Historian and critic Scott Saul, the main chronicler of Wattstax, claims that the subsequent movie was a significant breakthrough for African-American culture, too: ‘By cutting dynamically between music on stage and interviews over the course of the film, Wattstax establishes a sociological vision of the music: a vision that appreciates its artifice – its power as music and as costume drama – while grounding our understanding in the attitudes of the community from which it springs.’ The movie broke the rules and drew on a fund of dramatic community stories and great live music. The concert opened with Dale Warren’s ‘Wattstax Symphony’ and former Motown star Kim Weston’s haunting rendition of the national anthem ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. What followed was an explosion of styles and statements. Weston returned to the stage and sang the ‘Black National Anthem’ – ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’:
Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
The concert featured the very best that Stax could bring to the stage – new signings, talent from their newly forged labels, and the very best of Memphis music: the Staple Singers, Melvin Van Peebles, Jimmy Jones, Deborah Manning, Louise McCord, Eric Mercury, Freddy Robinson, Lee Sain, Ernie Hines, Little Sonny, the Newcomers, the Temprees, Frederick Knight, William Bell, Eddie Floyd, the Golden Thirteen, Rance Allen, David Porter, the Bar-Kays, Tommy Tate, Carla Thomas, Albert King, Rufus Thomas, the Soul Children, Billy Eckstine and Isaac Hayes.
For the Staple Singers, the theatrics of an open-air concert in California was neither new nor daunting. Since the early days of 1968, before they signed for Stax and throughout the Summer of Love, they had regularly appeared on stage for the coffeehouse hippies of the west coast, and appeared in concert with Jimi Hendrix, Love, Steppenwolf and Janis Joplin. The author Greg Kot, the biographer of Mavis Staples (I’ll Take You There, 2014), wrote that the family ‘found themselves immersed in a full-on psychedelic experience when they debuted on 18–19 April, at the Fillmore. The light show alone suggested a church of an entirely different religion, a collage of dancing liquid light and surreal images that mesmerised the audience.’ Later in the summer they were to reconnect with Janis Joplin at the Fillmore East and joined her on stage to sing the gospel standard ‘Down By The Riverside’. It was the Staple Singers who encouraged Joplin to record at the Stax studios for what turned out to be a fateful trip to Memphis towards the end of 1968.
Heading the bill was Black Moses himself – Isaac Hayes. Hayes’ performance, which parodied James Brown and the history of slavery, was a tour de force of musical self-confidence, the real meaning of Black Power. Scott Saul describes it in all its layered detail: ‘Isaac Hayes assumes the stage like a boxer entering the ring, wearing a full-length, swirling pink-and-brown cape that disguises the shape of his body. Then this “Black Moses” throws off his cape – and we see his body both triumphantly revealed and ceremoniously disguised again: topless except for a weave of gold chains, which extend down his chest, thicken into a belt, then descend to his knees; his lower half encased in skin-tight hot pink leggings. He’s a self-consciously costumed messiah – so free that he can flaunt the signs of his people’s slavery, so manly that he can use hot pink to draw attention to his manhood.’
The speeches were kept to a minimum, respecting the size and potential restiveness of the crowd. But one speech stood out and left the strongest surviving image of Wattstax: Al Bell on stage with Jesse Jackson and next to them a black senior manager of the beer sponsors, the Schlitz Corporation. All three have their fists clenched in the now familiar style of the Olympic Black Power salute. ‘This is a day of awareness,’ Jackson exhorted. Then he began to recite passages from ‘I Am – Somebody’, a praise poem written in the fifties by Reverend William Holmes Borders, the one-time pastor at Wheat Street Baptist Church, Atlanta, and an influence on Martin Luther King. It was a poem that was about to enter the vocabulary of soul music and the language of the street. By 1971 a song called ‘I Am Somebody’ was recorded by Johnnie Taylor at Stax, and then, as the phrase became absorbed in the language of everyday life, it influenced one of the greatest soul records of all time – Glenn Jones’ majestic ‘I Am Somebody (And The Universe Is Mine)’, recorded in 1983, a towering piece of gospel-inspired dance music which smacked of innovations to come in its samples of the voices of Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson advocating self-awareness and black pride.
Wattstax, and the film that it begat, became one of the most potent statements of black pride that soul music or Stax Records ever gave life to. But in time Al Bell’s thermometer, record sales and the success of Wattstax would be forensically analysed by the unforgiving tax inspectors of the IRS.
NOTHING BUT SOUL. Brenda, a young soul girl and resident of Resurrection City, outside her makeshift home in Washington.
