Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  An old wooden barn leans. A white horse swishes its tail. Otha’s mule brays.

  A fife and drum picnic. There may be five or fifty-five people milling about, blacks, whites, others. In 1970, fife and drum music was being played in Waverly Hall, Georgia, and in Otha’s area around Como, Mississippi. The tradition seems to have withered in rural Georgia, but at today’s picnics in Mississippi, when Otha Turner blows the dust from his cane with a flourish of trills, generations of Turners can, like the shamans, create spiritual music that divines the self from the self.

  The side yard at Otha Turner’s during a picnic. From left, Lonnie Young, Chip Daniels (with microphone), Kenny Brown on porch with guitar, Otha Turner (overalls, back toward camera), Cedric Burnside on drums. (Courtesy of Yancey Allison)

  Drums is a calling thing. The mighty pounding rings out through the dark Mississippi night, drums chasing the fife like dogs on a rabbit, and people step outside their homes and know Otha’s having a picnic.

  Neighbors and friends materialize from the night, appearing first as the sound of crunching gravel, then as shadows on the dirt driveway, then fleshed beneath the electric lights that Otha has strung through his side yard. Beneath the lowest branches of giant trees, the yard has an embracing warmth, becomes a lair.

  The picnics start on a Friday evening and end sometime on Sunday. On Friday, a couple goats will meet a hatchet, and the horse and the mule sigh with relief that they were not on this earth as goats to become three-dollar sandwiches at Otha’s picnics.

  Friends have already started to collect, though it is just midday and the picnic hasn’t actually begun. Moonshines are compared. The goat must be barbecued, and with it a pig. A load of beers must be purchased for resale that night, some off-brand sodas, never enough ice.

  Otha is ninety years old and powerful. His friends call him Gabe, like the archangel who blows the horn. His daughter Bernice has been playing since she was a child, and her teenaged sons—Andre, Rodney—and her nephew Aubrey (everyone calls him Bill)—they all blow the fife and beat the drums. But when it comes to family fife blowing, no one blows like granddaughter Sharde Thomas, who is eight and has been blowing the fife since she was five. She stands firm-footed like her granddad, holds the fife with authority, and blows “Shimmy She Wobble,” which also happens to be the first song Otha learned.

  The community gathers for a fife and drum picnic. (Courtesy of Yancey Allison)

  “I was about sixteen years old [making the year about 1923] when I started blowing the cane,” Otha told Luther Dickinson, his friend (and producer of this fine album). “It was an old man they called R. E. Williams, tall slim man. We would all come out of the field when it rained, too wet to pick cotton, and he’d be at his house blowing the ‘fice.’ I didn’t know what it was. I say, ‘Mr. R. E., how you make that? Will you make me one?’ He say, ‘Son, if you be a smart, industrious boy, listen to your mama and obey her, I’ll make you a fice.’ I wished it was tomorrow but it was about four weeks, he say, ‘Here your fice.’ I say, ‘I sure do thank you.’ He say, ‘You ain’t never gonna do nothing with it.’ I say, ‘But I’ll try.’ He say, ‘Well son, don’t nothing make a failing but a trying.’

  “Everywhere I got a chance, I be trying to blow that cane. Mama say, ‘Put that dad-blamed cane down, I’m tired of it.’ Mr. R. E., he turned around blowing the cane and I just stood there watching him. And I learned how to blow it. I made my own songs.

  “Then there’s a man called Will Edwards, he owned some drums. One day, we heard ’em, say, ‘Mama, I hear some drums.’ She say, ‘Y’all do your work, get ever’thing done so we come home tonight, I’ll give y’all a bath and carry you up there.’ We say, ‘Yes ma’am, yes ma’am.’

  “We do our work, she give us a bath, and we go up there. There’s people standing around, old men down there playing drums, putting drums between their legs. They say, ‘What you looking at, son? Getting down ain’t it? You want to try it?’ I say, ‘Yes sir.’ He say, ‘Boy, don’t you bust my drum.’ I say, ‘No sir.’ I got that drum, mess around, be playing all around it. ‘Listen at him, Will, listen at him, that boy yonder playing that damn drum.’ After a while, he say, ‘All right, young man, you been raring for this, you got a job, you one of my players.’ And I started playing with other peoples. Guys found I could play the cane, they be hiring me, carrying me to different places.

