Memphis 68

by Cosgrove, Stuart;

  The term had became a euphemism for blackness and black-owned businesses, and although it had been part of the vocabulary of African-American music for over a decade, the song secured its meaning around the world. Soul became not just a term, but a genre and then a movement. Despite all of their onstage demonstrations of togetherness and their clichéd commitment to ‘brotherhood’, Sam and Dave were never close, and finally split as a duo in 1970. Both admitted that performing the same hit songs time and again had been a contributing factor but they had precious few options other than to perform their hits, as drugs and fatigue ate away at their reputations. Their pathetic and soul-destroying feud, which had worsened when they were performing in Europe as part of the Stax/Volt tour, sapped their credibility with promoters and impeded their recording opportunities. When Stax and Atlantic parted company in the spring of 1968, it was the beginning of a long and humiliating decline. Because they were signed to Atlantic, whose contracts were now being pored over by new corporate lawyers, Sam and Dave shifted their recording base to New York City, but predictably they never managed to rekindle the unique chemistry they had found in Memphis. Although both brought out solo records, they failed to chart, and as the disputes festered neither found a way to reconcile. They spoke through intermediaries, often lawyers, and on the few occasions when money or a new recording opportunity brought them together again they were uncomfortable shadows of their former selves, refusing even to look at each other on stage. Sam Moore would later claim that they never spoke for over twelve years and did not even have each other’s phone number. The pair last performed together on New Year’s Eve, 1981, at the Old Waldorf on San Francisco’s Battery Street. By then, the show was drained of any real dynamism. Heavier than in their prime, Sam and Dave still insisted on ending with their signature routine, in which the duo danced face to face, reverberating like pneumatic drills. The sequence ended on an exaggerated handshake – one of the most contrived and dishonest acts of harmony in the history of soul music. They walked off stage and never spoke to each other again.

  Soul music’s dynamic duo came to a final and brutal end in 1988, when Dave Prater died in a car crash. By then he was performing in a bogus Sam and Dave act, having hired a stand-in singer, Sam Williams, to double as Sam Moore. The original Sam fought them in the courts to try to block the new act but his legal suit only injected more acrimony into the veins of a once proud R&B act. A year earlier, Prater had been arrested in Paterson, New Jersey, for selling a vial of crack cocaine to an undercover police officer. His life was spiralling downwards when his car spun off Interstate 75 near Sycamore, Georgia, hurtled sixty-five feet in the air, and ejected Prater to his death. According to the highway patrol, he was impaled in a pine tree. His ignominious end brought one of soul music’s most dynamic and troubled double acts to a premature and pathetic conclusion. At last, the fighting was over.

  Divine intervention. Snow besieges downtown Memphis, and Dr Martin Luther King’s planned march through the city is postponed.

  © Seth Rudy/Getty Images

  ALBERT KING’S STRANGE MORNING

  22 March

  Albert King had been drinking for six inebriated hours in a darkened room. He stumbled out to a scene that was both blinding and bizarre. Seventeen inches of snow had fallen overnight and, unusually for a spring morning, downtown Memphis was in lockdown. By mid morning all the city’s schools had closed and most stores had failed to open. Roofs and telephone lines had been felled by the weight of heavy snow and thousands woke up to power outages and no way of contacting friends, family or workplace. The major highways in and around the city managed to stay open, but in many cases they were impossible to navigate. Most side streets were blocked and abandoned automobiles lined the streets. The Sanitation Workers Strike only confounded the chaos. Streets were stacked high with rubbish, leaving little snow-capped hillocks dotted along suburban pavements.

  When King emerged from the bar-room in the early hours of Friday morning, he blinked through watery red-raw eyes and cursed under his fiery breath. A week ago he had appeared on stage at a fundraiser for the striking sanitation men, but now he yearned to be in a warm bed with Lucy by his side and a day of deep sleep to recover. He was a distinctive figure even in the most flamboyant of company, often wearing spats and a denim bib overall: one part gangster, the other part cotton picker. He had a pencil moustache that he shaved with a forger’s care despite the fact that his index fingers were scorched and scarred from stuffing burning tobacco into his old wooden pipe, which he smoked on stage like a demonic granddad. A giant of a man who stood six feet six inches tall, he was nicknamed the ‘Velvet Bulldozer’ and was known to carry a small handgun inside his bib or suit pocket. Although no one ever saw it, King, a born fantasist, often boasted that he had a sub-machine gun in his tour bus.