© Jill Freedman/Getty Imag
JUANITA MILLER’S LONG WALK TO DC
12 May – 24 June
Juanita Miller was fearless in the face of authority. When she stood up, the tense muscles in her forearms seemed to swell, and when she spoke she seemed to grow a foot in size. Within a few days of Martin Luther King’s death, Juanita Miller found an inner strength, as if his death had given her an urgent responsibility. She became passionate to the point of obsession about King’s last campaign, the Poor People’s March on Washington. She hustled friends and neighbours day and night, standing up to the most vociferous voices in her ghetto community and telling them it was time to stop mouthing off, because it was time to march. She walked into the Invaders’ low-rise headquarters at 1310 Florida Street, stuck up notices, and told the guys hanging out there that if they really cared about social change they should get a mule. It became her main focus in life, apart from her children who were disabled and in great need of support.
Prior to his death, King had launched an innovative and ultimately doomed campaign to take the poor of America to Washington, where the plan was to build a city within a city, an encampment of tents, shacks and wooden walkways. It was to be the biggest civic protest in the history of civil rights and would guarantee coverage in the press and on television. The protestors were to travel to Washington by mule train, harking back to emancipation and to the rural poverty of the Deep South. Scheming away in the shadows, the FBI gave the Poor People’s Campaign the secret codename ‘POCAM’ and tried for months to undermine it by circulating false information, planting negative stories, and arresting local activists across America. Despite the reservations that many had within the civil rights movement and the slow take-up, even among the most politicised communities, King’s assassination had ignited a new enthusiasm for change. The protestors came in their thousands, from the dusty towns of the South and the simmering side streets of the urban ghettos. They came to live in a new community, part campsite and part slum, which went by the glorious name of Resurrection City.
As Memphis grieved, Juanita Miller got angry. She was only twenty-three years old, a mother of two children, and at the time she was drawing welfare. Everyone called her Nita and she became the only woman from Memphis to take on a management role within the Poor People’s Campaign, leading a team of nearly eighty mules and over forty wagons to Washington. ‘We felt like we could run our own lives, build our own community,’ she told the Memphis newspaper, the Tri-State Defender. ‘We might not have had the power, but there was no lack of desire of wanting it.’
Juanita Miller Thornton was born in 1942 and had grown up in devastating poverty, in a slum apartment on Beale Street, before her family were rehoused in North Memphis in an area known as New Chicago. She was a student
at Manassas High School, where she shared a classroom with the young restless ghetto kid Isaac Hayes. As Hayes’ life gravitated away from poverty towards music, Juanita was drawn to the politics of poor communities and the welfare rights movement. In 1968 another of her school associates at Manassas, the Reverend Harold Middlebrook, had recently graduated from Morehouse College, met Martin Luther King and briefly ran the SCLC’s offices in Selma, Alabama. Now back home in Memphis, the Reverend Middlebrook was an assistant pastor at Middle Baptist Church in Whitehaven and had risen to local prominence during the Sanitation Workers Strike when he served on the strike’s strategy committee. His job was to organise local young people and recruit teenagers to support the strike, and so Middlebrook became a familiar figure at Satellite Records and at the counters of Poplar Records at 308 Poplar, jive-talking with customers unfazed by his preacher’s demeanour and starched white dog-collar. It was Middlebrook who originally recruited Juanita to lead youth demonstrations downtown and picket stores on Main Street in support of the strike, and it was in the intense heat of social unrest that she met and joined the Memphis Invaders. Even at the height of the strike, her interest was not so much in industrial disputes or even Black Power but in welfare and disability rights. She was by now a single mother with a daughter who was deaf and a son who had multiple skin conditions, and they were barely surviving on welfare. One night, dragging her kids along with her, she attended a speech by Willie Pearl Butler, the female president of the Memphis Welfare Rights Organization (MWRO), who at the time was leading a residents’ rent strike at Le Moyne Gardens, a decaying public housing project where the gifted blues and soul singer O.V. Wright lived with his mother. That night, a light went on in Juanita Miller’s mind. She realised that she, too, had a hidden talent and the capabilities to be a female community leader. So, with no money and two children to support, she volunteered to lead the mule train. It was the beginning of big changes in her life. Within a matter of months she had become the first recipient of welfare to attend Memphis State University. ‘They couldn’t see that if you were on welfare you could have pride,’ Juanita told a visiting academic. ‘They are putting men on the moon but felt that paying a woman $97 a month was a lot of money.’
In the harshest ghettos of Memphis poverty was a stubborn presence. The city had long been compared unfavourably with Detroit and Chicago when it came to securing federal aid to combat inner-city deprivation. A major investigation in Memphis’s sprawling Southside exposed a systemic failure to secure increased funding from Washington, or from charitable trusts and foundations. Memphis was unintentionally concealing the real depths of its poverty: poor quality housing, rat infestation and, remarkably in the mid twentieth century, six cases of malnutrition among children. Newspapers followed up on the claim and exposed the horrendous lives of the James brothers, who, despite being on supplemental food programmes, were emaciated. Another newspaper reported on the truly horrific life of Mrs Donnie Posey. Confined to bed with cerebral blackouts, her battered refrigerator contained only half a jar of orange juice to feed ten children. She was a widow and had brought her children from a rural shack in the old plantation town of Drew, Mississippi, to Memphis in search of a better life. It was a fruitless journey.
