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Stanley Booth
2019: Chicago Review Press
400 6X9 pages.
Author of the excellent collection of blues- and jazz-related pieces, "Rythm Oil," Stanley Booth, has another compilation of mostly blues- and jazz-related pieces in this new book (In addition to chapters on such folk as Bobby Rush and Phineas Newborn Jr, there is a piece on photographer Williams Eggleston). To say Booth is opinionated is an understatement, but to give a minor sense of the flavor of his writing there is this quote from the opening article, "Blues Dues" about reading a galley about a book on blues whose publisher sought his endorsement:
"So, finally, I picked up one of the proofs to look it over. I hadn’t read far before I came upon these words: “The weekend I was in Memphis …” Unlike many before him, who’d simply bought a lot of blues records, listened to them, and written a book, this writer had made the extra effort of going to the blues museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi, passing through Memphis on his way there, thus becoming an authority. I, who lived in Memphis twenty-five years, going in the course of my research to the city and county jails as a guest more times than I cared to remember, found it hard to restrain myself from hurling the galley all the way back to New York. …
There’s the blues, an emotional state, and there’s the blues, an art form, or a group of art forms. Believe me, when you’re in the Memphis jail, city or county, you got the blues. When you’re in your cozy room, listening to Robert Johnson’s plaintive tunes, you’re hearing the blues. Two different worlds. But some people, people from Berkeley, or Boston, or wherever, are so highly imaginative that they make a leap of funk and become Spokesmen of the Blues. No, really, they make a living this way. People in Dublin, London, Kyoto, Amsterdam, and Lower Slobbovia read them and feel somehow enhanced, enlightened, end manned by the blues.
I never intended to have anything to do with the blues. They came into my life through my bedroom window when I was a child. It wasn’t a matter of choice. What I learned, I paid for in experience at the school where they arrest you first and tell you why later."
There are brief portraits like the one on King Oliver (that ends "Oliver died two months later, on April 10, 1938. His sister used her rent money to bring his body north and gave up her plot in Woodlawn for him. But there is still no headstone on the grave of one of the true founding fathers of jazz.") and a lengthier one on Ma Rainey which includes a brief history of minstrel shows and development of music to the blues before chronicling her life and career and another one on Blind Willie McTell with its detailed chronicling of McTell's Library of Congress recordings and the account that McTell was allegedly paid ten dollars for the session.
There are two chapters on Furry Lewis that are based in part on the close relationship between the two and tell Furry's story and gives a glimpse about how good Booth's writing is. "Furry put the candle down and leaned back in his chair. 'When I was eighteen, nineteen years old, he said, 'I was good. And when I was twenty, I had my own band, and we could all play. Had a boy named Ham, played jug. Willie Polk played the fiddle and another boy, call him Shoefus, played the guitar, like I did. All of us North Memphis boys. We’d meet at my house and walk down Brinkley to Poplar and go up Poplar to Dunlap or maybe all the way down to Main. People would stop us on the street and say, ‘Do you know so-and-so?’ And we’d play it and they’d give us a little something. Sometimes we’d pick up fifteen or twenty dollars before we got to Beale. Wouldn’t take no streetcar. Long as you walked, you’s making money; but if you took the streetcar, you didn’t make nothing and you’d be out the nickel for the ride.'"
Then Booth describes Furry's life today. "Furry has been working for the City of Memphis Sanitation Department since 1923. Shortly after two o’clock each weekday morning, he gets out of bed, straps on his artificial leg, dresses, and makes a fresh pot of coffee, which he drinks while reading the Memphis Press-Scimitar. The newspaper arrives in the afternoon, but Furry does not open it until morning. Versie is still asleep and the paper is company for him as he sits in the kitchen under the harsh light of the ceiling bulb, drinking the hot, sweet coffee. He does not eat breakfast; when the coffee is gone, he leaves for work."