  “Then I say, ‘I’m gonna buy me some drums and start giving picnics.’ My kids say, ‘Daddy, you gonna do that? You got nobody to play.’ I say, ‘I’m gonna hire somebody to play.’ So I did, and my daughters, they kept a’watching me and wanting to try it. I say, ‘Don’t bust it!’

  “So I was down at the field and I heard the drums at the house. I came back, asked my wife, ‘Who’s that messing with my drums.’ She say, ‘That’s your children.’ I say, ‘You mean to tell me that my children messing with my drums? Y’all go get the drums and bring it out. I wanna see can you play.’ They got them drums and played them drums. I say, ‘Well hooray for y’all!’ ”

  In 1997, nearly all the fife and drum players in north Mississippi have learned from Otha Turner. Nearly all, in fact, are his kids, grandkids, some cousins, and lots of neighbors.

  Every good session begins with Otha berating the drummers for playing too fast, or for playing too slow. He’s got to whip the fire into them. He assembles each lineup like a barbecue chef selecting spices. He knows the nuances between the older players and the younger, between each individual. They’ll beat the drums for a five- or twenty-minute stint, and everyone soloes and everyone plays together.

  The players exchange instruments throughout the night, but performing at any one time there is usually one marching band bass drum, two snares, and a fife. Otha makes his fifes from cane the length of a bamboo segment and a half; they’re longer than a foot but not by much. He bores out the middle with a poker heated on coals, then, by sight, bores five fingerholes. The drums are shouldered with straps, allowing the players to snake slowly when playing. Otha’s fife is always kept handy in the back pocket of his overalls, at the ready like nunchucks.

  The trance music begins as imperceptibly as a breeze, the sound of someone testing their instrument. Is it still there? It is still there. Another asks, Is mine still here? Mine is still here. Someone laughs loudly, buys another beer at Otha’s makeshift bar, yells, “Play that thing.”

  Otha Turner made his own instruments from cane. He played smoking fife, 1998. (Courtesy of Bill Steber)

  The crowd gathers, thicker suddenly, as people spill from the darkness. Otha begins to march and the drums follow. Not fast. Not slow. Snaking, people fall in behind them and beside them, arms raised overhead and swaying, hips shaking over the county line, forth and back, side to side, grinding and doing the do. Men hump the drums and women hump the drums. The crowd shouts, spurring the players to take them higher and further, spurring the dancers to shake with more abandon. A lady in her sixties throws herself in a push-up position and makes love to the earth.

  The sound goes through us and reverberates off the trees and in the hollows all around. We are at the mouth of a cave. We are in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, on a second line in New Orleans, the funereal spirit entwined with the life spirit. “The old people taught me and told me that that was African,” says Otha, “that way back in Africa, you played drums if somebody died. At the funeral, they would march behind the casket to the cemetery.”

  Time blurs. The drum pounds. The fife hypnotizes, human breath through an ancient piece of wood. Serpentine goes the line behind Gabe, serpentine. “You makes a fice do what it do,” says Otha Turner, and he has the wisdom and the calluses that confirm this simple statement. “You know your cane with your fingers. You put that cane up and start to blowing, and you can put what you got through your mouth into that cane. The fice ain’t got but two whistles to it, high and low; you got to catch something yourself. Then know how to know it, then blow it. You got to be patient with it. Yo
u gots to know how to know it.”

  MAMA ROSE NEWBORN

  The more I learned about the great jazz siblings Phineas and Calvin Newborn (and about their bandleader father, Phineas Sr.), the more I realized what a force their mother was. Both Phineases were dead—her husband and her son—and I realized Mama Rose (as everyone called her) was living quietly in the South Memphis house that Phineas Jr. bought her in 1956. I knew she had stories, so I got her number from her surviving son, Calvin. She invited me by.

  I wrote this piece but never submitted it for publication. It’s hard enough to find a magazine interested in obscure musicians; an article about the mother of obscure musicians? I couldn’t face the odds. I wrote it for myself, then tucked it away. I paid her an honorarium for her time, which was the honor I cared about, and the one she did too, since publicity couldn’t help with her heating bill.

