Time Is Tight

by Booker T. Jones

  MEMPHIS—Summer 1951—2

  As I finished second grade, going on seven years old, one of a few public spaces available to blacks in South Memphis was Lincoln Park, which also happened to be the site of my first kite contest. Before participating, I had fashioned a kite from newspaper and balsa wood sticks. It was held together with glue and had a bright blue tail made from Christmas wrapping ribbon. That early June afternoon, a light wind quickly and gently lifted my kite up close to the puffed-up, milky clouds that were waiting in the warm blue sky. It joined the flock of other kites erratically swaying next to each other.

  I was so excited for the contest. There was food out on tables, booths with crafts, games, lots of people, and a large band playing on a covered stage. At the time, I had advanced from flying kites purchased at the drugstore to flying ones I had built in a large field behind my friend O. D. Adams’s house over on Orleans Street.

  Months of effort went into making my kite for that afternoon, but in an instant, none of that mattered. Serendipitously I wandered over to the stage where Al Jackson’s band was playing. The blend created by the string bass and Al’s kick drum hit repeatedly in my chest, like the dreams I’d had of music late at night in my bed. I was swept away in wonder at the sound of brass instruments dancing with wood instruments. My kite-making friends stayed behind, holding tightly to their strings, not noticing I let mine go. My kite wafted and glided upward while I also floated, just in the direction of the music, my feet skipping. After all that work, the newspaper kite was whirling, escaping, vanishing from sight.

  The first big band I had ever heard live overwhelmed me with excitement.

  The leader of the band was a slim, well-dressed older man. There were five saxophones in the front row and trumpets and trombones behind them. There was an upright bass, a piano, and a guitar. And there were drums with a very young man behind the set.

  I didn’t have much to say about the kite contest to my parents when I got home, just that I had heard a band playing in the park.

  My parents already knew of my passion for music and, from the time I was very young, supported my endeavors in the discipline. Our small Edith Street house was built in 1945 and was only thirteen hundred square feet. The piano was in the living room, not far from my parents’ bedroom. They never complained when I played into the night.

  My success as a keyboardist comes from my attempts to emulate and duplicate my mother’s style. She was a loving person and bequeathed to me many portions of her musical makeup. She birthed all of me, physically and musically.

  The way she played the piano sunk into my being. I was born listening to her. When she sang at church, the room quieted as she gave renditions of gospel pearls and classic arias.

  I got a double dose. People at church also requested my father, Booker T. Jones Sr., to sing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” a cappella. There were no dry eyes when he finished. His sterling tenor voice, with its vibrato and sincere delivery, ensured that.

  While I was only three or four when Mama sold her old upright piano, the missing instrument left a gaping hole in my heart. Even if I didn’t know how to play then, I’d still get up on the bench and use two fingers to make harmony. Mom and Dad made up for it by buying me musical toys and later real instruments. I was so happy with those. One afternoon, a woman reporter from a Chicago magazine came to our house and sat in the living room, interviewing Mama. “Was Booker always musically inclined, Mrs. Jones?” she asked.

  “I never thought of Booker doing anything else,” Mama replied.

  Piano notwithstanding, it was always the drum, or drums, that harbored an inescapable fascination for me, even before I saw Al Jackson Jr. the afternoon of the kite contest.

  When I was a little boy, Mama used to take me to the downtown department stores: Bry’s, Goldsmith’s, Lowenstein’s, and the Black and White Store. Of all the magical things we saw, what captured my attention the most was a toy drum at the five-and-dime store on Main. A delicate wooden thing, with the heads covered in a coarse paper mesh cloth, the drum sounded real. At home, it seemed like seconds before I busted the head, but I got to beat on it and to hear that sound and to hold those sticks.

  I played my sticks anywhere I could—on a pillow, on the carpet, the top of a paper cup, anything that would bounce back even slightly. And then it became the sticks themselves that held the fascination for me. Rhythm after rhythm beat out on Mama’s beautiful hardwood floor. It did damage the floor, and I got yelled at, but that hardwood responded so perfectly to my wrist movements. I began to play flams and paradiddles before I knew what they were.

