Memphis Music Quotes

Facinating." He broke into a wide grin. "I've discovered something, Khufu. This is not Memphis, Egypt." Khufu gave me a sideways look, and I could swear his expression meant, Duh. "I've also discovered a new form of magic called blues music," the man continued. "And barbecue. Yes, you must try barbecue.

Led Zeppelin created their music from a diet of Bert Jansch, Memphis Minnie, John Fahey, Billy Fury, Phil Spector, Richard 'Rabbit' Brown, Moby Grape, Manitas De Plata and Om Kalsoum. Those who came afterwards were content with a diet of Led Zeppelin, which is not the same thing at all.

The Delta region of Mississippi is an expansive alluvial plain, shaped like the leaf of a pecan tree hanging lazily over the rest of the state. Stretching some 220 miles from Vicksburg to Memphis, it is bounded on the west by the Mississippi River, and extends eastward for an average of 65 miles, terminating in hill country, with its poorer soil and different ways of life, and the Yazoo River, which eventually joins the Mississippi at Vicksburg. For blues fans, this is the Delta...

For Elvis Presley, living in a completely segregated world, the one thing that was not segregated was the radio dial. There was WDIA (“the Mother Station of the Negroes,” run, of course, by white executives), which was the black station, on which a young white boy could listen to, among other people, the Rev. Herbert Brewster, a powerful figure in the world of Memphis black churches. A songwriter of note, he composed “Move On Up a Little Higher,” the first black gospel song to sell over a million copies. What was clear about the black gospel music was that it had a power of its own, missing from the tamer white church music, and that power seemed to come as much as anything else from the beat. In addition there was the immensely popular Dewey Phillips. When Elvis listened to the black radio station at home, his family was not pleased. “Sinful music,” it was called, he once noted. But even as Elvis Presley was coming on the scene, the musical world was changing. Certainly, whites had traditionally exploited the work of black musicians, taking their music, softening and sweetening it and making it theirs. The trade phrase for that was “covering” a black record. It was thievery in broad daylight, but black musicians had no power to protect themselves or their music.

But the blues is a more sustained illumination, against the humiliation, rage, and sadness of life, and in turn invests the artist with not eternal youth but a scarred mortality, blessed with poetry.

The Grits Guide to Southern Music “If I had to tell somebody who had never been to the South, who had never heard of soul music, what it was, I’d just have to tell him that it’s music from the heart, from the pulse, from the innermost feeling. That’s my soul, that’s how I sing. And that’s the South.” -Al Green, legendary soul singer from Memphis, Tennessee

I have been asked the question, “If people are simply trying to physically survive by purchasing food through this system, why would God not give them grace and allow them to feed themselves and their families by using this mark?” The answer is that this entire system is based upon a false religion and the idolatrous act of worshipping the Antichrist and his man-made image. Consider this example. When the Israelites departed from Egypt, there were six hundred thousand men, not counting the women and children. They departed with unleavened bread but entered a rugged wilderness where they lacked the foods they were accustomed to in Egypt. There was also a shortage of fresh water. Moses left for forty days on Mount Sinai, and the people demanded that Aaron collect their gold earrings and create a golden calf they could worship. They had lived for hundreds of years among the idolatrous Egyptians, a culture that worshipped a different deity for just about every situation. They also deified and worshipped some mortals; namely, certain rulers. After all that time, the culture had influenced some of these former Hebrew slaves. Several of the Egyptians gods were represented by a cow or a bull, and they all were given names. Each named cow was associated with a particular role, and each had its main center of cult worship. Apis was worshipped in Memphis, Hathor was worshipped in Dendera, and so on. With Hathor being a cow god that was worshipped in Dendera, a location near the Red Sea where the Hebrews might have crossed, it might be reasonable to assume that the Hebrews could have been creating a golden image to represent this Egyptian god. This god was also associated with music and dance, among other things. By molding a golden calf and dancing around it, the Israelites were turning from trust in their God, Yahweh, who delivered them from slavery with astonishing and supernatural signs and wonders. Instead of turning to God for sustenance and provision, their hearts turned to idol worship, which was an abomination to God. The divine punishment for this act was the death of three thousand Israelites and the destruction of the golden calf.

My earliest recollection of blues is hearing it in Memphis as a kid in the fifties. It came from the black workers in the fields along Cyprus Creek near the dead-end road I lived on with my mother. The emotion I felt in that music wrapped itself around me and touched my heart. It was very comforting. It gave my loneliness and sadness a sweetness. A kind of hope. Their blues expressed how I felt, too. My parents were divorced; I was an only child; I felt alone as my mother worked long and late hours. I was adrift and out of place when blues floated in like a dream and touched my heart. The blues rescued me. That’s when the blues overtook me. Over the years blues have continued to express how I feel as a human being. Now, more than forty years later, as I work as a blues musician, the music I heard as a kid

Jim Dickinson, the southern boy who played piano on “Wild Horses,” was exposed to black music through the powerful and only black radio station, WDIA, when he was growing up in Memphis, so when he went to college in Texas he had a musical education that exceeded that of anybody he met there. But he never saw any black musicians, even though he lived in Memphis, except once he saw the Memphis Jug Band with Will Shade and Good Kid on the washboard, when they were playing in the street when he was nine. But the racial barriers were so severe that those kinds of players were inaccessible to him. Then Furry Lewis —at whose funeral he played—and Bukka White and others were being brought out to play via the folk revival. I do think maybe the Stones had a lot to do with making people twiddle their knobs a little more. When we put out “Little Red Rooster,” a raw Willie Dixon blues with slide guitar and all, it was a daring move at the time, November 1964. We were getting no-no’s from the record company, management, everyone else.

