Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  Feathers speaks conspiratorially when discussing why fame has eluded him. Sam Phillips passed on his “Tongue-Tied Jill,” so Charlie took it across town to Meteor and had a minor hit. “Sam said he was going to hurt me, and he did,” says Charlie. “He said that because I left after Elvis left. He could see hisself going out of business.”

  The reasoning seems far-fetched; Sun still had Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis on its roster. But Charlie is ablaze, his face all the redder against a full shock of white hair and thick white sideburns. He accuses Phillips of withholding his best material. “Sam’s-got-the-main-cut,” he says about songs recorded thirty-five years ago, believing they’d be hits today if Sun would turn them loose.

  For the first time in decades, as many people as desire can hear his new album. Charlie Feathers is a slam-bang rockabilly record, pairing him with former Sun session men. It’s got its feet in the past and its head in the present. “We Can’t Seem to Remember to Forget” mourns the passing of rockabilly, Feathers singing, “That time it slipped away / And that’s something we don’t want to forget.” The irony is that Charlie wanted to record it with his son Bubba’s band, giving it a more modern punch.

  Feathers’s voice is itself like a band. The hiccups, yips, and other vocal eccentricities punctuate his lines like guitar fills, adding depth and excitement. He keeps your attention by switching from a growl to a whisper. (“That’s your rockabilly when you slow it down, lower it. The dynamics. Music is made to make you sit up, so damn much stuff going on.”) His oddest vocals are on “Uh Huh Honey”—he begins in a voice thick and deep, then takes an inspiration from Ralph Armstrong’s piano solo and leaps into a tone like helium escaping from a Donald Duck balloon.

  But Feathers is not all gimmicks. For the verses to Hank Williams’s “I Don’t Care (If Tomorrow Never Comes),” Charlie contrasts the weary tone of a downhearted, abandoned man against a tender but propulsive rhythm section (Stan Kesler, a regular Sun bassist, and J. M. Van Eaton, Jerry Lee Lewis’s drummer); at the chorus, he gives the song a twist, looking on his loss as a freedom and singing like a new man. Chris Isaak’s guitarist could take a few lessons from Roland Janes’s swampy vibrato.

  Feathers is the first to admit—to insist—that Charlie Feathers is not a pure rockabilly album. “Rockabilly ain’t got room for drums,” he says. “That train song, ‘Pardon Me Mister,’ me and my son Bubba run through it down there and it was so outstanding with just the rhythm and the electric guitar. They put the drum on it and killed it.” All songs deserve such delightful and exciting deaths.

  Beneath the tree in his front yard, Charlie has turned the rocker so as not to spit tobacco juice on his guest. He is still talking about the possibilities in rockabilly, illustrating it with a dream project of recording an album of ten different versions of “Roll Over Beethoven.” “They say [on the Charlie Feathers liner notes] I won’t do a song twice the same way. Yes I will, if they say that’s the way they want it. I’ll do it another way if they don’t say nothing. I could cut ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ ten different ways with ten different voices. I can mess around with a song, man.”

  Charlie Feathers at home on his porch, relaxed and comfortable. (Courtesy of Trey Harrison)

  “He’s so far into music that he is, in my opinion, a genius,” says Ben Vaughn, who produced the new album. “Like we think of jazz greats: Sun Ra or Mingus or Monk. No one expects an abstract thinker to come out of rockabilly. But that’s exactly what Charlie is. He’s never given up on rockabilly, and he continually redefines it in his mind.”

  Feathers remains a devoted apostle of Elvis Presley, despite his contentions of unrequited appreciation. Challengers to the throne are met with disdain. “Elvis sang so damn hard, man. People think of the Beatles and all that—ohhhhnnn. Any mama that washes dishes in the kitchen could sing the same way the Beatles did. ‘La la la.’ It’s not singing from down here [the guts]. They could stand there and sing thirty days and thirty nights, and never hurt theyselves.”

