Memphis Rent Party Page 10

  The accessibility of these happenings never ceases to amaze me. When I was writing It Came from Memphis, my then-new friend Danny Graflund told me a line I’ve since used often: Memphis is the town where nothing ever happens but the impossible always does. Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint was an impossible experience, and available every Sunday. A musical nirvana. Rapturous. Plunk in the middle of a social and economic disaster zone. But there it gathered those seeking a stronger jolt, higher wattage, a more intense escape. Like a church, Junior’s joint was a room pulsating as one. What a rave must be like but with older people on different stimulants.

  Mississippi Juke Joint

  Previously unpublished, 2005

  Before we’d slammed shut the car doors, a drunk woman came spilling out of Junior Kimbrough’s house. Drunk, or maybe crazy. Crazed, certainly. She was shouting, her words indistinguishable, her tone sharp, her finger pointing at our hearts. Her body was doubled over as she jabbed, stumbling and squalling. She ignored others and looked at us, through us, her rampage unrelenting. We three were the only white people in evidence.

  Junior’s house was in the middle of a cotton field, the cabin a structure only slightly more handcrafted than the long rows into which the field had been furrowed. You could take a wide view and in all that you saw, the house was the only thing that wasn’t a cotton plant, its wooden brown stood out against the crop, still green and bursting all around us. It was a home filled with humans, all seeking a state of exalted rapture.

  The crazy woman was half-dressed; technically, you could say three-quarters. Her shirt was unbuttoned—or had lost its buttons—and her brassiere was loose. Her head was swathed in a do-rag, her feet slipped into something that once had been house shoes. She was older than forty, but younger than a hundred. And as astonishing as her appearance was, her tone was making the impression: a scolding, a warning, an admonition. It was so personal, so intimate, that while I couldn’t doubt it was at us, I did look behind, expecting to see her children or her sister or someone she knew. But this woman at that moment was knowing no person. She was out of her mind and soon lurching out of our sight, and we entered the door she’d exited anticipating a taste of some of whatever it was she’d had, with a result not dissimilar.

  Junior Kimbrough at home in Holly Springs (not the same location as the cotton field). (Courtesy of Dan Ball)

  Junior Kimbrough and the whole of the droning north Mississippi sound have become such a part of me that it’s hard to remember when I first became aware of it. But around 1988—within the first few months of my return to Memphis (following a decade of only visiting home)—I was riding around Holly Springs, Mississippi, and stumbled upon Aikei Pro’s Records Shop, a store with overflowing shelves of blues 45s and LPs run by a storyteller named Mr. Caldwell. The Aikei (pronounced “Ike-ee”) had old records in great shape from Chess and Stax and kept current releases from north Mississippi groups, few though the choices might be. And Mr. Caldwell told it like it was, stories that day were about being a black man with blue eyes and the mixed heritages that belie our skin tones.

  I returned there with a couple friends visiting from the cosmopolitan Northeast to show them how quaint and charming a small town in Mississippi could be. My Yankee friends finished inside the store before me, and when I came out, they were in casual discussion with one of the locals. He was a big man, like a football player, with an air of quiet violence, simmering sexuality, and raucous good times. His eyes were big, like they’d seen things we wouldn’t believe, and though he was welcoming, he also seemed to have a live 220 current running through him. He was Junior Kimbrough.

  Junior Kimbrough at Aikei Pro’s Records Shop, Holly Springs, Mississippi. (Courtesy of Axel Küstner)

  Junior Kimbrough could keep the dance floor packed at his famous house parties, 1994. (Courtesy of Bill Steber)

  Junior invited us to his house party, to be held Sunday afternoon, the following day. Giving us directions, he said, would be pointless as his place was impossible to find; he instructed us to instead ask anyone who loitered at the Aikei to lead us. So the next day, we did just that, and then we stopped at the Sunflower grocery to pick up a case of beer, some of which we gave to the guides as payment. We followed several middle-aged black men in a pickup truck, making turns on winding roads that had no visible names until the lead truck slowed in a wooded area, a hand coming out the passenger window and hooking over the truck’s cab, pointing us to the woods on the left. The opening in the trees wasn’t apparent until we’d almost passed it, and the turn in was a hairpin; they’d slowed dramatically, made sure we caught it. The drive ran down a hill, the curtain of trees thinning to our right, another hairpin turn at the bottom unfolding into the red dirt field where, floating in its middle, we saw the house where all the action was.

