well.

  Furry Lewis had piqued my interest in the original bluesmen and blueswomen, these living links to another time and culture. At Birth of the Blues, the band was all elder players, a great thrill. After the core group would wind down, barrelhouse piano player Mose Vinson would stay late, playing in the bar’s picture window. Because that’s what born barrelhouse piano players do. His keys had long propelled a night’s diminishing party, and as the waitresses cleared tables, we last revelers gathered close around his piano bench, shouting encouragement and dancing the white middle-class boogie.

  I didn’t get to know Mose like I did Furry, but Mose was younger—he lived until 2002—so I got to hear him a lot more. He didn’t record much, but fortunately Judy Peiser, who was giving Mose regular employ at the Center for Southern Folklore, got with producers Knox Phillips and Jim Dickinson and they made the Piano Man recording happen. (Sun Records alumnus Roland Janes engineered.) I was honored to write the liner notes, and it’s a disc I still play often.

  No Pain Pill

  Liner notes to Piano Man, 1997

  “You ain’t got no pain pill, is ya?” asks Mose Vinson, having turned all the blues in the room into a joyous sound. Bringing relief is his personal sacrifice, and he takes on the woes, like he’s always done.

  “I was born playing, Holly Springs, Mississippi,” he answers, when asked what he would like listeners to know about him. “The good Lord give me that talent, and I play that talent behind the good Lord. I didn’t learn from nobody, he give it to me.”

  Short of the new supermarket off the town square, Holly Springs—and especially the outlying area—fairly resembles how it was in 1917 when Mose was born. Which means the good Lord had to do some serious driving on backcountry winding roads to find Mose for the delivery of this gift. Thank you, Lord.

  Mose, eighty, began his musical career when he was five years old. “First thing I saw was an organ, an old-time organ what you work your foot on the pedals. That’s what I started playing, then I left that to the piano and I played a whole lot better. Organ was too soft for me.” Behind the force of his piano keys, you can almost hear the din of a drunken juke joint, almost see an organ turn to toothpicks.

  Mose Vinson, boogie woogie piano player. (Courtesy of Axel Küstner)

  Those hands were made for music. When his peers took to the cotton fields, Mose joined a touring show and established a life in music. “I just play my own style,” he says. “I never did practice anybody else’s style.” That style has defined the man. In the days when everyone had monikers—Dishrag, Butterfly, Turkey Hop—Mose Vinson was known as “Boogie Woogie.” And while he can make a piano jump like a fat lady wearing thin house shoes on hot concrete, boogie woogie is much too constraining a term. There is a strong jazz element that runs through his playing, and the gospel that is so near his heart never gets away from his fingers.

  There is great humor in Mose and in his music. He punctuates his sentences with piano notes, running his big hands over the keys. He smashes notes together like a piano Impressionist. “I go up there and get the black keys, then come on down and mix it with the white keys. That makes my music sound pretty good.”

  It also sounds pretty good when, in contrast to his rumbling vocals, Mose adds a giddy “yeeeh,” hearkening back to the abandon that prevailed in juke joints. “During that time when I used to play for nightclubs, they drink corn whiskey,” he says. “People come in and stay all night long, tell me to play the blues, and I played the blues too. Ole country, way way back old dirty blues. All night long. They be shooting dice, those women get drunk, three, four o’clock in the morning, those women would have me play some dirty blues. Stay up all night playing dirty blues. Have a ball all night. Daylight in the morning. Five, six o’clock, I was through, do it again.”

  When recording settled into Memphis, Mose went to Sun Records for a job, and he ended up sweeping the floor. “Cleaning up, stuff like that. I’d play a few pieces.” Sam Phillips auditioned him a few times and Mose lucked into the occasional released session (James Cotton’s “Cotton Crop Blues” and “Hold Me in Your Arms”).

  As you’ll hear during the discussion that intersperses Piano Man, Mose comes from another world. “He dead now,” becomes an all-too-familiar refrain. His mother is dead (his father, a gambler, was shot when Mose was eight), his brothers are dead, his sister is dead. His friends and his rivals are dead. Some of my interview, in fact, took place among the barely living, in a convalescent home with Mose seated at the piano in the activity room (he was the only one wearing shades indoors), and when he began to play, the number of wheelchairs in the room increased, the attendants passed out tambourines, and suddenly two doctors came rushing in because (I swear) a bedridden patient was up and dancing.

  There is nothing mournful about these blues. Mose Vinson absorbs pain, transforms it into music that, despite its sadness, evokes joy. Yeah, I got a pain pill. It’s about five inches in diameter, it fits into a CD player, and it’s got Mose Vinson’s name on it.

  THE FIELDSTONES

  After Mud Boy’s near riot at the 1977 Beale Street Music Festival, I tried to hit all the civic concerts. One blues band caught my ear at a downtown summer event as the 1970s were becoming the eighties. The group was tight, sounded modern and urban, but they also conveyed a strong sense of traditional blues. They told me their regular gig was Friday nights at the J&J Lounge.