  Of course, when Dad took me to night football games, I watched Washington High School Drum and Bugle Corps perform.

  MEMPHIS—Fall 1953—1

  My life was changed forever when I was nine years old and my father surprised me with a brand-new clarinet. The dank smell of the case, the black wood, the beautiful dark green felt that caressed each piece, and the excess glue on some of the pads made a sight I will never forget. Not until I laid eyes on a Hammond B-3 organ was I ever so moved and hypnotized as when my father put that instrument in my hands. Everyone should experience such love and rhapsody at least once in their life.

  Mr. McClellan, who was the band director at Leath School, a small school where my dad once taught, was a close friend and neighbor who lived up the street. One Saturday morning, my dad called him and asked if he would give me a short, impromptu lesson.

  We went up to Mr. McClellan’s house, he came out, and on his steep driveway, he showed me how to hold my clarinet and where to put my fingers to cover up the holes. Mr. McClellan was a short, stout, balding, and likeable man, who—in spite of inadvertently spitting all over me when he spoke—changed my life in just a few benevolent seconds.

  We stood there in his driveway, me still holding the clarinet before I let go of the instrument to put it back in its case. It would be the starting position for my hands over that clarinet and many other woodwind instruments, including the oboe, with my fingers glued in place over the holes, like he showed me. Even while walking, I kept my hands in starting position. I cannot thank Mr. McClellan enough. Dad had sacrificed and made a down payment and signed papers for years of monthly payments to buy a clarinet for me.

  One Saturday morning when I was nine years old, my dad told me under a bright, warm sun, “Go back in the house and get your clarinet. We’re going to get a haircut.” I had a slight twinge of anxiety. I’d been to Cade’s before. Why am I taking my clarinet this time? What song will I play? Will I remember the notes? Dad was proud of me and wanted to show me off. He didn’t doubt that I would do OK.

  Set back from the street in a building of storefronts that included a beer garden as well as Samuel T. Lusk’s watch repair shop, Cade’s was so much more than a barbershop. There was a lot of camaraderie and good talk on any subject, and overflowing on the shelves under the big storefront windows were mounds of musty old magazines with curled edges. Overcoats were piled high on a coat rack, and laughter and political posturing were easy to find. Oddly, I loved the tired, pungent odor of the hair tonic in the red and green bottles that had expired months ago on the barbers’ stations behind the chairs. It gave the place a unique, recurring reference point from other types of establishments.

  Mr. Cade himself was a dark, slight man with a quiet nature. He always had a pleasant disposition while cutting my dad’s hair and giving him a shave. I looked forward to perusing the many Life and Look magazines at the shop and playing the occasional game of checkers with any one of the men who would indulge me. Mr. Cade’s son, Kenneth, older than me, was a member of the Washington High School band, playing clarinet, and I looked up to him. I think this fact was one of the things that helped influence my dad to buy my clarinet. God knows he couldn’t afford it.

  Mr. Macklin was the barber who took care of my hair—Mr. Mac, we called him. He used his strong hands to give my bald head a vigorous massage with aftershave lotion each time my haircu
t was done. Then he’d unsnap the pin securing the towel and slap and smack my bald head all over with aromatic tonic and talcum powder. “There you go, boy,” he said, with another firm smack, and I was free to catch yet another cold with my bald head.

  The shop quieted as I began the first notes. The tune I picked was a very popular song I had heard on a TV show, Skokian, which I taught myself on my new clarinet. It was the first time I played for an audience—the men recognized the tune instantly. After I played the last note, there was silence.

  I was thrown off by this. Did they enjoy the song? Did I miss some notes? One by one they started to smile and applaud. They kept clapping. So long that I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to do. I made a nervous bow and rushed over to the window to put my clarinet back in its case and sat down close to my beaming father.

  Chapter 2

  ’Cause I Love You

  MEMPHIS—Spring 1960—2

  There was a sameness in the way the fresh spring day started. The bell had rung for my second-period class at Booker Washington High, and I was in my seat. David Porter appeared at the door and gave me an urgent look. With a bogus hall pass in his hand, he had a few words with the teacher and suddenly I was out of the room and in the hallway. David told me to grab the sax from the band room before we sped to the studio in the band director’s zippy 1957 Plymouth, which David had borrowed. Mr. Martin’s car keys always seemed to be in David’s pocket.

