My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire

by Maurice White

  As I approached high school, my hair started to get darker, turning from blond to brownish red, and became less straight and kinkier. Thank God! This was a big deal to me. I was tired of being teased. Around this time I started to become popular, since I played the drum kit at school. I got good pretty fast. The drummer is the jet engine of a band. He holds the groove and controls the pace. I could push the other musicians forward or break them down to a whisper. This made me the musical captain. I had power and control, and I liked it—I liked it a lot. Between my changing appearance and newfound sense of power in banging on the drums, I felt blacker, hipper, and less like an outsider.

  Music. The word became the glue between myself, Booker T. Jones, and David Porter. We started to reveal our dreams to one another, and music was blossoming into our shared destiny. Every performance each of us had together or apart sparked our imagination about the next gig.

  David had been in singing groups since junior high, which made him all the rage with the girls. My love for the Spaniels and, more importantly, David’s popularity with the girls made me want to form a singing group with him. The Marquettes consisted of David Porter, Tyrone Smith, Robert Davis, and myself. We entered many talent shows. Tyrone was a short guy who had a piercing tenor voice. He would sing so velvety that the girls would lose their minds. Like many boys my age, I heard those girls’ screams as the ultimate seduction to stay on the stage.

  The talent shows at Booker T. Washington High School were like Hollywood coming to Memphis for us kids. Many of our dreams of stardom were born right there on that stage. It was a beautiful auditorium, and the stage seemed professional, with lights that flipped out from the floor and more lights hanging from the ceiling alongside the curtains. The auditorium was made for show business.

  Music education classes were just starting in black schools when I was a boy. It began with singing folk songs in elementary school. In middle school there was a choir class, where we would perform for different events. In junior and senior high we graduated to band, where we could pick an instrument and learn how to read music. Music education gave us discipline, increasing our concentration skills. Music education also gave me an appreciation for all that is beautiful in the world. Understanding the mechanics of reading music—the soft tones and hard tones—built my sensitivity. It also gave me and many black kids of the early 1950s in this music city of Memphis, Tennessee, dreams. Would any of us become the next Drifters or the next Spaniels or the next Big Joe Turner?

  During this time, Booker T. kept prodding me to play more and more drums and do less and less singing with the Marquettes. “You should hang around older musicians,” I recall him saying to me once. It was as if he was calling me into being more serious about music. Singing for us came natural, but to be good on your instrument required practice and time. With Booker’s push, I started to play not just in school but also in other spots around Memphis. I worked for a funny dude named Squash Campbell. His group was called Squash Campbell and the Mad Lads. My gig with them had come about because their drummer, Joe Dukes, was leaving.

  “Hey, boy, I hear you’re getting pretty good on the cans,” Joe said.

  “I’m trying,” I responded.

  “Don’t say you’re trying, just say I’m good.”

  “OK. I’m good.”

  Joe laughed. He had a wide smile framed by a perfectly groomed mustache.

  Joe was a first-class drum-playing cat. He quickly became my idol. He lived four doors down from me in the Lemoyne Gardens projects, and I’d see him going out to gigs in a tuxedo—the first live black man I ever saw in one. Besides his fierce drum playing, he could also sing. Joe had a vocal quartet called the Four Dukes, and they’d sing at the VFW, Elks, and other social clubs. He was the most respected musician from my neighborhood

  Joe’s powerful personality exemplified strength, but his temper generated conflict. He had quit a lot of gigs because of his hot head, and I would be right there to pick up the leftovers. I followed in Joe’s footsteps for some time, and I longed to take his drumming ways to heart. Joe was old school. A showman. A ham. He knew how to bring a crowd to its feet with his beats, and yet he played the drums melodically. He took time to carefully tune his drums. Watching Joe play gave me permission to be even more expressive, because his approach was so unique.