  This was long before GPS was available. The phone book pointed me to Mississippi Boulevard. A more organized person would have brought a map. My friend Cam McCaa (a three-lettered poem of a name) and I crisscrossed streets until we found Mississippi, drove one way on it and then the other until we found the club. We returned regularly, never bringing a map, and never doing daylight reconnaissance.

  The Fieldstones recorded only two albums, both for the University of Memphis record label, High Water. That enterprise was fueled by ethnomusicology professor, author, and jug band revivalist Dr. David Evans. Were it not for High Water, many of Memphis’s great bands from the 1980s would have been lost. (On their million-selling album Raising Sand, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss recorded an almost-to-the-note version of the song “Let Your Loss Be Your Lesson” as rendered by High Water artists the Blues Busters.) The Fieldstones cut some very deep blues, a few tracks evoking their Saturday night gig. The release of the second album, Mud Island Blues, was subject to university budgets and delayed twenty years. Most of the band did not live to see it.

  That first
night I experienced them at J&J, the Fieldstones became one of my all-time favorite bands, and then their second home, Green’s Lounge, became one of my all-time favorite clubs. Both really spoiled me: They were that hard to beat and that easy to access. I cherished them in their time, bringing friends from all over to share the experience. Their demises—the band’s and the club’s—have been like the death of family, a yearning for one more experience, one more sound, one more moment in their presence.

  Got to Move on Down the Line

  Liner notes to Mud Island Blues, 2005

  My buddy Cam was already tanked when I picked him up just before the liquor stores closed. It was near eleven P.M. on a Friday night in 1980, summer, and we were driving from the more-monied suburban East Memphis to the less-monied inner-city neighborhoods we didn’t usually go to, looking for the J&J Lounge.

  “Hey,” I’d shouted the weekend before to a man who’d just left the stage at a Memphis blues festival, “Y’all sound good, where do you play?”

  There was only one J&J Lounge in the phone book, so, after buying a fifth of Kentucky Tavern, Cam and I set out. We found the J&J and would return often; the bar’s exterior was never well lit, and our landmark became a large Victorian home with red lights glowing from behind all the drawn window shades. You paid the cover charge and bought your beer in an anteroom; the club was through a door. It was hot that first night and we decided to cool off with a couple beers before we hit the whiskey. (Play it in any key—play it in whiskey!) We laughed when the barman, to our suburban white-ass surprise, set out two quarts. Me and Cam, with three bottles glinting in the club’s dim light, stayed popular that night at the J&J.

  The Fieldstones were in mid-set, their warm, welcoming blues—so narcotic—enveloping us. The stage, unlike the club, was not barely lit; it wasn’t lit at all. The music poured from the darkness like night from sky.

  The band moved to Green’s Lounge, where they developed an international reputation. It was not uncommon to meet people there who spoke no English but understood perfectly what was going on, and brought their own guitars to prove it. Green’s Lounge was nothing but a double-shotgun building made of cinder blocks, half the front dividing wall cut out to create a U shape, allowing more audience to see the band and easily reach the bar. Sometimes the kitchen served food. People were always dancing—real, real dancing, dirty dancing, leaving little room for imagination or for the neighboring couple. As Green’s increased in popularity, selling more quarts of beer, they got more popular with their distributor, and not long before the roof burned off, lighted beer signs were illuminating the dark corners, diminishing the mystery.

  The Fieldstones at Green’s Lounge. Left to right: Mr. Clean (dancing, left), Boogie Man (rear, of the Hollywood All-Stars, sitting in), Chester Chandler, aka Memphis Gold (guitar), Joe Hicks (drums), Lois Brown (bass). (Courtesy of Erik Lindahl)

  The band. The Fieldstones weren’t known for their solos. The music came out as a whole, even when one member stepped forward. Joe Hicks, the vocalist / drummer, used to say, “Time to move on down the line,” and he’d tap the snare a couple of times. He’d say it in between songs and always to start a set. “Got to move on down the line,” tap tap, and the Fieldstones would fall back to their instruments. Bobby Carnes played the keyboard, and he rarely spoke, leaning into those fat church chords instead, the ones still smoky from Saturday night. Lois Brown, she played bass and had a beautiful smile. If the band got hot, she’d tug a string for the ceiling fan without missing a note. Lois was tough, and when acting as the band’s manager, she brooked no jive. But her playing made the music lithe. She didn’t move a lot, a little rocking to the beat, but there was a touch, a jump to her jump, that made the bass—and that band—so sinuous. People who never danced would dance to the Fieldstones. One guitarist’s spot rotated, mostly between the soul band veteran Clarence Nelson and blues original Wordie Perkins.