  I walked through the door to Satellite Recording Studios on David Porter’s heels, baritone sax in tow, not quite believing I had stepped inside. Before I knew it, I had my horn out and was standing in the middle of the slanted theater floor amid a room of musicians, having heard only a short excerpt of the music and being asked if I could think of an intro for the song.

  From somewhere came the introductory notes out of the bell of my horn, and the rest of the band picked up the opening bars of “’Cause I Love You” for Rufus and Carla Thomas, who were standing even farther back in the room, behind a baffle with a small window. The tape was rolling, and in lieu of an algebra class, my career as a session musician started that morning.

  For years, I had stood at the bins in the record store in the foyer of the theater, listening to live music come from behind the curtain and longing to be a participant myself. Only my dry mouth reminded me I wasn’t dreaming as I looked at the faces of the professional musicians during the playback. This was real. I had made it over the long-standing hurdle through the “velvet curtain” into Stax’s recording studio.

  MEMPHIS—Summer 1952—1

  Years before, I had heard live music coming to me from inside an opened attic window of the home of my neighbor, Mrs. Humes. I felt free to ride my tricycle, then later my bicycle, in her two-lane driveway. She would call out, “Booker T., you’d better watch out. Henry’s coming home soon.” Then I’d stay clear of her driveway so her husband could get in without issue.

  I treated their driveway like it was my own runway. Mr. Humes would patiently stop his car at the front yard when he came home from work so I could clear my trike and myself out of the way. He would pull his ’52 Chevy into the driveway and into the ruts in the floor of his garage the same way every day.

  Mrs. Humes was quite old and small, but she wasn’t weak. I could hear her powerful voice from my house when she called, “Henryyyy!” to come inside for dinner. Many days I could hear the clamor from her chicken coop when she would grab one and wring it in the air, ’round and ’round by its neck until the screaming stopped. Then she would feather the chicken and put it in a boiling pot for Henry’s dinner.

  The Humeses allowed me to enter their house as my own. I felt free to go into their junky old garage. It had a concrete floor, where ours only had a dirt floor. I explored Henry’s yard tools. There were dark stairs leading to an attic. What an adventure! In the attic was a small bedroom, where their grandson, Carl Kirk, slept when he visited.

  Many evenings Mrs. Humes made lemonade, setting the pitcher on the table before the porch swing, and talked to me for hours until my mother called out, “Booker, time to come home.” Mrs. Humes had been a nurse, which she liked reminiscing about, as well as all the other life experiences she’d had. The muggy, moist night air in Memphis kept everyone in the neighborhood on their porch chairs and swings in the hopes of catching a breeze.

  Sitting me close, she opened up a world of knowledge.

  She told me how they milked snakes in Florida, getting the venom for snake-bite victims. And how one man would hold the snake while another would let the snake bite the rubber cap spread over a wide-neck bottle, and the milk would come dripping down the side. She told me how fish lay eggs and explained that flowers need the sun to grow.

  For a little boy like me, the smells that came from Mrs. Humes’s yard at night were as intoxicating as the stories she told. I would stay up after dark so I could go over and see flowers she had that bloomed only at night. I was always just there, kicking dirt around or piddling with a rock or playing with the grass, listening to her talk to me. Sometimes she would let me water her flowers. Carrying the big heavy sprinkler can from around the side of the house, spilling water all over myself and the sidewalk, it was the happiest I could be in the afternoon there in Memphis.

  That is, unless Mrs. Humes’s grandson was practicing oboe in her attic. The oboe! Never had I heard a sweeter, more mysterious-sounding instrument. I was introduced to an unlikely but new and exotic nuance of sound and resonance.

  And when I heard my mother play “Clair de Lune” on the piano one afternoon, something happened to my heart. Up to that time, I had not heard anything so tender and sensitive. At the other end of the scale was Antonin Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony. The piece, with its dissimilar, imposing chords, took my breath away. In spite of having no knowledge or understanding whatsoever of the method Dvořák employed to create such audacious music, I felt a certain empathy and connection to the piece and its conception. As if I were compelled to try and create a similar work. I was so touched, I would have done anything to learn that art.