  The party at Junior’s was in the large front room, and I only recall two other rooms. A few chairs and a sofa were pushed against the living room walls, creating as much dance and band space as possible. In the bedroom to the right, all the other tables, some chairs that didn’t fit, lamps, and other furniture were stacked floor to ceiling, leaving only the bed untouched and ready for falling into. Back in the main room, a door at the rear led to the kitchen, but that door was split horizontally. The lower half stayed closed, and behind it was seated a woman, wide and stocky, massive in her density, like she was made from the missing upper door: the house lady. She sold drinks, woke sleeping drunks, and maintained order. No one wanted to cross the house lady.

  I have a confession to make. When I first ordered a beer from her—we’d set down our case and all the cans had disappeared as if into a hole in the bottom of the sea, which pleased us (and it didn’t bother the house lady, who never had enough beer anyway)—she offered me a choice of canned beer or Junior’s homemade fruit beer. I can’t imagine why I didn’t leap at the opportunity to taste the fruit beer, except perhaps that the words fruit and beer together were so unexpected—sort of like the time at Mardi Gras in New Orleans when I stumbled upon a woman at a card table in front of a bar; she had a large, clear jug of something soaking in pinkish water, and so startled was I when she said, “Pickled pig lips, fifty cents,” that I dug into my pocket, saved from the awful treat by the lack of a quarter (she wouldn’t sell just the upper). Fruit beer—in all my visits to Junior’s house and his later juke joints, I was never offered it again, and by the time that day I’d loosened my mind enough to go for it, she was sold out. “No fruit beer, just regular.” I’m sure I answered, “Yes ma’am.”

  The band was a trio, with Junior seated on a folding chair, a guy named Cotton on the bass, and the drummer’s kit always a hodgepodge, salvaged from the Salvation Army’s bin of the unsalvageable; one time a drum was a cardboard box reinforced with duct tape. They had amplifiers for the guitars and a vocal mic, but everything was so close and intimate—the musicians repeatedly pushing revelers off them—that what they played was felt every bit as much as it was heard. Music filled the house like water in an aquarium.

  And the music never stopped, the players handing off their instruments and joining the audience. Half the people there were musicians, and they all played all the instruments. Junior played only guitar, and he’d play whenever he felt like it, breaking into the song he was best known for, “All Night Long,” as often as he liked. With its familiar opening wail, its gradual build, and then the funky gallop of the song’s body, it was the crowd’s favorite, and Junior never tired of giving them what they wanted. He could draw the song out for an easy quarter of an hour, and people danced the whole time, with partners or without, whether they were lingering from the last dance, rising at the song’s first notes, or lunging up when overtaken by the spirit in midverse.

  Junior Kimbrough, playing the blues, 1996. (Courtesy of Bill Steber)

  Everyone danced. This sea of people moved not as one, but like a riptide, and it was amazing how blindingly bright it was outside and how dark within. I once tried to shoot some Super 8 film
at Junior’s house, but even with the lens all the way open it was barely possible to capture a distinct image. As the afternoon wore on, people passed out in chairs, on the porch, in the bed, and in the field. Might’ve been the fruit beer.

  I returned to Junior’s several times, once with my longtime friend Belinda Killough. “When you told me about Junior’s Sunday blues jam,” she said after her first visit, “I thought it was going to be in somebody’s small backyard with bowls of Fritos and stuff.”

  Belinda continued, “We must have gotten there about one P.M. or so, after church service, because I remember ladies in dresses with church fans. The crazy lady wore a pair of stretch shorts and a long-line bra, and you said she wasn’t even the same crazy lady that had been there before. The band was all young guys wearing Batman T-shirts even though they couldn’t afford a movie ticket. We must have stayed there twelve hours.”

