Memphis 68

by Cosgrove, Stuart;

  When Bill Hurd returned to Notre Dame, his athletic career peaked, and he set no fewer than eight university records and was named Athlete of the Year for 1967–68. Narrowly missing out on what was destined to be the most politically resistant Olympics ever remained a sore defeat among many victories. He then followed the path of many sprinters before him and accepted an invitation to join the Fighting Irish and use his speed as a member of Notre Dame’s famous football team. He was back on campus watching television when Smith and Carlos took to the podium in Mexico to receive their gold and bronze medals for the 100 metres. The silver had been won by the liberal Australian Peter Norman, who as a mark of support accompanied the black athletes to the podium wearing the outlawed badge of the OPHR. Smith and Carlos came to the ceremony dressed to protest: wearing black socks and no shoes to symbolise African-American poverty and single black leather gloves to express African-American strength and unity. As the US national anthem played and an international TV audience watched, each man bowed his head and raised a clenched fist. Silence reigned.

  In his own inimitable style John Carlos has since described the tension inside the stadium: ‘You could have heard a frog piss on cotton. There’s something awful about hearing 50,000 people go silent, like being in the eye of a hurricane.’ Carlos was so concerned about the silence that greeted their stance he genuinely feared assassination. ‘I remember telling Tommie, “Look, man, if someone has a rifle and they’re going to shoot us, remember as sprinters we are trained to listen to the gun. So you keep that foremost in your mind.”’ The demonstration had all the dramatic street imagery of the Black Panthers and the Memphis Invaders, and the two were promptly banned for life, but the image of their medal ceremony resonated around the world and entered the iconography of protest. Although it is now seen as a momentous event in the politics of racial protest, at the time it divided opinion, even within the fractured black community, where some cautioned against any public demonstrations of anger or demands.

  According to Douglas Hartmann, the author of Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete, ‘it was a polarizing moment because it was seen as an example of Black Power radicalism. Mainstream America hated what they did.’ Pressure mounted on the US Olympic Committee. A spokesperson for the Olympic movement said it was ‘a deliberate and violent breach of the fundamental principles of the Olympic spirit’. The words had been carefully drafted by Avery Brundage, the doggedly unsympathetic president of the committee. In less than twenty-four hours, the US Olympic Committee ordered Smith and Carlos out of the Olympic Village. Smith never raced at international level again. Both men were sent into athletic exile, and in the case of Carlos his subsequent career was ruined. Stalked by the FBI for much of the remainder of his life, his wife committed suicide and his children carried the stigma, struggling to find work. ‘I had a moral obligation to step up,’ Carlos has since said. ‘Morality was a far greater force than the rules and regulations.’

  Bill Hurd’s remarkable athletic career took him back to his old school regularly, to reminisce about the old days and discuss the athletic records he had broken, many of which were still defiantly in place decades later. But more often than not, his memories drifted back to the other great love of his life: the brilliance of black music. If Booker T. Washington was the training school for soul music and Memphis funk, Hurd’s Manassas High School was synonymous with jazz and the marching band tradition. In the sixties, the pupils of Manassas were driven to new levels of musical sophistication by their tutor and band leader, Emerson Able Jr, a strict music disciplinarian and talented jazz saxophonist who once excluded Isaac Hayes from the school band for falling behind with his sheet-music reading lessons. Happily, the punishment never rankled with Hayes, who invited his old teacher to join him as a guest musician on-stage at Wattstax.

  Emerson Able’s father owned a store in a dank basement near Madison and Front, where he repaired and reconditioned brass instruments, particularly tubas, trombones and saxophones. It was those big meaty horn sounds that came to define the Manassas High School band and infuse the city’s musical style. Able famously applied emergency repairs himself, filling worn holes in saxophones with slugs of chewing gum. He pushed his pupils hard, using carrot and stick, and the reputation of Manassas, which was already huge in the Memphis area, achieved a national reach. Professional musicians and local studio heads often called at the school looking for talent. Willie Mitchell, the overseer of Hi Records, was a frequent visitor, and most of the Stax in-house producers drew on the talent academy. Among its most gifted former pupils were hard bop jazz pianists Phineas Newborn Jr and Harold Mabern, and trumpeter Booker Little. Newborn Jr was the musical talisman who tied the threads together and may well have been the greatest Memphis soul musician that never was, turning his back on the repetitive simplicity of funk for the technical complexities of jazz.