  Charlie pauses, and when he continues, his voice is lower, softer, as if someone might overhear. He told Ben Vaughn that Elvis was half African American, and he tells me, “The truth never came out about Elvis. I don’t believe Vernon was his daddy. He kicked Vernon out of the house the minute his momma died. Elvis wasn’t black-headed, you know that. He had albino hair, yellow as a baby duck. He’d play a show, the minute the show would end, he’d run to the bathroom, wet his hair down with water. If it started drying, it’d kick up like a little yellow baby duck. That’s the truth. And his nose was down just like that, flat. I think he done something to his nose later on. I don’t want to say too much about it.”

  (Courtesy of Trey Harrison)

  Beads of sweat have formed on Feathers’s forehead, whether from the afternoon sun or the heat of the conversation. Rosemary Feathers, Charlie’s wife, has served us sweet tea and the ice is now melted in the glasses. A bird dog in the neighborhood is baying and it sounds like a car alarm. “I’ll always write songs,” says Charlie. “I’ll be laying in there and I know damn well I’m asleep, but a whole damn song will go through my mind. I open my eyes, by the time I get up, damn, somehow or another it’ll slip away from me. There must be another world beyond this one. There’s got to be, man, I don’t understand why I can’t quit.”

  In this other world, rockabilly is king and Charlie’s ideas are respected and appreciated. It’s a world where Feathers is Elvis and Elvis lives behind the Rebel Inn. The tone of his voice reveals his conviction.

  “Craziest damn thing I ever seen is this music business,” he says. “You don’t think nobody cares, and yet you meet people from all over the damn world; they come here and they care and they know. I don’t understand it, man, I do not understand it.” Then he gets a twinkle in his eye and the waning excitement ratchets up a notch. “I got a song that Dean Martin could sing and it would be a smash hit. I got one right now that Jerry Lee—I went out there and give it to him. He never listened to it, he never heard that son of a bitch. In two weeks’ time, I guarantee that he would have a number one hit in the nation …”

  Charlie phoned me immediately after the piece had run. In Memphis, the local weekly ran it as the cover story. He hemmed and hawed, mumbled some. I could tell he was bothered and tried to draw him out. He said, “You’d better talk to my wife.”

  Rosemary Feathers got on the phone and gave me what for. She didn’t like the way I’d presented some of Charlie’s ideas about Elvis’s parentage. Did he say that to you? she demanded about his assertion that Elvis was half-black, her question getting exactly to the crux of the matter, and I admitted that he did not, he only implied it. I drove there immediately. Charlie was in the front yard on a lawn chair beneath the tree chewing tobacco. Aw it’s awright, he told me, and I apologized again for my slight. Rosemary had appeared outside, and I can’t recall if she also said it was all right, but the way she stiffly walked back inside let me know that it wasn’t.

  Eight years later, a small label in Austin, John Fahey’s Revenant, compiled and issued most of the singles from Charlie’s early career. Titled Get With It: Essential Recordings (1954–69), it is a beautiful package, with a booklet featuring many photos, and liner notes from Peter Guralnick, Nick Tosches, Colin Escott, and Jim Dickinson. The two CDs present Charlie’s genius in a shimmering light. His voice, his voice, his goddamn voice. It sounds heavenly, it sounds Hawaiian, it’s a violin, a saxophone, it’s a perfectly tuned instrument that he lets waft in the warm breeze. The fiddle bow draws across the strings, the metal slide on the pedal steel yodels with glissandos, and Charlie pinches his vocal cords, managing a high pitch from the bottom of his gut:

  I’ve been deceived

  There’s no use denying

  I was fooled by kisses

  Your sweet talk and your lying

  You can throw around your comparisons to Hank Williams and Bill Monroe, but you don’t need to know the sound of anybody or anything except for birds si
nging in trees to appreciate the purity of Charlie’s voice. He’s about art, not about blasting rave-up energy. Charlie Feathers vocals are sculptures.

  Charlie, built stocky and broad, what you might call a powerhouse, could be feisty and uncooperative. He’d been through the record business ringer, a major talent who managed not to get real heard. He got early guitar tips from Junior Kimbrough, a bluesman who would achieve prominence in the 1990s. As kids, they both hung around the Slayden, Mississippi, cotton gin where the older Junior showed Charlie some licks. When Charlie was nine, he saw bluegrass greats Bill Monroe and Clyde Moody perform in a tent.