  I heard those very instruments in my own head. I began to absorb all sound. I heard rhythms in machines, in nature, in the wind. I became excited by the music that played in my mind. The promise and the possibilities were endless! Deep emotional passages echoed in my memory as sung by the a cappella black choruses in the Holly Springs, Mississippi, churches.

  MISSISSIPPI—1952—8

  I remember the mud the most. Its tenacity was second only to that of the men who strained their backs to push and pull our cars in and out of it. There were many cars. A long line in succession had driven from the church on concrete city streets in Memphis to the slippery dirt roads in Northern Mississippi, where the old family church cemetery lay.

  I was six years old, and my grandmother, Lealer Jones, had died. She was one of twelve children, and she had four children, including my father. The rain and the storm were so incessant that the grief seemed to take a back seat. The only focus was that of the men to free one tire then another from the muddy holes.

  They had no choice. The funeral had to proceed, and the country road had only one lane. Burying Grandmother was a test of the will and strength of her progeny.

  The progeny prevailed. When we reached the church, my soul actually stirred at the sound of the voices singing the Negro spirituals to mourn my grandmother’s death. The sound praised God in the most basic, undeniably honest way music can act, with the human voice. Sounding as one force. Haunting and yearning, old, used, with a presence I feel to this day, it comforted and scared me at the same time.

  Unaccompanied by any musical instrument, the sounds reflected the moans repeated by slaves in the fields for years and moved me beyond description. How much I loved sitting in those hot, country churches hearing those voices! Even before the sermon, it sent my grandmother to heaven for safekeeping by virtue of its sound alone. The mud and the grief were overcome, and the celebration ensued. Thank God for another life,
Lealer Jones.

  MEMPHIS—1952—6

  Also engraved in my musical memory is the song of the hot-tamale man singing down Edith Street at dusk while pushing his cart. “Hot tamales,” he cried on two notes as the sun went down.

  I consumed and digested vast amounts of musical foodstuff in the rich dirt of Memphis, and I couldn’t get enough. I always wanted more.

  Externally, my searches started to reveal new instruments and their promises of even more sounds and textures. I began to incorporate not only the instruments I was playing and hearing but all sound. My experimental nature unleashed a torrent of possibilities in my mind. At the same time, a silent support group consisting of my parents, teachers, church people, and community musicians made sure I had enough time with instruments to explore my internal world of sound and gave me the freedom to go deeper beneath the surface of the musical river flowing through my young consciousness.

  Fortunately, I landed in the second-grade class of Mrs. Gladys McChristion, a lithe and lovely woman, and she started us with addition and subtraction. I began daydreaming, twirling curls in my hair and tuning out the math drills. I remember Mrs. McChristion calling my name, but I was far, far away…looking out the window. The class would laugh out loud when I came to, because there was a little swirl of hair on the top of my head from playing with it while my mind drifted off.

  I was thinking about music, always. Rhythms, symphonies. The external world crashed into my internal world early in my life. Uninvited. Dominating and entitled.

  It wasn’t always pleasant or even understandable, but the river of sound overflowed and found expression. It was where I lived. No music, no Booker. Like my mother had become a musical reflection of my grandmother, I became a reflection of my mother. Not identical, but so lovingly similar. My grandmother was a piano teacher, and sometimes I felt her grief in her playing. The legend goes that Wilson Newell, her husband, was on his knees praying in the woods near his home not far from Holly Springs when a shot rang out from behind him that shattered his skull. That would have been on August 3, 1943, an event most likely unreported to authorities and uninvestigated. However, word of mouth can go on for decades, and this is the story that my mother told me of her father’s death. I can only imagine that my grandfather may have misspoken to some white man or woman. Or possibly even some white woman had taken a liking to him, or some white man had a dislike for him. Worse, maybe he was killed for sport. Unfortunately, all these were likely hazards for a black man in the Deep South during this period, and they gave rise to my mother’s burning fear for my safety as a young boy.