  Newborn Jr came from a remarkable musical family. His father was the drummer with the Plantation Inn house band, an R&B band which at its height featured Ben Branch and Willie Mitchell. The Plantation Inn was something of an institution for the enlightened and the curious. Situated on Highway 70, across the Mississippi Bridge in West Memphis, Arkansas, the venue dubbed itself ‘The South’s Finest Nightclub’ and with liquor laws more lenient than in Memphis the club became a magnet for the musically inspired and the underage. ‘When I was a kid I always heard about the Plantation Inn,’ Stax trumpeter Wayne Jackson told local newspaper The Commercial Appeal. ‘It was one of those places the adults went. They had linen tablecloths, good steaks and good music. Then as time went by, and we became teenagers, we would go and sit around and listen to the bands and the singing. They’d serve us a beer and look the other way. We thought we were big time. But we got to hear what was being played and fall in love with the music.’ The veteran producer Jim Dickinson went there as a young teenager. ‘There were times where I couldn’t get in,’ he recalled. ‘Like if I didn’t have a phony ID or something. So many a night I just went over there and got drunk in the parking lot, stayed in my car listening to the music, because you could hear it from outside.’ Dickinson is one of many who see the Plantation Inn as the real root of Memphis music, more important than either Sun Studios or even Stax itself. He has argued that Ben Branch and the Largos, for years the house band there, encapsulated what were the primitive origins of Memphis soul. ‘They were the single most significant influence on what became the Memphis sound. All of what became soul music was derivative of what Ben Branch and Largos were doing,’ Dickinson claimed. ‘But overall, the Plantation Inn itself developed a kind of sound . . . and how the same group of musicians developed a kind of interplay and a style.’

  The Plantation Inn house band, which sometimes went by the initials PI, took its name from the slave plantation era, and became something of a crossroads for young Memphis musicians, who would be required to play all forms of music from old dancehall standards through jazz to R&B, rock ’n’ roll and soul. Performing as underage musicians, they came under the brutal leadership of strict senior professionals such as Ben Branch, Willie Mitchell or, in the case of Phineas Newborn Jr, his own demanding father. Branch in particular was suspicious of young ambitious musicians. He turned down Isaac Hayes on several occasions and never fully acknowledged his talent, even at Hayes’ creative height. Unlike Manassas High School, which remained conservatively wedded to jazz and classical, still insisting that its students could read music, the Plantation Inn was an informal, sometimes reckless, hive of improvisation, a place where jazz became contaminated with the new forms of popular music.

  Drummer Howard Grimes, who became a mainstay session drummer at Hi studios, was another prodigy of North Memphis. ‘I went to Manassas High School, where I was under the teaching of the great bandleader Emerson Able. I never knew that he was in my corner, but he was,’ he told journalist Andria Lisle. ‘He’d take me on his own gigs at the Plantation Inn in West Memphis, and let me out of school at two p.m. so I could catch the bus o
ver to McLemore Avenue. But he’d never tell you how good you were – he’d keep you working as hard as you could to please him.’ In his own young days Able had been a disciple of the legendary Jimmie Lunceford, who had preceded him as a Manassas bandleader. Lunceford, the ultimate renaissance man, had joined the high school as an English teacher cum football coach but also organised extracurricular music classes. In the Depression era, he established a Manassas High School student band called the Chickasaw Syncopators, and then eventually left the school, taking many of his best students with him to form the world-famous Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra.