There are chapters on Elvis, one on Elvis in 1967 and one on the aftermath of his death and what happened to Elvis' Doctor who became a scapegoat for some after Elvis passed away who believed (contrary to the autopsy which said Elvis did not die of drugs) the Doctor was responsible and pictured as a pusher. A chapter on The Memphis Soul Sound takes us to The Bar-Kays funeral; Otis and Steve Cropper working on and recording "Sitting At the Dock of the Bay"; Issac Hayes and David Porter working up a song; a visit to American Studio and Donald Crews and Dan Penn; and WDIA's annual Goodwill Revue including Carla Thomas story. Booth notes that the next night after the Goodwill Revue Otis Redding and most of The Bar-Kays would be dead.
In his history of Beale Street, the chapter "Beale Street's Gone Dry," he writes, "In 1959, having graduated from Sidney Lanier High School for (white) Boys in Macon, Georgia, I moved with my family to Memphis. I knew little about the place other than that it was on the Mississippi River and had an association with the kind of music I liked. I soon learned that Memphis was, if anything, even more “Southern” and puritanical than Macon, with no liquor served by the drink and almost no integration. Restaurants, taxis, hotels, parks, libraries, movies, all were segregated. Blacks still sat in the back of the buses. Whites who wanted to hear black music went to an all-white club called the Plantation Inn across the river in West Memphis, Arkansas, and listened to a singing group called the Del Rios or to Loman Pauling and the Five Royales. My first experience on Beale Street was being thrown out of a Ray Charles concert at the Hippodrome for sharing a table with some black classmates from newly integrated Memphis State University. There were tables for blacks and tables for whites, but no mixing allowed. 'What you mean, pattin’ these nigger girls on the ass?' a cop asked me. 'I haven’t patted anybody on the ass yet, sweetheart,' I said, finding myself seconds later face-to-face with the gravel in the alley. Living in Memphis, off and on, for twenty-five years, learning the blues, I would come to know those alleys, that downtown gravel, well."
Then there is a piece he wrote about Phineas Newborn, Jr., that ended up being an obituary in the Village Voice, where he traced the Newborn family history, including the father, drummer Phineas Sr. and brother, guitarist Calvin, as well as Phineas Jr.'s life and brilliant career, not ignoring the psychological issues this piano genius experienced. "Phineas Newborn, I would learn, was to some people a living symbol of African American genius, the ultimate product of a tradition whose roots are mysterious and deep. His family life and American music were one and the same, with a cast including Elvis Presley, B. B. King, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Charles Mingus. His style resembled that of Secretariat, or the young Muhammad Ali. He could think of things to do that no one else had ever done, and then he would do them. He had, another Memphis pianist once observed, “a boogie-woogie left hand, a bebop right hand, and this ... third hand.” But it was not simply unsurpassed technique that made his work so affecting: his music derived power from its own emotional range—the outer-space comedy of 'Salt Peanuts,' the nostalgic humor of 'Memphis Blues,' the rhapsodic sadness of 'The Midnight Sun Will Never Set,' the majesty of 'The Lord’s Prayer.'"
The article on Bobby Rush brought much about Bobby that went way beyond his musical persona, but assesses his stature as a major blues artist. "In the following account, I try to avoid invidious comparisons between Bobby Rush—it’s a stage name, and he likes it used in full—and great historical figures like B. B. King and John Lee Hooker, who have not made an exciting recording in years. Bobby Rush, in his mid-sixties, continues to make first-rate R&B records and to have the best stage show since Ike and Tina broke up. If my friend Mick Jagger were hip enough and wanted to revive his career—instead of endlessly dragging his scrawny ass around the planet regurgitating his greatest hits—he would cut Bobby Rush’s 'Jezebel.' But he’s not hip enough, nowhere near as hip as this senior citizen from Houma, Louisiana, southwest of New Orleans, within spitting distance of the Gulf of Mexico. Not Houma proper but a farm near there. Bobby Rush is the real thing, as country as a tree full of owls or a passel of possums. But he’s also at least as up to date as Kansas City."
There is a brief appreciation of Marvin Sease and extended one of his friend, the celebrated photographer William Joseph Eggleston. The closing chapter, which gives this volume its title is on legendary Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips and takes us from his heyday, through his fall and his funeral with Elvis and Priscilla there. This chapter, like practically everything in this superb collection of Stanley Booth's writing, authoritative, evocative, informative, and compelling reading.
I received a download to review from a publicist. Here is a video of Phineas Newborn.
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