  The blues and the bluegrass set him up perfect for Sam Phillips, who had recorded Howlin’ Wolf and Junior Parker, and would soon find Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. Charlie was at Sam’s Sun Records in the very early days. He could be cantankerous; not being able to read or write compounded his frustrations. He didn’t feel like Sam gave him the proper push, and Charlie went through Meteor, King, and some smaller labels, even winding up with Sam Phillips again at Holiday Inn Records. The music was great throughout Charlie’s career, the distribution was not. He jumped around a lot.

  With this new release, I wanted to visit Charlie again, but I was intimidated by my past errors, and by Charlie’s wife, Rosemary. I needed the connection that my friend, photographer Trey Harrison had—he had the power of the pig. “After the Revenant release I called him up,” Trey relates, “and talked to him about coming to his house to make some pictures. He was resistant, and he said, ‘You got to talk to my manager.’ While I had him, I mentioned this duplex where I used to live, and that Charlie’s son Ricky lived on the other side. Charlie said, ‘Ain’t that where Ricky had that pig?’ I said, ‘Yeah, Ricky and I buried that pig in the backyard.’ Charlie goes, ‘Why’nt you come over tomorrow about ten o’clock.’ ” It was set. I’d ride with Trey.

  Charlie lives in a small post–World War II-era house in a neighborhood right off the Memphis highway that leads to the north Mississippi hill country where he was born. He’s lived there long enough that people driving by slow down and call his name. He greets them all with a wave, and sometimes a few words.

  “You seen Marshall?” one asks.

  “Ain’t seen Marshall,” Charlie answers.

  As the car drives away, Charlie says, “That boy Marshall, he’s messed up on drugs.”

  We sat in the living room for a while. Charlie wasn’t much interested in talking about old songs. But he was enthusiastic about the duplex. One morning, Trey found his front door open and his six-year-old son seated on the porch next to Charlie Feathers, who was wearing big pink slippers and had just come out of the hospital, where one of his lungs had been removed. Trey did not interrupt their discussion.

  Charlie also remembered sitting on that duplex porch. He faced an awning across the street that he’d hung when he worked for an awning company. “Would have been in the forties,” he told Trey. Rosemary’s voice piped up from the other room: “It was the fifties.”

  Charlie was ready for a chew, so we retired outside. He had an old wooden rocking chair on his porch that hadn’t moved for a thousand years. Charlie sat in it and reached for his pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco. Trey reached for his camera.

  “I wouldn’t stand there,” Charlie told Trey. “That’s my spitting spot.”

  Trey took several giant steps in the other direction, and then Charlie settled in. “A chewing man attracts women like no other,” Charlie said. “They just swarm you, man. Women love it. I think it’s the smell or something.”

  Charlie was relaxed. His Red Man was handy, his previous pouch twisted and empty nearby. He talked about fast-pitch softball and drag racing. In passing, he mentioned that the rockabilly era was very competitive. “It was a style,” he explained, almost a formula to which songs had to adhere. Trey asked him what he thought when he first heard Chuck Berry. “All our jaws dropped,” Charlie said, “when we heard his guitar.”

  Trey snapped some photographs. I mostly observed. It was August, and hot, with Charlie sometimes shooing away insects, saying, “I guess they want their picture taken.” After about half an hour, Charlie stood. He’d loaded up that spitting spot; it was all wet. He said, “Well I guess you got it by now.” We thanked him. He said to Trey, “I’ll tell Ricky hi for you. I’m gonna go sit in the air-conditioning.”

  Less than two weeks later, Charlie Feathers suffered a stroke and fell from the rocking chair. Several days later, on August 29, 1998, he died. The funeral was held in Holly Springs, with a Memphis burial. There was no Charlie Feathers Day. The funeral wasn’t broadcast live on the radio. Celebrities did not rush to town. Charlie was buried like he lived: surrounded by those who loved him.

  After the period covered by the Revenant CDs, Charlie Feathers released occasional recordings on a variety of labels in a variety of countries. He traveled to Europe, where audiences appreciated what Americans had dismissed.

  Dean Blackwood, from the Revenant label, remembered preparing for Get With It by going through tapes and tapes and tapes Charlie had in a closet. “He was worn out and so was I. We didn’t expect to find things quite so consequential. But we found the tracks he recorded with Junior Kimbrough, which are included in the package.”