  The legacy of the Plantation Inn band and Manassas High School brought the best of North Memphis to prominence. Ben Branch went on to lead one of the great bands of the civil rights era, the Operation Breadbasket Orchestra; Willie Mitchell pioneered two eras of Memphis music, the up-tempo instrumentals of the sixties with Bill Black’s Combo, peaking in 1968 with his own ‘Soul Serenade’, and then driving Hi Records to new levels of success with the emotional soul of Al Green and Ann Peebles in the seventies; and Phineas Newborn Jr became one of the great figures of jazz (the respected jazz musician and writer Leonard Feather saying of him: ‘in his prime, he was one of the three greatest jazz pianists of all time’). But, like so many before and since, Newborn Jr struggled with substance abuse and nagging mental health problems that necessitated his incarceration in the Camarillo State Mental Hospital in California. Undervalued and out of the reach of the music scene, Newborn Jr returned to Memphis in 1968 but recoiled from invitations to join legions of his old friends who were earning money as session musicians in the Memphis studios. He struggled to earn money through music despite short residencies at the legendary jazz club Sweet Basil in Greenwich Village. Throughout his early years Phineas Newborn Jr had been the virtuoso most likely to find greatness, but he could never find it in himself to compromise, and he died prematurely, still doubting his own formidable ability and emotionally distancing himself from the story of the band he had once graced.

  * * *

  Bill Hurd’s athletic career faded into history, and he became a successful ophthalmologist, frequently travelling around the world to perform eye surgery on patients in Senegal, Mexico, Ghana and Trinidad and Tobago. Later in life he returned to the faithful friends in his life: the saxophone and the lessons he had learned at Manassas. Now an accomplished bandleader in Memphis, he has recorded four albums, one of which features the city’s finest vocalist, J. Blackfoot of the Soul Children. Another features the late Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire, and yet another stars his wayward schoolfriend Isaac Hayes. Hurd has reconnected with former pupils of Manassas High School, the irreducible thread that runs through the Memphis jazz scene.

  Hurd’s experiences of 1968 are inevitably framed by the photograph he never appeared in: the iconic image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, heads bowed in solemnity, their black gloved fists raised aloft. Of all the many images that 1968 gave to the world, this powerful statement of black resistance, beamed around the world, stood out as the defining image of the era.

  Gospel franchise. Mahalia Jackson, businesswoman and gospel superstar.

  © Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo

  MAHALIA JACKSON’S GLORI-FRIED CHICKEN

  November

  A stately voluptuous Mahalia Jackson emerged from the kitchen bearing a plate of her famous fried chicken. The cameras sparked into life, and Ernest Withers pushed his way to the front, tangled in straps and with his cumbersome Graflex Crown camera nestled in the palms of his hands. Jackson strode into the heart of her new restaurant and held the steaming plate of chicken aloft, teasing the photographers, as if fast food was cooked with sacred sauces and in the most celestial of kitchens. It was a press launch for Jackson’s soul food franchise, a series of restaurants that were briefly popular in 1968 before economic reality and poor distribution brought the venture crumbling to its knees.

  Jackson had been adamant that the restaurant chain respect gospel heritage and not exploit the name of the Lord, and so decided that the fascia of the fast food restaurants would be designed to look like a church and carry her name. She rejected several recipes and a host of terrible puns on the draft menu but agreed that the franchise could call its centerpiece dish ‘Glori-Fried Chicken’. An image of the gospel star hitting a joyous top note adorned the cardboard buckets of fried chicken. The design was far from original, being boldly derivative of the pseudomilitary gait of Colonel Sanders and his Kentucky fried chicken franchise, by then an institution in the white South. Jackson was a magnificent singer, a soaring contralto who remained fiercely loyal to gospel music throughout her life. A frequent visitor to Memphis, she was known first as a gospel star, then as a celebrity chef who specialised in southern soul food, and then as an astute businesswoman who made the clever decision not to invest in fast food but to license her image rights to others.