  Useless Are the Flowers

  Previously unpublished, 1993

  The sun came up on the morning of May 26, 1989, and when, around six A.M., it illuminated the sagging front porch of 588 East Alston Avenue in a crumbling South Memphis neighborhood, it shone like the spotlight that had always eluded Phineas Newborn Jr., seated in a chair outdoors and dead. Junior—as he was known to friends and family—had that night, as most recent nights, haunted the doorways of nearby Beale Street, then returned to the house he’d purchased for his parents more than three decades earlier, when his musical star was ascending. That was before he’d recorded his first album and when word of his awesome talent was being spread by awestruck musicians like Count Basie and Lionel Hampton. This night, he returned to his mother’s upright piano and then retired to a porch chair in the pleasant Memphis dawn, where his soul departed from his fifty-seven-year-old body.

  A few nights before his brother died, Calvin Newborn was awakened during the wee hours to hear Junior sitting at the piano. “I lay there and tried to figure out what he was playing and how he got that sound,” Calvin recalls. “It was so eerie because it sounded like single notes, but he was playing fourths. The notes were so together it took me a long time to figure out what he was playing. He just played it once, that was all he played.

  “Later, my mother said he was playing ‘Going Home,’ and I knew he was sending a message. He knew he was going.”

  “It’s some rough sides to these mountains, I’m telling you,” says Mama Rose Newborn, wife of the late Phineas Newborn Sr., mother of Junior and Calvin. “Yeah, man, I’ve come up some rough sides of the mountain, but I’m a happy old lady.” Mama Rose is a petite woman, diminutive in body but gigantic in spirit. She is not a bitter woman, though she mourns the loss of her husband and her firstborn son—and each before their time. Phineas Sr.’s orchestra was, beginning in the 1940s, one of the most influential in Memphis. Among the artists who went through his band were saxophonist Hank Crawford, who became band director for Ray Charles during both “What’d I Say” and Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music; trumpeter Bowlegs Miller, whose own band became a starting point for many Memphis soul greats (including the Hi Rhythm Section, who would eventually be the core of Al Green’s hits); Robert “Honeymoon” Garner, a stalwart Memphis jazz organist; and Herman Green, who played behind a young B. B. King and alongside John Coltrane. About his father, Calvin said, “He made Elvis dance and elephants dance. If you had a heart, he’d make you dance.”

  Junior, who was fluent on tenor sax, trumpet, and vibes, in addition to the piano, began touring at the age of sixteen. As a teenager, he joined Lionel Hampton’s band. At twenty-five he made his album debut with Atlantic Records and that same year he stole the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival; he collaborated with Charles Mingus on the soundtrack to the 1959 John Cassavetes film Shadows. Before he was thirty, he suffered his first nervous breakdown, and thereafter, mental hospitals became as routine in his life as recording studios.

  Phineas Newborn Jr., circa 1956. (Courtesy of Preservation and Special Collections Department, University Libraries, University of Memphis)

  Mama Rose, as she is known even to people whom she’s never met, is seated in the living room of the small Alston Avenue home. There are handkerchiefs drying over the gas heaters, a couple crumpled one-dollar bills stuffed for all the world to see into the stockings that she wears. She has on a housedress and a colorful African hat with vertical stripes. “There is so much you don’t know,” she says, referring both to people in general and to me specifically, “could make another world.”

  The front room to Mama Rose Newborn’s home is filled with posters, awards, citations, photographs, album jackets, a piano, and other memorabilia of her husband’s and sons’ careers. This assemblage is for herself, because she is proud. “The public don’t recognize them like they should,” she says, “but I don’t worry about it. I would like for them to, but I know how the trends and things are.” She reaches to a table beside her chair and pulls down a large Bible, turns to the inside cover, and reads aloud the following notation, one among many: “Bill Monroe, fifty years ago got a prize on Grand Ole Opry. August 1991.” Then she adds, “They still honor him. Things like that is something that a lot of people forget. People ain’t thinking about what was. Thinking about what is.”