  The Revenant release came about two months before his death. “He was excited by the response,” says Blackwood. “He wouldn’t admit to it, and he groused and grumbled, but he was excited to have people care. Whatever role he did or didn’t have with the Sun sound, he’s the real deal. When it comes down to what’s there in the groove, he’s as good as anybody that ever did it.”

  Ricky Feathers in the front yard of the duplex, frying a late-night supper. (Courtesy of Trey Harrison)

  Trey says Ricky Feathers used to go fishing all day, and when he’d come home at night, he’d fry fish on the duplex’s front porch, shaking it up with flour in a brown paper sack to coat it. “He had a big metal bowl full of oil and he ran a line from a propane tank in the back of his pickup truck. He always parked right in the front yard. It was a red truck, with flames painted on it.”

  Ricky had learned hospitality at home. I remember the smell of food in Charlie’s house, and I can visualize Rosemary in the kitchen. Their house seemed real comfortable, everybody happy and surrounded by good scents. Seems to me it was pies, but it may have been fried fish.

  JAMES CARR

  Vocalist James Carr was revered in Japan, Europe, all over the world—except at home, where he was just another minority dude on welfare. When my friends at Easley-McCain Recording alerted me that he was coming in to record, I landed an LA Weekly assignment and made the ten-minute drive to James’s garden apartment. There was no garden, not a flower to be seen; all the doors opened from a common exterior walkway that overlooked a train track. James was pleased to have company, to be recognized by a Memphian for his artistic merits. I was honored to give him that recognition.

  James was known to suffer from mental health issues. I’m unaware of any formal diagnosis, but in my encounters with him, it always looked like he needed medication or was on something heavy (and not necessarily prescribed). The recording sessions proved both thrilling and disturbing—it was magnificent to hear him break open his voice when he would, and it was unsettling to see how, echoing the words of one of his earlier hits, messed up his mind was.

  Way Out on a Voyage

  LA Weekly, May 22–28, 1992

  When it was built in the 1950s, Memphis’s Mid South Building was probably stylish and sleek. Today, the blocky turquoise exterior pales next to the snap of the nearby fast-food joints. The elevator moves slowly to the third floor. The hallway to the Goldwax Records office feels institutional, with no natural light and a musty smell. The tiled floor reflects the dim ceiling lights. The yellow paint is not sunshiney.

  The walls of the office are mostly bare, the blue carpeting subdued. The fax machine in the corner seems like a futuristic anachronism. Only the large coffee table littered with
music magazines indicates the nature of the office’s business. That, and the two men who now run the company, Elliott Clark and Quinton Claunch.

  Quinton Claunch’s Blue Seal Pals were a radio country and western band, not unlike the Slim Rhodes Band, seen here on their 1950s Memphis TV show. (Radio was much less of a production.) (Courtesy of Preservation and Special Collections Department, University Libraries, University of Memphis)

  Quinton Claunch founded Goldwax in 1964, at the same time that nearby Stax Records was breaking out with Otis Redding. By then, Claunch was established in the local scene as a radio musician, Sun session man, and producer of regional hits. Though he’s played and performed all his life, Claunch would be the first one in a crowd of a thousand people you’d assume was not in music. Coke bottle glasses and arms crossed uncomfortably, he speaks in a Mississippi drawl that is at once rushed and clunky. His tan polyester pants and plaid shirt are more suited to his forty-three and a half years as a tristate supply company salesman, peddling steel products, heating and air-conditioning supplies, and sheet metal. Nothing about him indicates a man who discovered and produced some of the greatest soul voices ever recorded. Claunch’s Goldwax originals included the Ovations, who achieved brief fame with “It’s Wonderful to Be in Love”; Percy Milem, whose “I Slipped a Little” was recently revived as a beach music hit; and Ollie Nightingale, a vocalist who later had modest success on Stax. Some of O. V. Wright’s early material belongs to Goldwax as well, including “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” which was promptly covered by Otis Redding at Stax. Goldwax has an impressive roster, but what gives it real weight is the presence of James Carr.

  Carr’s place in soul music history is assured with his 1967 original version of “The Dark End of the Street,” the version to which all others are still compared: