Just a little post showing three of my favorite places on Jackson Ave in Memphis. Well, two are my favorite, but the Corned Beef House is all Josh Roberts. And yes, it’s open and passed health inspection last year.
Here’s a soul gem I came across this week, released in 1971 on the short-lived Memphis Records label, a Mercury subsidiarity founded by Jerry Butler of the Temptations. This was most likely recorded about a mile and a half from the photos above, at Universal Recording Studio, 261 Chelsea (according to info on Ollie’s other Memphis Records release). That is nearly a stone’s throw from the former location of American Studios (now a Family Dollar, I shit you not). There’s some info in old Billboard mags (use Google books) and on the Soul Detective blog if you want more.
I like Christmas music, both classics and oddities. Last week, I went on a Christmas music binge and unearthed some gems. A few blues selections are below! If you want more, I’ve been sharing several (blues, jazz, outsider, rock ‘n roll, country, hillbilly, and exotica) Christmas tunes per day on my Facebook page, marked with #Christmasmusicology.
I found out about Reverend Edward W. Clayborn from Dixon and Godrich’s Recording the Blues, a slim history of early blues and gospel records, recording sessions, and labels. Clayborn’s thin, spring-loaded slide and “Jesus is the reason for the season” message are somehow simultaneously incongruent and totally complimentary. (Document Records did a compilation and booklet on Clayborn, if you need more.)
“Sonny Boy’s Christmas” is a post-war-blues-era Christmas record that doesn’t feel like a novelty, a rushed studio afterthought, or a throwaway. It’s peak Sonny Boy (II), in top form on Trumpet Records in 1951.
Non-Christmas fun fact: Lillian McMurry, owner of Trumpet Records, was in debt to Plastic Products, Inc., Buster Williams’s indie record pressing plant in Memphis. McMurry gave Williams Sonny Boy’s contract in 1954 in exchange for some debt relief and, since Williams also pressed for Chess Records, he sold Sonny Boy’s contract to Leonard and Phil Chess.
Here’s a fun, modern blues Christmas tune by the amazing Denise LaSalle, who recorded for Chess, Westbound (in Detroit, with whom she scored a gold record), ABC (in Memphis), and Malaco (in Jackson, MS).
One more. This ain’t blues, but it sure is good. I was surprised an Alex Chilton Christmas recording is out there, so I feel like it’s my job to signal boost it. Lucky for us that we’re alive in a world where it exists. Merry Christmas, y’all.
I’m irritatingly skeptical of everything “fun.” It might be the New Englander in me. Breaking into an abandoned building to read old medical records? That’s fun. Disneyland, cruise ships, guided tours? The possibility that some one-size-fits-all, for-profit construction of “fun” could actually be fun seems nonexistent. If you’ve never been a grad student, I’ll tell you what year one is like: you read books by weighty authors and are expected to speak confidently about how wrong their posited ideas are, how unpleasing their writing is, or how outdated and idealistic their notions of authenticity, racial essentialism, ethics, aesthetics, gender, and politics are. So I can still do my skeptical schtick, I just need footnotes. Sometimes, we even talk about blues (read: we talk about what Elijah Wald says about blues, because he’s done the skepticaling for us).
As a blues fan, I embrace some aspects of blues tourism while finding others problematic. Yes, I used the Mississippi Blues Trail markers to visit Magic Sam’s house in Grenada several years ago, and it was awesome. But I also wrote an undergrad paper on the impact of urban renewal on Beale Street. In short, Beale was closed for a decade-ish and then rebuilt as the tourist destination we know today. There’s very little literature detailing the institutionalized and systemic racism and classism that led to the closure of Beale; sweeping that stuff under the rug keeps the “home of the blues” mythology neat and simple. I get it. Blues needs landmarks, Memphis needs tourist dollars, and people want to experience music in a bar that opened when W.C. Handy was alive, but I’m uncomfortable with reproductions being passed off as authentic, lineage narratives that are gussied up for the general public, and the fetishization of physical places that come to represent “blues.” It is a musical genre and culture filled with folklore and fakelore, and that’s part of the appeal for me, but the complicated, problematic parts of the story are often unrecorded, inaccessible, and certainly not promoted. If something in blues is aimed at blues fans, I usually skip it.
Weirdly, I’ve been told by starry-eyed blues tourists as well as eye-rolling blues skeptics that the Juke Joint Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi is worth a trip, worth a pilgrimage, even. And I find myself in Mississippi for the Blues Symposium at Ole Miss (yes, blues has a symposium!) with the fest starting today, my one free day, the day I figured I’d finally break into the Sterick Building in Memphis. I had hoped to catch guitarist Josh Roberts in Memphis last night, but a long day and a severe weather warning kept me inside the Best Western, so I’m jonesing for a music fix…
bluesnerd 