  King cursed his losses as he trudged home along Beale Street. It was not unusual for him to emerge into the sunlight bleary-eyed, hungover and beaten. He had played craps most of his life and had good fortune and bad. Like so many itinerant gamblers who sang the blues, he had lost more than he had won and fate meant he often lost heavily. According to Memphis legend, he was once forced to pay off a gambling debt with his most treasured possession, his trademark Gibson Flying V guitar, manufactured in 1959 by the legendary company in their sawdust plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan. King had loved the guitar like a girlfriend. Sometimes on stage, as he conjured a sound somewhere between blues and soul, twisting strings with his worn left hand, he could be seen kissing the brown walnut body and caressing the fret as if it were a naked neck. Although he had now secured another guitar – a gift from the Gibson company – King still yearned to be reunited with the original Lucy, and had recorded a song for Stax which was a paean to his loss – ‘(I Love) Lucy’/‘You’re Gonna Need Me’ was scheduled for release on the morning of 22 March 1968. Stax had set up a day of interviews at their studios on East McLemore and personal appearances at a bar on Beale Street, but most of the engagements were abandoned as the freak weather took its toll.

  The Sanitation Workers Strike had lasted for nearly two full months and was threatening to spread to other public service workers. The snowstorm appeared to be an act of divine intervention; as if the heavens had burst in support of the low-paid workers. More pressure was now unexpectedly heaped on the intransigent mayor, who since his investiture on the first day of the year had been forthright in his stewardship of public services, often demanding the unachievable and spurning reasonable requests to negotiate. Since the death of the two sanitation workers in the thunderstorms of 1 February, there had been several instances when a long strike could have been averted, but Loeb was determined to win at all cost and to drive the strikers into a humiliating climb-down. He consistently argued that the strike was illegal, and, although he always said in public that ‘this office stands ready . . . to talk to anyone about his legitimate questions at any time’, his words were always more emollient than his actions. On Tuesday 13 February, an International Union official flew in from Washington to meet with the mayor to discuss the core grievances, but Mayor Loeb provoked deeper resentment by threatening to hire new workers unless the strikers returned to their jobs. A small number of trucks left the Department of Public Works depot, but they met with fierce resistance and had to be escorted by the police as they attempted to collect over ten thousand tons of rubbish that was now piled up on the city’s streets. According to the labour academic Michael K. Honey, the snowstorm ‘seemed providential in some ways but in truth it proved a huge setback to the Memphis movement’. Plans for the march on what the press were calling ‘the Day of the Big Snow’ were abandoned, and the city was given more time to mobilise against the strike.

  The stand-off between Mayor Loeb and the striking sanitation workers reflected a much bigger divide than workers versus the boss. It pitted Memphis’s black community against the city and its prolonged history of segregation. On Monday 19 February, the local branch of the NAACP staged an all-night
vigil, picketing city hall on behalf of the strikers and widening their local campaign to a city-wide boycott of downtown stores and businesses. Congregations from the city’s churches were encouraged to show support for the strike. The Reverend James Lawson, a pastor at the Centenary United Methodist Church and a civil rights veteran, emerged as a key supporter of the strike. Lawson had studied nonviolent resistance in India and was a dedicated advocate of the Gandhian philosophy of peaceful protest, the strand of civil rights that had also influenced the Atlanta preacher Dr Martin Luther King. Lawson shared with King a deep-seated belief that as preachers they had to challenge the racial orthodoxies that ruled Memphis and to ‘desegregate the minds’ of their congregation. As the pace of 1968 gathered, yet another local preacher emerged as a leader of the city’s black communities. The Reverend Samuel ‘Billy’ Kyles, a pastor at the Monumental Baptist Church, had formed Community on the Move for Equality (COME), a collation of Memphis Christians who supported the sanitation workers. Kyles had forsaken a career as a soul singer for the church, having once fronted the gospel group the Maceo Wood Singers and shared stages with Sam Cooke and the Staple Singers. He had also been arrested earlier in the decade for refusing to sit at the rear of a segregated Memphis bus.

  On Sundays throughout the spring of 1968, ministers called on their congregations to join a series of protest marches planned for the weeks ahead. The church reached out to the music community, pleading with the city’s gospel choirs, high-profile soul singers and blues singers of Beale Street to sing their hearts out for the cause. Stax songwriters Homer Banks and Raymond Jackson reactivated their school gospel choir. Isaac Hayes, David Porter, O.V. Wright and saxophonist Ben Branch all supported the strike, and many more stars from the local soul scene responded to requests from the churches and showed up at an eight-hour gospel marathon at Mason Temple to raise money and morale.