  The Squash Campbell gig launched what I would consider my first fully professional job. Squash was a tenor sax–playing fool with very strange mannerisms. He could contort his body so that it seemed like he was having seizures. It was cool to his fans, and allowed him to hustle a lot of gigs. As a result, he received the opportunity to play at colleges like Mississippi State and a bunch of others in the Tennessee–Mississippi–Alabama–Arkansas corridor in the late 1950s. Squash was also positive and encouraging. “Boy, you got the stuff,” he said to me a lot. His confidence in me made me want to reach higher with my playing, so I became a bit flashier, with my trademark stick twirling and moving my body to the groove. But most of all, Squash taught me the valuable lesson that I could be a bandleader if I could hustle gigs and keep a band working.

  Later that spring I came home from high school and found Mama on the floor in serious pain. Her teeth were clenched together, and she was moaning not loudly, but deeply. This pain was incapacitating. “I’ll be all right, Sandy,” she insisted, but I knew she was only trying to put my mind at ease. She looked helpless, lying on the floor, propped up at the end of the couch. I sat beside her quietly, the only sound her moaning. I felt vulnerable, my mind racing. Was she really sick? Who was going to take care of us?

  I knew I had to do something. Within a week I got a job delivering papers for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. My route was long, taking me across the railroad tracks into the white part of Memphis. Without my bike, I could have never pulled it off. When I got back home, I told Mama, “I got a job, and you don’t have to work anymore.” She protested, but I proclaimed, “I won’t allow it, Mama. That’s that!”

  A little over a month later, standing in our living room, the windows open to the sounds of other kids my age outside playing, I handed Mama the rent money. Her chubby hands reached out and received it graciously. I felt older in that moment. I didn’t have the wisdom to articulate it, but something significant had changed in me. But if the test of a man is to provide for his family, I guess you could say I became a man that day. Giving Mama the rent money was like a rite of passage. I bought the groceries, continued to pay the rent, and started to learn how to budget. Although Mama got a little better over the next few months, we pretty much existed on the money I made from my paper route and the growing cash I made from playing with Squash Campbell and the Mad Lads almost every Friday and Saturday night. Dad sent Mama money from Chicago too.

  I quickly learned that my budgeting skills left a lot to be desired. That summer, after getting the paper route, I was able to make a $30 down payment on a drum set—a beautiful Trixon set of gold drums, which the jazz great Lionel Hampton endorsed. I really wanted those drums, and was excited when I got them. Two weeks later, the next payment came due, and I didn’t have it.

  The owner of the music store came knocking at my door, chomping on a foul-smelling cigar.

  “Do you have the money, son?”

  “Sir, I just need two more weeks, and I promise I’ll have it,” I pleaded.

  “Sorry, son, rules is rules.” He snapped his finger and pointed inside the apartment, signaling for his worker to come in and repossess the gorgeous set of drums. The worker, a black man, felt bad for me. He didn’t say a word, but he knew I was almost to the point of tears. Watching him pick up that drum set and carry it down the steps was heartbreaking. I will never forget that feeling of loss. I was hurt, but I tried to act like I wasn’t. I kept it all locked up inside. I went back to my makeshift drum set, with its mismatched bass and snare drum, and borrowing what I could from school. Damn!

  Part of being a black man in the mid- to late 1950s in Memphis was the way the whit
e establishment did everything it could to impress upon us that we were not men at all. This reality crystallized for me one day while I was delivering papers on the white side of town, slinging them from my bike. Dusk was falling fast when these cops slowly drove up beside me.

  “What are you doing over this side, boy?” they said.

  “Delivering papers,” I responded, my voice low.

  With that, the two cops got out of the car and started beating my ass. They said nigger this and nigger that and how they were going to teach me a good lesson. When they finally stopped, they calmly got in their cruiser and slowly drove off. I could hear their laughter fading as they got farther and farther away. Once I got up, I just stood there sweating and shaking in the cool evening air. I had urinated on myself. I vowed that if I got stopped again by the police, I would run and cut through somebody’s backyard. The fear haunted me for several months. Abuse of black men was a regular occurrence in Memphis. The white power structure had a steel grip on us black people. You could get your ass beat bloodied raw for no reason whatsoever—just another day for a Negro in Memphis.