There were micro-squabbles almost unbelievable to imagine now. The BBC was giving live coverage to the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1961 and they had to actually shut down the broadcast when trad jazz and modern jazz fans started to beat the shit out of each other, and the whole crowd lost control. The purists thought of blues as part of jazz, so they felt betrayed when they saw electric guitars—a whole bohemian subculture was threatened by the leather mob. There was certainly a political undercurrent in all this. Alan Lomax and Ewan MacColl—singers and famous folk song collectors who were patriarchs, or ideologues, of the folk boom—took a Marxist line that this music belonged to the people and must be protected from the corruption of capitalism. That’s why “commercial” was such a dirty word in those days. In fact the slanging matches in the music press resembled real political fisticuffs: phrases like “tripe mongers,” “legalized murder,” “selling out.” There were ludicrous discussions about authenticity. Yet the fact is, there was actually an audience for the blues artists in England. In America most of those artists had got used to playing cabaret acts, which they quickly found out didn’t go down well in the UK. Here you could play the blues. Big Bill Broonzy realized he could pick up a bit of dough if he switched from Chicago blues to being a folksy bluesman for European audiences. Half of those black guys never went back to America, because they realized that they were being treated like shit at home and meanwhile, lovely Danish birds were tripping over themselves to accommodate them. Why go back? They’d found out after World War II that they were treated well in Europe, certainly in Paris, like Josephine Baker, Champion Jack Dupree and Memphis Slim. That’s why Denmark became a haven for so many jazz players in the ’50s.

Louise, who at twenty-three could easily look like a sixteen-year-old boy, wore trousers, a vest, and a tie. Joan wore a chic dress with a nipped-in waist and wide skirt, her red hair in a wavy, shoulder-length pageboy. The juke box in the bar was a good one, with Ray Charles singing “Hey Now” and new records by B. B. King, whose performances on Beale Street were a Memphis sensation. The most popular song of the night, hands down, was Kitty Wells strumming “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Wells was from Nashville, and the burgeoning country music industry in their home state was a subject of fascination for both women. Louise, intrigued by the fashion for cowboy costumes and yodeling, could do a fair imitation of Hank Williams. Louise had a new swagger that Joan hadn’t seen in her before. She was more assertive and suffered fools even less. When a pretty young woman stopped by their table to compliment Joan’s hair and flirtatiously ask, “Why don’t you cut it short?” Louise sent her on her way with a proprietary growl, saying, “Leave her alone. She’s not gay.

A Sun record released in June 1954, a month after “Gonna Dance All Night,” came closer to the panting It: “My Kind of Carryin’ On” by Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers. It fluttered, shook like a creature flirting with madness. Sam must have slept well that night. “My Kind of Carryin’ On” was Poindexter’s only Sun single. In 1955 he retired from the music business after the breakup of his band. His lead guitarist, Scotty Moore, and his bass player, Bill Black, had joined with a new singer. Today Poindexter sells insurance in Memphis.

Stanley, why on earth you got niggers dancing in here? Even got nigger music on. And here I thought the flood was the end of the world.

Rick contacted me about the session, but he didn't know who in hell was coming in. I said, "Who you got?" He said, "Aretha Franklin." I said, "Boy, you better get your damn shoes on. You getting someone who can sing." Even the Memphis guys didn't really know who in the hell she was. I said, "Man, this woman gonna knock you out." They're all going, "Big deal!" When she come in there and sit down at the piano and hit that first chord, everybody was just like little bees just buzzing around the queen. You could tell by the way she hit the piano the gig was up. It was, "Let's get down to serious business." That first chord she hit was nothing we'd been demoing, and nothing none of them cats in Memphis had been, either. We'd just been dumb-dumb playing, but this was the real thing. That's the prettiest session picture I can ever remember. If I'd had a camera, I'd have a great film of that session, because I can still see it in my mind's eye, just how it was - Spooner on the organ, Moman playing guitar, Aretha at the piano - it was beautiful, better than any session I've ever seen, and I seen a bunch of 'em.' Spooner Oldham, the weedy keyboard player who is most known for never playing the same licks twice and who is ordinarily the most reticent of men, speaks in similar superlatives. 'I was hired to play keyboards. She was gonna stand up in front of the microphone and sing. She was showing us this song she had brought down there with her, she hit that magic chord when Wexler was going up the little steps to the control room, and I just stopped. I said, "Now, look, I'm not trying to cop out or nothing. I know I was hired to play piano, but I wish you'd let her play that thing, and I could get on organ and electric." And that's the way it was. It was a good, honest move, and one of the best things I ever done - and I didn't do nothing.

So what exactly is 'Nashville' food, anyway? Unlike the Low Country with its shrimp and grits, or even Memphis with its barbecue, Middle Tennessee doesn't have an easily recognized cuisine. We mostly celebrate simply what comes from the earth here - the corn, tomatoes, beans, greens - the animals that proved easiest to raise - such as hogs and chicken - with some wild game and fish from our waters. It's the food that business owners made into our meat-and-threes, tearooms, and chicken joints, and it's the baked hams and green beans traditionally served in our homes.