  By late February, in a rowdy meeting in the council chambers, packed out by more than a thousand strikers and their supporters, anger overwhelmed the crowd, and police were called to clear the area. It was a prelude to the heightened violence and disruption yet to come. Mayor Loeb complained to the local press that his house was being targeted by striking workers and that windows had been smashed, scaring his wife and family. It was a story that unlocked a whole series of accusations against the strikers. Over one hundred strikers were ejected for staging a sit-in at city hall, students were arrested for picketing high schools in support of the strike, and nine demonstrators were arrested on the corner of Main and McCall and accused of intimidating shoppers during a downtown protest. Burning rubbish across the city was blamed on the strikers, although most of the fires had been ignited by teenagers and some were orchestrated by the Memphis Invaders. Students at Northside High School, near the giant Firestone factory, called for a walkout in support of the striking sanitation workers. More arrests were made at the Democratic Road Public Works facilities when picketers tried to prevent scab lorries from leaving the plant. Yet another activist minister, this time a young man known as the Reverend Harold Middlebrook, had led the demonstration. Middlebrook troubled the authorities more than the older preachers and seemed to be a bridgehead between the church and the city’s restless teenagers. He had been educated with Stax musician Isaac Hayes at north Memphis’s Manassas High School and he became a youth preacher and community worker at Dr Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. By March 1968, he was still clinging to the creed of non-violence but he’d become close to the charismatic John Burl Smith, a leader of the nascent Memphis Invaders, and led gangs of high-school students in a sit-down demonstration at the junction of Third and Pontotoc. They were arrested en masse for blocking the highway. The national media’s interest in the strike took on a new and hysterical tone when it was announced that Martin Luther King would come to Memphis to lead a march in support of the strike. The date was set for 22 March 1968. Pouring oil on already troubled waters and anticipating widespread social disruption, Mayor Loeb instructed the National Guard to initiate riot drills and hostile crowd training exercises.

  As Albert King trudged through the early morning snow, the Reverend Jim Lawson made frantic calls to Martin Luther King in Atlanta to stop him travelling. The sudden snowfall was so severe that the march on behalf of the sanitation workers was called off at the eleventh hour, although it was agreed to reconvene a week later, on 28 March. Reverend Lawson joked at the time that Mother Nature had fulfilled Dr King’s demands for a general strike but it was a joke designed to keep flagging spirits alive. Lawson had called in every favour he could. A long-time friend of Detroit preacher the Reverend C.L. Franklin, he had managed to secure a half-promise that Aretha Franklin, at the height of her creative powers and then the most famous soul singer in the world, would travel to Memphis to support the strike at a public rally at Mason Temple. But nerves were fraying, and the strike was facing a colossal challenge; the most committed supporters – other public service workers including teachers – had been issued with threatening notices that they would be sacked if they took the day off to support the strike.

  In a half-remembered conversation with staff at Stax Records, King had agreed to support the strike, too. In his mind he would headline. King had a habit of stretching the truth, and although he was never a pathological liar, he frequently imagined himself at the centre of things and was rarely burdened by the truth. He often claimed to be a half-brother of the more famous blues guitarist B.B. King, whose father was also called Albert, but it was a fabrication. King claimed that they had shared a similar upbringing in the small town of Indianola, Mississippi, in the Delta region that became the rural nursery of the blues, but they were not related. Early posters promoting Albert King often knowingly fed the distortion, listing him as ‘Blues Boy’ King to emphasise the B.B. Shadowing his namesake, Albert King even named his dearest guitar ‘Lucy’ after B.B. King’s guitar ‘Lucille’, and he rarely corrected anyone who made the mistake of thinking he was the real B.B. King or his lost brother. Although it was a small deceit, Albert King was not actually born in Indianola, nor was he actually called King. His social security card reveals his place of birth as the small cotton port of Aberdeen, Mississippi, a slave town hugging the banks of the Tombigbee River, and the name bequeathed by his father was Albert Nelson. He remained Albert Nelson for the first decade of his career and only when B.B. King emerged as a national blues star did he change his name.