  The beating shaped my attitude and understanding of my environment. The racial tension in Memphis was evident in every aspect of life. Memphis was still very much segregated in 1958. There were nine black police officers, but they were not allowed to arrest white folks. At the time, blacks were organizing, fighting to join unions to get better jobs in the factories. Some police brutality was a backlash against the progress blacks were making in standing up for their rights.

  Although adjusting to being the breadwinner of the household was difficult, I was finding a lot of musical opportunities. In the late 1950s, the Memphis music scene was booming. There were many places to perform, all centered around Beale Street. As in most American cities, there were areas where black folks gathered. Beale Street was the Harlem, New York, of Memphis, Tennessee, and something more—it literally meant music. Memphis is the birthplace of the blues, and consequently the birthplace of rock and roll, and Beale Street is its womb. Jazz, soul, early rock and roll, rockabilly, and blues were all there. Music was just like water and sunshine in Memphis: it sustained an essential part of life. Young and old, everybody talked about music, from the corner store to the shoeshine stands to the barbershops to the bus stop.

  Radio was just as crucial. On Saturday nights I sat on the floor listening to King Biscuit Time with Sonny Boy Williamson, airing on KFFA from Helena, Arkansas. WDIA played blues and gospel; WHBQ played rockabilly and blues. Saturday-night party music and Sunday-morning gospel songs on the Hammond B-3 organ were a big part of black culture back then.

  I became obsessed in particular with WDIA, which became a part of my daily life. WDIA was the first radio station in the country completely dedicated to black music. It boasted 50,000 watts and could be heard all the way to St. Louis in the north and to the Gulf Coast in the south. Rufus Thomas was a DJ there. B.B. King’s career started there. I loved every minute of what was coming out of my little radio from WDIA. Nat D. Williams, the main DJ, was hip, and even the gospel DJ, Theo “Bless My Bones” Wade, was a character. The radio was on WDIA in the apartment every morning and every night till Mama said, “OK, Sandy, turn it off.”

  I wanted to be part of the music world that I heard on WDIA, and in that pursuit I continued to find an ally in Booker T. As a result of our shared shyness and love of music, Booker T. and I were becoming as thick as thieves. He would stop by my apartment on the way home from high school, and my place became our main hangout. We also befriended a great young piano player named Richard Shann. This trinity, Shann, Booker, and myself, were buddy-buddy, sharing the same likes and dislikes for all kinds of music. Our friendship seemed like a big step toward our creative expression, personal growth, and psychological intimacy. I was excited to discover jazz. Icons like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane blew our young, fertile minds. In our idol worship, we were laying the groundwork for who we would become as young adults, and later as men. Music wasn’t just our world—it was our universe.

  Booker and Shann were instrumental in expanding my musical education, playing jazz records for me that I couldn’t afford to buy the way they did. Even when we weren’t together in person, we talked about music on the phone every day. Shann was the first to turn me on to Art Blakey, Roy Haynes, Max Roach, and the one and only Elvin Jones—the top drummers in jazz, bar none.

  My obsession with music accelerated a deep personality change in me. This period was one of the few times in my early life when I felt naturally outgoing. Maybe it was in comparison to Booker’s very laid-back demeanor, but during our conversations about music, for the first time I started to feel comfortable in my own skin. I felt comfortable playing the drums. And the way we talked about music—with the energy that only youth can bring—took me to a higher level of self-acceptance.

  We formed a little combo with Shann and started rehearsing in Booker T.’s den. His parents were so supportive. His dad would pick me and my drums up from Lemoyne Gardens and drive me to his house, or to gigs in such towns as West Milford, Arkansas, while Mrs. Jones would make sandwiches for our travels. Booker T. Jones Sr. never missed an opportunity to tell me about the importance of education. If it wasn’t education on his mind, it was people like Jackie Robinson or Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes when we couldn’t get Mr. Jones to take us, Booker T., being a faithful friend, would carry the drums down my steep apartment steps to Mississippi Street and all the way down to Beale Street, then up the stairs to the VFW club where we often performed.