Juanita Miller’s first job was to identify people from the Southside of Memphis who would join her on the ‘Long Walk to DC’. A few members of the Invaders signed up, but, keen to shift the focus away from youthful Black Power activists, she also encouraged local mothers and their kids to join the mule train and bravely convinced disabled activists to join her. One problem loomed large: where to find a mule? No one in the city owned one and those who had seen a mule talked about them as if they were from the dark days of slavery. But Miller was as good as her word, and with the clock ticking on King’s most dramatic idea, she led the Memphis mule train to Resurrection City. It was Miller, more than any of the city’s celebrated preachers, or the wild boys of the Black Knights, or the Memphis Invaders, who took an impassioned message to the highest seat of power in America.
It is not entirely clear how Nita’s plans converted to music but they did. Still grieving the loss of their spiritual mentor, the Staple Singers had the idea to record a tribute record, a song that could help his cause. After conversations with Ralph Abernathy it became clear that the most productive thing they could do was to bring attention to the Poor People’s March. Their first Stax recording, a rousing song called ‘Long Walk To DC’, was in many respects a throwback to the gospel origins of soul music and the early days of civil rights. With stirring tambourines, gospel hollering and powerful female vocals featuring sisters Mavis and Cleotha Staples, the song was both a commemoration and a call to action. Behind the vocalists and always at their shoulder was their guitarist father, the former preacher Roebuck ‘Pops’ Staples.
Around the time of the recording, Miller had gone to Stax studios to fundraise and meet up with her old school colleague Isaac Hayes. Word spread through the studios of her audacious plan to take mule trains from Memphis to camp out in Washington. John Gary Williams of the Mad Lads had by now been recruited into the Memphis Invaders, and some of their members had signed up to join the mule train. Homer Banks, a prolific writer within the Stax camp and a man who was always attuned to the city’s restless political culture, thought that marching on Washington was now such an established part of the grand narrative of civil rights that it was worthy of a song. Banks claims to have had the idea in his mind many months before, and initially intended the song to be a commemoration of Martin Luther King’s epic march on Washington in 1963, but the Memphis mule train brought the idea back to the forefront of his mind, and the song had already been written and recorded in a demo form when the Staple Singers signed for Stax on 25 July 1968.
With the clock ticking, Miller had to source old plantation mule trucks and farm vehicles, which had long since disappeared from the ghetto streets of Memphis. She had made contact with the grieving leadership of the SCLC, who told her that the local base for the march was in the tiny village of Marks, Mississippi, seventy miles due south of Memphis. It was where the southern leg of the march was scheduled to begin, and Miller was advised that it would help to launch publicity if the Memphis mule train could assemble there. The plan was to leave Memphis by mule train and farm carts, ensuring that local press photographers got powerful images of young ghetto radicals being driven to Washington surrounded by bulls, cows and goats. Then, when the press call ended, the protestors would decamp onto a fleet of buses and drive south to the national assembly point in Marks, which was at the time one of the poorest communities in the United States.
It was in a dirt-poor schoolhouse in Marks that Martin Luther King had first conceived of the idea of the Poor People’s March on Washington. King and Abernathy had visited the village a year ago and watched the children, most of whom were from illiterate families with no hope that parents could even understand their rudimentary homework, let alone help. It was the teacher’s job not only to teach but to nourish what was a depressed and emaciated class. ‘We watched as she brought out the box of crackers and a brown paper bag filled with apples,’ Abernathy wrote in his autobiography. ‘The children sat quietly as she took out a paring knife and cut each apple into four parts. Then she went round each desk and gave each child a stack of four or five crackers and a quarter of an apple.’ It was a scene that touched King deeply and nudged him away from core civil rights issues such as desegregation to the wider and more ingrained problems of poverty. ‘I watched with growing awareness of what we were seeing,’ Abernathy wrote. ‘This was not just a snack. This was all these children would be eating.’ When the two men drove away from Marks later that day, King in tears, they vowed they would return to shine a torch on the school and the grim lives of these children who were struggling to learn despite near starvation. Over time, the commitment to return evolved into a national campaign against poverty, and the mules that King’s car had to negotiate on the drive back to Atlanta bec
ame their symbol. Whenever King or Abernathy was called on to explain the Poor People’s Campaign they returned to the story of the ‘soul children’ in the school in Marks, Mississippi, and used their plight to arouse sympathy.
In January of 1968 King had made a speech to rally support for the campaign. In his sonorous voice, always heavy with dramatic foreboding, he spoke directly to the congregation and outward to the world: ‘We are tired of being on the bottom. We are tired of being exploited. We are tired of not being able to get adequate jobs. We are tired of not getting promotions after we get those jobs . . . And as a result of our being tired, we are going to Washington, DC, the seat of our government, to engage in direct action for days and days, weeks and weeks, and months and months if necessary, in order to say to this nation that you must provide us with jobs or income.’
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