  There were four restaurants in different parts of Memphis, all of them in African-American communities, but the flagship had been cleverly located at Stax corner, which uniquely attracted musicians and journalists from all over the world. According to the African-American historian Alice Randall, ‘Mahalia Jackson sought to use franchise food as a kind of Trojan horse to introduce economic vitality into the belly of black communities. There was a bit of Marxism in her recipe. A bit of black Muslim self-reliance. And a whiff of gasoline.’ Jackson had secured a partnership with Gulf Oil, who stated in a press release at the time, ‘we are pleased to be associated with Miss Jackson, a respected and renowned personality, and her company. Since Mahalia Jackson’s Chicken System is black-owned, managed and staffed and is hiring in the communities in which it operates, Gulf hopes it is helping to provide blacks business and employment opportunities.’

  The issue of black-owned businesses had been a key plank in the civil rights movement for decades, but in Memphis the cause was magnified by a city-wide NAACP campaign led by Maxine and Vasco Smith, who co-ordinated picket lines at stores in predominantly black neighbourhoods. The most visibly successful protest was at the Bellevue-McLemore shopping mall, close to both the Stax studios and Jackson’s flagship chicken restaurant. The objective was to secure jobs and management posts in stores that had predominantly black clientele. As the NAACP jobs campaign gathered momentum and small but significant successes, by contrast Jackson’s venture crashed and burned. After the initial enthusiasm of the launch period, interest dwindled and a high-profile robbery at the drive-in restaurant on South Parkway had a negative effect on trade. By 1971, the managing company had filed for bankruptcy.

  Despite the commercial setback, Jackson’s reputation was unscathed and she was able to point to the noble ambitions of her Glori-Fried Chicken. The chain had been ambitious in its aims, offering jobs, decent wages, paid vacations, low-cost life insurance and major medical benefits to its employees. It was also in the ambitious process of building a management school for African-American recruits when the roof fell in. Despite her detour into the fried chicken industry, Jackson was at the towering height of her career as the most successful gospel singer black America had ever produced. It was hard earned, deeply deserved and had provided her with substantial wealth. She had received many approaches to convert her from her gospel roots, first to blues and then to sixties soul music, but had always refused. She believed that the church was something more than a place to worship and saw it as the great sanctuary of life and the breeding ground of the civil rights movement. Al Green was even more explicit: he saw the church as a social response to segregation, once telling Esquire magazine, ‘Church is so important for black people because it’s the only place we had to go when we couldn’t go no place else. Couldn’t go to the bar – wasn’t allowed. Couldn’t go to the hotel because we weren’t able to rent a room. Couldn’t go to the restaurant because we weren’t allowed to be seated. So we went to church.’

  On her long journey to fame, Jackson had sung in churches from the beating heart of the Chicago Sou
th Side to the flooding levy banks of Louisiana, and she had performed in Memphis on hundreds of occasions, staying at the Lorraine Motel in a specially sourced double bed. Across her remarkable career she had defied age and seen off a younger generation of female singers, including Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick and Gladys Knight, most of whom escaped to pop or soul music. Franklin had briefly threatened to steal Jackson’s crown when she signed for Columbia Records on what was euphemistically called a jazz contract, but Jackson knew that was just corporate code for pop and soul, and told people indiscreetly that the worm of fame was eating away at Franklin’s soul. It was never a happy relationship; the often dogmatic Jackson felt that Franklin had betrayed her sacred gifts to the music industry, and for the rest of her life she held her in silent contempt. Although they were civil and ambassadorial when they met, the painted smiles hid many bitter jealousies. Franklin, for her part, was equally scathing. She considered Jackson to be a conniving fraud, a woman too busy making money to make great music, and she had never quite forgiven Jackson for withholding payments that she claimed were due to her when they performed at a concert in Chicago at a time when both were established stars of the gospel circuit. Who could ever fathom the many mysteries of the gospel circuit? It was lucrative, bitchy and strewn with a sometimes bogus love for God. It was the Miami soul singer Paul Kelly who dramatically severed his links with the Christian gospel tradition when he released ‘Stealing In The Name Of The Lord’, a savage critique of religious parasites, false preachers and the furious commercialism of the new church.