  Calvin Newborn has a gig in Memphis. He is seated on a stool so near the front door of the soul food restaurant that when customers walk in for dinner, the door almost bangs his guitar. The restaurant seats about twenty-five people. Calvin’s accompaniment is a boom box. A karaoke version of “Feelings” comes on and Calvin shuts his eyes and plays mellifluous jazz guitar, singing the words so softly that not everybody in the small place can hear. He gives the song his all, much like he will at a gig in Chicago a few months later, where he will command a nice fee and draw a sold out crowd, and much like he will every night for a year when he’s playing show tunes on a tour of Europe in the orchestra of a Broadway musical.

  Unlike his brother, Calvin was not a prodigy. He knows the ticking of years that precedes proficiency, a knowledge that helped him falter not at all in his more recent pursuits of painting and writing. His book of his family’s history, As Quiet as It’s Kept!, includes some reproductions of his paintings. He also recorded some of his finest guitar work ever on what will surely be a hard-to-find and underappreciated CD by Herman Green, Who Is Herman Green? His Music, Worthy of Note.

  Calvin, who has lived all around the world but keeps a room at his mother’s house, now also has a studio apartment of his own in public housing at the end of Beale Street. He can be seen on some evenings darkening the same doors his father and brother passed through decades ago, occasionally playing on the bandstands where their legends still cast a shadow. Some of the club owners know who he is, but many of the bouncers see him as part of the rabble they’re paid to keep out. One young band, FreeWorld, often honors him with a spot on the stage next to his old friend Herman Green. Calvin’s legend is widely known, but he himself almost always requires an introduction.

  “My husband and I came to Memphis with nothing but traveling trunks,” says Mama Rose. “Up from Whiteville, Tennessee, where we were born, and we got a room in Orange Mound [Memphis’s first suburban development built for African Americans]. We were poor people, and my husband had a bike. The trolleys was running on Southern Avenue, and he would take that bike up there and catch that streetcar, let it pull that bike all the way to State Normal [now the University of Memphis]. My husband was the cook’s helper there; he was a good cook. And on his way back, he’d do the same thing. Later we moved from Orange Mound because he wanted to get uptown, close to the music.”

  Calvin Newborn at home, 2002. (Courtesy of Chris Floyd)

  Memphis was a place where, with a little ingenuity, small means could be grafted onto bigger ideas. Each family had been musical, the Murphys—Mama Rose’s side—in the small farming community of Whiteville, fifty miles northeast of Memphis. And near Jackson, Tennessee, Phineas Sr.—he pronounced it with a long i and spelled it Finas on his bandstand and bus—and his bro
thers played in the high school band and at church, where they also sang.

  The legacy began at least one generation prior, with Mama Rose’s father playing guitar in the Church of God in Christ. With a long cord between his guitar and amp, he could wander all over the room. “Calvin’s grandaddy would play gospel songs in church,” says Mama Rose. “He didn’t play this other music. He had the guitar, and you know how sanctified folks do, he’d be jumping up, hollering ‘Glory!’ and ‘Hallelujah!’

  “That’s where Calvin got his movements from. He never seen him, because their grandaddy passed away a long time ago. But that’s why Calvin’s got to move. It was just in ’em both to move! And it was in their daddy and me too. I used to dance and play the piano, played organ at church. Just music lovers.”

  Just music lovers, loose in Beale Street heaven: block after block of clubs, filled at night with big bands and small combos, a mix of local musicians and touring acts like the Brown Skin Models, which was a medicine show with long legs as the cure-all.

  Beale Street was a place for jam sessions, for cutting heads. If you thought you could do better than someone on stage, then the bandleader, the band, everyone in the audience wanted to know. Because no one was settling for second best. Finas’s route into the coterie of players—and ultimately to the superior position of bandleader—began by challenging another drummer to let him beat the skins. He also worked as a roadie for the bigger shows that played the grand Malco Theatre at the corner of Beale and Main (now the Orpheum). Finas was a man who wanted to immerse himself in music.

  “We’d keep up with who was coming to town and we would come uptown. He had a cousin lived up here; we would stay overnight, and, honey, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, all them old musicians, my husband would help take out their instruments and get us some passes. He played drums with lots of ’em. I met ’em all.