Then there's the Music

I just finished It Came From Memphis by Robert Gordon, first book I've read about Memphis, and I hope the beginning of a new journey. I never paid much attention to the blues (in particular old 'country blues'), accepted it as the backbone of rock and moved on. It sounded sonically narrow (due to poor recordings), thematically repetitive (the stuff most commonly played is the most straight-ahead), and distant, inaccessible (like from a different era)... But, I'm finding (from hours on youtube, WEVL, and a few new CDs), one can 'sink into it', that is, it sounds foreign at first, but becomes familiar and comfortable over time. With a little effort up front, it soon becomes seductive and addictive. Suddenly, a wild, free, and deep universe presents itself.

So this book is my doorway into Memphis music, a love letter by a native Memphian to his hometown, and its most fruitful (and powerful) art form. Gordon grew up here, in the 60's and 70's surrounded by a breathtakingly wild sub-culture that fed his soul. The story starts with a chronicle of the generation just before his, which took the first stabs at a new music back in the late 1940's. In particular a bunch of adventurous high school white kids: curious, rebellious, picking up old instruments and trying to play forbidden black music. They spent weekends driving their parents' cars across the river to Arkansas (because in Memphis white people were not allowed into black clubs). Even there, in the swampy, decrepit, and lawless hamlet of West Memphis, only one club, the Plantation Inn, would allow it (even there the white audience and black performers were separated by a high railing). But booze flowed like water and drinking age was an oxymoron. And after the show, in the parking lot, the black musicians and white kids would finally mingle, smoke weed, and drink more... thus began a conversation.. and conversion of these white middle class kids (Gordon calls them 'the witnesses'- I think he means they were here in a remarkable moment in history- an epic moment when a new art was born, an art that from such humble roots would quickly seduce and conquer the globe).  These kids raised on what? Bing Crosby and Judy Garland? The big-bands from Glen Miller to Dizzy Gillespie(already influencing each other)? All the recordings of 'black music' coming out of New Orleans and Harlem? Now under the spell of this ecstatic, soulful, and ragged music the local poor, Delta raised, black people played. Here is a great example of one of the (now passed) Memphis blues greats playing:


That's Furry Lewis, who I had never heard of before, living here in town, in a tumbledown little shack.
The book's opening anecdote describes the Rolling Stones' Memphis concert in 1975. They called up Furry, and had him open their show- all alone, on stage, seated on a stool, 82 years old, he wowed the crowd of 50,000. After that he had a small revival and got to gig around town more often, sometimes jamming with the young white kids (the witnesses) in the new cafes. Other times, they would drop by his house with a bottle of whiskey to entice him to play for them.