  Soon Junior moved the party into a former barbecue shack called the Chewalla Rib Shack, then to a final location in Chulahoma. A converted church, it was heated by a wood stove. It burned down not long after Junior Kimbrough’s death in 1998.

  R. L. Burnside lived next to that joint, and he played there often. R. L. and Junior became the heart and soul of Fat Possum Records; they recorded at the juke joint. Though fruit beer was never offered at the Chulahoma place, I did taste all kinds of white lightning, some of which was quite smooth and appealing. More memorable is the worst white whiskey I ever tasted. It was a full-moon night and a group of us were cooling off out front, a mixture of locals and visitors. Two white guys in hunting camouflage opened a jar and passed it around. They were leading a discussion about coon dicks, the penises of raccoons made into necklaces and worn for good luck. I was not interested in the coon dick they offered me, but I did taste their whiskey. I almost gagged, but my scientific impulse won out and I quickly tasted it again to confirm it was as bad as it had at first seemed, which it was. Its bouquet was of freshly mowed lawn clippings, and it went down like long thin shards of glass, with an aftertaste of rusted barbed wire. “Rusted” may be assigning it too much character.

  R. L. Burnside outside his home, 1978. (Courtesy of Axel Küstner)

  My own memories get foggy about the end of that night, but Belinda saw it all: “The crazy lady continued to get really drunk and later at night somebody took her in a back room and put some pajamas on her and she came running out like a little kid even though she was full-well grown. She asked me for my lipstick and I gave it to her.”

  I was there often enough for Junior to recognize me, and I got on a first-name basis and had a couple adventures with Cotton. But I never got to really know my fellow revelers, nor my host. I didn’t know their struggles or their loves, their lives, their particular strains of boredom or despair. But each time I went, we were unified in our release from all those things. We all shared equally in escaping with the blues. We all got real real gone.

  I love what’s in this piece, but I have misgivings about what’s not. When I was hanging around, it was for fun—not reporting. I captured the good times, but there was another side. At Junior’s, we all escaped into the blues, but our escapes out were not the same. At day’s end, I would go home to my comfy bed in an insulated house, romanticizing the missed opportunities of fruit beer. And Junior and all his friends would go home to shacks where the wind blows through.

  That first time at Junior’s, when I opened that bedroom door and saw all the furniture stacked, I instantly recalled a description of a “rent party” from a college class on the Harlem Renaissance. Tenants who needed to make rent would throw a party where they lived, pushing all the furniture back to allow more room for dancing. Everyone paid at the door and bought food and drink inside, helping the residents raise the payment. Junior’s party had its economic purpose too—the house lady sold those drinks (though I don’t recall paying to enter). But the party also struck me as a way of reminding the worn and the weary of the reasons for living, a way to reinvigorate the spirit in the face of a week of otherwise abject poverty and grueling manual labor. The thin walls may be poor shelter from the cold winds, but they can still harbor the collective heart, like the blues.

  CHARLIE FEATHERS

  “No one expects an abstract thinker to come out of rockabilly.”

  —Ben Vaughn

  This profile on Charlie Feathers put me in an ethical quandary, and I didn’t come out so clean. I’d read an interview where Charlie gave a startling quote about his theory of Elvis Presley’s lineage. The notion was kind of ludicrous, certainly outlandish, and I was, even at the mature age of thirty, taken by the idea of the potential controversy his statement might provoke.

  I wanted the quote.

  Charlie was about to turn sixty and was, for the first time, going to have a record on a major label. He’d gotten his start at Sun Records in the 1950s and never stopped releasing songs and albums on a variety of small and independent ventures. His dedication to rockabilly endeared him to a select group of pomaded, cuff-jeaned fans the world over, and his remarkable voice expanded that base, slightly. In early 1991, he would have his first major label release, an opportunity like he’d never had.