  The blues had become synonymous with Memphis and its growth from a cotton trading town to a vibrant riverside city. King was part of a rich legacy of fanciful entertainers who dated back to the self-anointed father of the blues, W.C. Handy, a man who managed to turn poverty and suffering into a thriving business. His origins were primitive. His first trumpet was a hollowed-out cow’s horn with the tip cut into a mouthpiece, and he grew up making rhythm by scraping a nail across the jawbone of an old horse’s skull and playing with broken branches on old milk churns. Handy’s primitive instrumentation pointed forward to the jug bands of Beale Street and scattergun bands like Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers, who thrashed out dance rhythms on old pots and jugs, and foreshadowed the powerful percussion that marked out the Stax sound. Handy’s first professional outing was in a travelling minstrel show – the plantation burlesque shows that used racist stereotypes to entertain the landed gentry and, later, paying customers. As far back as 1837, there are records of Handy’s performances with Mahara’s Minstrels on stage in Sacramento, California, charming a mainly white audience, shaking tambourines and clattering old bones. It was when he wrote the genre-defining ‘Memphis Blues’ – a hymn to the demi-monde of Beale Street – that, according to the Republican politician Jimmy Quillen, Handy ‘professionalised’ the blues and carved the name of Memphis on the musical map. In a glowing congressional address, Quillen said that the song encouraged ‘a million jukeboxes to swell in a million hog-nose restaurants and chitterling cafés . . . It inspired jazz, rock and roll from which soul music came.’ But w
hat he did not say was that the blues was predicated on the deep-seated poverty of the southern townships in the aftermath of slavery. Equally, it was aligned to a calculating showmanship in which any of life’s setbacks, from blindness to syphilis and crippled legs, were turned into musical material. And every socially deprived environment, from the slave plantation to the prison yard, was evoked in order to bring suffering to the surface. Handy had led the way; then Sleepy John Estes, Furry Lewis, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and, eventually, Albert King became his distant and inventive descendants.

  According to King’s version of his own imprecise personal history, he was one of thirteen children born to an itinerant preacher who left his family destitute. The family moved briefly to Indianola, then with his mother, her two sisters and his rag-tag family he settled in Forrest City, Arkansas. He picked cotton, drove a bulldozer, and worked on highway construction before he became a musician. His first guitar was fashioned out of an old wooden cigar box, a tree branch and a strand of wire. Even when he could afford his first professional guitar, he carried it wrapped in a jute sack which had once held onions. Left-handed, he simply turned his guitar upside down and thereby defied some of the cardinal rules of conventional guitar playing. One of his techniques, bending the strings, became not only a trademark but a guitar trope that was to become a defining feature of blues as it surged forward into rock. Film actor Steven Seagal, an obsessive collector of blues guitars, now owns King’s ‘Lucy’ and once described it as ‘the most important blues guitar in the world, a voice from another planet. It has the most amazing tone and all of Albert’s energy in it.’

  King’s first band, In the Groove Boys, was based in Osceola, Arkansas, where he grew up as a teenager. After a brief spell in the early fifties performing with gospel group the Harmony Kings, he finally secured a paid job as a drummer for Jimmy Reed’s band. By then, King had moved north as part of the great migration and settled in Gary, Indiana, where he played poorly paid shows in the Rust Belt towns of the North East. But bad luck, aimlessness and a seemingly dated music style worked against him, and he drifted south again, this time to Memphis, where either by chance or clever contrivance he struck up a conversation with Estelle Axton at the counter of the Satellite Records store adjacent to Stax. Always fascinated by the vagaries of record sales, King asked Axton how blues records were selling. They exchanged opinions, and both came to the conclusion that there was still life in the old dog. Axton had regular customers who bought blues records religiously, but they also agreed that the genre had to move on from its sparse Delta roots and embrace the many changes that soul music had swept through black music. First among them was what Stax had perfected – a strong studio backing band that could add substance to songs: a metronome drum sound, solid bass and energetic horns. The conversation moved naturally to the idea that King could front such a session. It was the key to unlocking the most prolific period in his patchy life, and a seam of great records was mined, among them ‘Crosscut Saw’, ‘As The Years Go Passing By’ and the towering ‘Born Under A Bad Sign’, which King often described as his personal autobiography. It was a tale of hard luck and trouble, written by Stax’s most personable and morally reliable artist, William Bell, who composed the song in part to cash in on the craze for the signs of the zodiac. Nonetheless, King’s blues-soaked version became a worldwide hit and is now a staple of the blues guitar scene, having been covered by Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Etta James. Stax executive Al Bell saw a modernity that gave the time-honoured blues tradition a new lease on life: ‘Albert King has taken one extreme, the gut-bucket blues in its rural form, transposed all elements except its reality and added a touch of urbanisation, thus his style becomes contemporary.’ And in so doing, King had found a new audience, or what Bell called ‘a new breed, the hippies and the European. To them Albert King is the father of modern blues.’