  Toni the drummer, left, and Rose, the proprietress of Green’s Lounge. (Courtesy of Huger Foote)

  The star of the band was Will Roy Sanders. For a while, he got a job driving a truck and was out of town on many Saturday nights. Without him, the gigs were good—hell, if you didn’t know about the possibilities of Will Roy, they were great—but he could take the band to a higher, or lower, or deeper place. He had a long rubber face and he sang out of the side of his mouth; you could film a tight shot of him singing and, with the audio turned off, be entertained all night. He’d step up to the mic, wail out an opening verse or line or word (like he does on “Put Your Loving Arms Around Me”), and the band would kick in like your favorite tractor getting its first spark on a warm engine.

  For their third set, the band would invite guests on stage. Saxophonist Evelyn Young would often show up—the young B. B. King had modeled his guitar parts on her solos; Evelyn didn’t have to wait for the third set. Little Applewhite was a regular, but he never sounded more late-night than he does here on “That Ain’t Right.” A woman named Toni was always around, bumming drinks and dollar bills, sitting in on drums. One night, a wispy third-set bass player named Shorty who’d been sitting in for years sang a gospel song of such stirring beauty that the band had to quit for the night. Albert King sat in, Teenie Hodges, and a lot of those visiting people who couldn’t speak English. The Fieldstones made everybody sound good. Their blues swallowed you.

  Week after week they played world-class music until two or three in the morning. Whenever I took their Saturday night presence for granted, hearing them would refresh my wonder. For a long time, the oversight seemed indecent: Such huge talent, such obscurity. I wanted them to get wider recognition, to be heard by millions. But fame is relative, and in some ways this weekly gig was the best kind of success. It put extra money in their pockets, it gave them time in the spotlight, it drew people from all corners of the globe to their Saturday night home, to the community they had made within those unassuming cinderblocks across from the automobile graveyard.

  The years have not been kind to the Fieldstones. Making this music was not glamorous. The last time I saw Lois, her health was failing seriously; I heard she lost a leg to diabetes. Joe Hicks had a series of light strokes; Clarence died; Wordie sobered up and, I think, works in a factory. Last time I dropped Toni off at her place in the projects, she borrowed fifteen bucks and has been hiding from me ever since. Evelyn Young passed, Applewhite has had serious kidney trouble. After Green’s Lounge shut down in the mid-1990s, Will Roy purchased it and ran it with his wife, Dorothy. That’s when a fire shuttered it.

  I’ve waited nearly twenty years to hear this album. I bought their first one the day it came out, and it livened up many a party. Week after week I’d badger them for information on the release of their follow-up, and they’d say it was in the can and they hoped it would come out soon. Now that we’ve got it, here’s my suggestion: Get one forty-watt light, maybe two. You’ll need either a smoke machine or a convenience store’s worth of burning cigarettes, definitely a cooler full of beer quarts, also setups—a maraschino cherry on top of a hotel ice bucket, napkins stuffed inside tiny drinking glasses. Find a real diverse group of humans: large, small, very fat, quite skinny, black, white, others. Put a sign on the wall that says NO DOPE SMOKIN’, then ignore it. Hire a skinny old man you could push over with a sneeze, give him a loaded gun, and let him frisk everyone as they enter. Call me and I’ll pick up Cam on the way. Turn up Mud Island Blues. Dance.

  LEAD BELLY

  In addition to encounters with live musicians, I’ve also had good luck buying used records. The cover of Lead Belly’s Last Sessions, Vol. 1 features white-haired Lead Belly, eyes closed, face intent, and you can almost hear him humming. And how could a blues singer with a name like that be bad? It turned out to be not only an encounter with a folk music master but also an invitation to a private dinner that never ends, that never gets cold, that continuously whets my appetite.

  The more I learned of Lead Belly, the more my admiration grew. He came to the public’
s attention through folklorist John Lomax (and his son Alan), who first recorded him in a Texas prison, 1933; after being previously pardoned for murder, Lead Belly was in this time for a non-fatal stabbing. His relationship with the Lomaxes was complex and fraught. They managed his singing career and made him popular. They also hired him as their driver and valet. In a 1935 March of Time newsreel, Lead Belly wears prison stripes and is made to reenact his previous year’s liberation from jail into the care of the elder Lomax. It’s like the 1966 televised interview with the American POW in Vietnam, Jeremiah Denton, whose favorable answers about his responsible care by his captors were belied by his blinking in Morse code t-o-r-t-u-r-e. Lead Belly recites the script’s lines, but his exaggerated shucking and jiving conveys the relationship’s deeper truths.

  By the time of this recording, more than a decade after the newsreel, and only a year before his premature death in 1949 from Lou Gehrig’s disease, Lead Belly seems to have made his peace with the world (though not necessarily with his wife, Martha).

  Nobody in This World

  Oxford American, Summer 1999

  You are sitting next to strangers—on a city bus, or maybe in a doctor’s waiting room. The space is close and would be claustrophobic, but you begin to overhear conversation—a riveting tale, an old man’s life, a world away from your own. The one you thought was his son next to him, or his niece on his other side, are strangers, and this man is talking not to them but to everyone, and unlike the crazed rants from which polite folk avert their eyes, his story holds the room rapt.