  Booker and I formed several groups in those early days of high school, in addition to the combo with Shann. In every group, Booker T.’s musical role was undefined, because he could play damn near everything. By now Booker T. was clearly the most talented and proficient young musician in and around Memphis. We had a nucleus of young musicians—Louis Keel on sax, our pal Rudy on trumpet, me on drums, and Booker on everything. We played for just about every dance, talent show, sock hop, or school event associated with Booker T. Washington High.

  Together with David Porter, we had a built-in fan club that followed us to other performances. It was sooooo cool. We would put on performances downtown at Ellis Auditorium, sponsored by the school, big events with dancers and intense choreography.

  Yet despite all the gigs we played, jazz, by my senior year in high school, had become my passion. The freedom of expression in jazz, with its complex chord changes, rose high above what I considered the “commercial” music world of 1960. Everyone had the 45 “The Twist” by Chubby Checker. I was mesmerized by Art Blakey’s 1960 album The Big Beat. By this time, Booker T. was fully committed to the piano and organ. We formed yet another group, a so-called jazz band. We stretched out and experimented musically, enlisting an older cat named Tucker who had more experience in jazz than Booker and I to play bass with us. He had an amplified upright bass, so everyone could really hear the bass, which was unusual. This combo felt like the culmination of all the musical training I had. I knew jazz was the top of the mountain.

  In the spring of 1961 I graduated from Booker T. Washington High School. That day would be one of the most traumatic moments of my life. There I was in my robe on the auditorium stage, where the graduating class stood in those days. I looked out into the audience, and sitting in the front row, dead center, was my birth mother, Mother Dear, staring at me with a strong, purposeful glare. She looked just like me, and it was intimidating. I had not seen her in six years, since that brief trip to Chicago, and I had no idea she was coming. My scant memories of her exploded. She represented gaps, empty space, and emotional and psychological holes. I was flustered. I didn’t know what to feel. Happiness? Sadness? Hope? Fear?

  At the end of the ceremony she pulled me aside. “I want you to move to Chicago. I want you back, Sandy.”

  Her voice had a tone that I didn’t recognize. It was not motherly; it was more like a sibling or a friend. She also sounded needy. All I knew was that it
was a ticket out of Memphis. I had no problem leaving. I was tired of the racism—from whites and from blacks, because of my fair skin. My spirit stood ready.

  I had to get my stuff together pretty quickly. I felt as if I were packing myself into that round arch-top wooden trunk. The drumsticks, the shabby clothes, the music lesson books, the snare drum, the records, the one or two pictures I had, and the scrapbook that contained all the programs I played on at Booker T. Washington High—all the little pieces that had become my life since Mother Dear left fourteen years earlier.

  Surely, there were people I would miss. I had a girlfriend, DJ, who I was crazy about. DJ was the cutest girlfriend I ever had. She was a short, sexy, high-yellow thing with a smoking body. Her butt was big and beautiful, just perfect. She loved that I played the drums in my flashy way, which I’m sure had been a factor in my overcoming my shyness to first ask her out.

  Also, David Porter and Booker T. and I were the closet things to blood brothers that I knew. They represented my musical family—my real family. I think my leaving was tougher on Booker and me than on David. David was more outgoing and had a wider cache of friends. That wasn’t the case for Booker T. and me. Booker and I were such close friends that every girlfriend he had I knew about, and vice versa. We were kindred spirits and similar in our dispositions. There’s a quality to those formative years that’s deeply bonding. It’s different than the friendships you have with people you meet later in life, in college or early adulthood. My friendship with Booker and David is imprinted on my soul—it can’t be erased. I was happy for the unknown new life awaiting me, but sad to leave my soul brothers.

  A week later, when it was time to leave, I went to say good-bye to Mama. She sat there quietly as I stammered over my words. She kept her head down, not looking at me. I initially thought she was hardly paying attention. But when she looked up, I could see she was devastated. At that point, in 1961, I was her caretaker and the breadwinner. I believe she’d never thought Mother Dear would come back for me. I knew her health was deteriorating, but I didn’t know to what extent.