  I drove across town and was having a really great visit with Charlie. We sat in lawn chairs in front of his house, situated in a post–World War II middle-class neighborhood of modest but sturdy structures. The summer air was unseasonably unoppressive. Charlie was feeling the lift of success when he’d no longer imagined this kind of exposure. He’d been embittered by the music industry—a business that’s always looking to toss aside talent and loyalties for the next new thing—and this late-career praise was pleasing him, even if he didn’t like to show it.

  Ambition was impairing my better angels and I wound the conversation toward his old labelmate Elvis. Charlie had genuinely great musical ideas, but in the wider world, he was distrustful. Functionally illiterate, he had to be wary. Even the previous year’s contract signing with the Warner Bros. imprint Elektra / Nonesuch had nearly derailed when Charlie learned it said right there on the contract that there was nonesuch company. But if you’d been ripped off as many times as Charlie Feathers—by the music biz, by show promoters, by the power company and the auto mechanic and every dad-blamed person in the world, you’d be suspicious too.

  The Onliest

  LA Weekly, August 1991

  The Rebel Inn is on Highway 78, once a major thoroughfare linking Mississippi cotton land to the Delta’s big city of Memphis. The old motel’s neon sign no longer functions properly, and the parking lot these days is more of a teen hangout than a place for weary motorists. James Earl Ray is said to have slept in the Rebel Inn the night before he shot Martin Luther King.

  Conspiracy has long haunted Charlie Feathers, who lives on a dead-end street behind the motel. The rockabilly great never really made it, never became the star that might seem natural for a friend and inspiration to Elvis Presley. Feathers’s modest house is not very different from any other on the block, but it is worlds away from the stature of Graceland, the mansion of the rock and roll King.

  Beneath a shade tree in his front yard, Charlie is seated in a black rocker. Wearing a faded flowered shirt, the brightest ornamentation is the pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco poking through the top of his chest pocket. Despite the fact that it’s August, his Christmas lights are still up, the sign of a man thinking about both the past and things to come.

  “Rockabilly is the beginning of the end of music,” the genre’s greatest enthusiast pronounces. “It is the onliest. It’ll be the last; there’s no more after rockabilly.”

  It’s a grand statement with an elusive meaning, but the subject gets Feathers excited, worked up like an evangelist in a gin joint. He is a rockabilly preacher, a fundamentalist when it comes to this blend of country and rock and roll that thrived briefly in the 1950s and has been often revived. Charlie has to pause, partly to gather his thoughts and partly because he’s had a lung removed recently (that’s why he chews inst
ead of smokes his ’bacca) and he’s not supposed to get palpitated. Words frustrate Feathers, they limit him.

  “It’s-just-no-more-music,” he says, his hands punctuating the rhythm of the sentence to drive home the point to his congregation of one. “Rockabilly comes from cotton-patch blues and bluegrass music. Ain’t nothing else exciting left, you see. I seen some guys the other day on the television. They’re sickening to me. I watch them boys with the big hats on, unh-uhmmm. The world ain’t gonna move backwards!”

  Some would say Charlie himself needs to study this last statement. His rockabilly cohorts found success when they moved to rock and roll (Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins), country (Johnny Cash), and the sappiest pop (“The last band Elvis had was dime a dozen. Get ’em anywhere. He was just singing because he already had it made. The dadgum rockabilly made him.”). Charlie stayed with the dadgum stuff, working new ideas into the old genre. He has just released his first ever major label record, part of the initial installment in the distinguished American Explorers series. The album includes an updated version of his “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” which became the back side of “Mystery Train,” Elvis’s first major hit. (Alas, Charlie sold his ownership in the song when money was tight.)

  It is more than thirty-five years since Elvis Presley released his first rockabilly record. “Blue Moon of Kentucky” was a fusion of blues and bluegrass, and Charlie Feathers feels he’s never received proper credit—for bringing the song to Elvis, for coaching him on his vocals, for helping fuse the genres. He was hanging out at Sun before Elvis or any of the other hillbilly cats came along, talking shop with Sun founder Sam Phillips and trying to tune in the music both men heard in their heads. Feathers demoed material for the label and wrote songs, including “Gone, Gone, Gone” and “Get With It.”