For many years musicians have come to Memphis to sing and play, among them W.C.Handy, the “father of the Blues”, who moved to Memphis with his band in 1909. He had been living in the Mississippi Delta researching the music of the black slaves working in the cottonfields. Fortunately, he was able to remember the details of what he heard and convert the songs into formal tunes that he published as sheet music. A tune that he wrote for a political campaign developed into “a southern rag”, as he called it, and acquired a new name: “Memphis Blues”. It was published as an instrumental in 1912 without making much of an impression, but words were later added, and it slowly grew in popularity. Handy didn’t invent Blues music, but he formalised it and made it known to a wide audience. Later, a powerful body of work was created in Memphis in the middle years of the twentieth century by Blues musicians, including B. B. King, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Furry Lewis, Booker T. W. White, Sleepy John Estes, McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters), and Big Joe Williams. Handy’s inspiration is one of the key threads that was later woven into Soul and R&B music in Memphis.
Another of those threads was Gospel music and Memphis had two important contributors to that tradition. Lucie Campbell worked in Memphis for sixty years, writing over one hundred songs. Her first published gospel song appeared in 1919. Two years later, she contributed several songs to one of the earliest Gospel songbooks, the National Baptist Convention’s “Gospel Pearls”, in 1921. The Reverend Herbert Brewster also began writing Gospel songs in Memphis a few years after that, some of which have become well-known. Two of the best are “Move on up a Little Higher” (by Mahalia Jackson) and “Surely, God is Able” (by the Ward Singers). There were several popular Gospel harmony groups in the city during this period.
After the Second World War, several local radio stations played a significant role in the popularisation of Black music in the city. WNBR-Radio led the way with its weekly live broadcast of the amateur performers who took to the stage in the Palace Theatre on Beale Street to sing and play a mix of Blues, Jazz and Pop songs. WDIA-Radio (a “White” station) employed a local Black history teacher called Nat D. Williams as a new DJ. Williams introduced a programme entirely made up of Black music that became increasingly popular with all audiences. This breaking down of separate White and Black audiences was another key feature of the music that emerged from Memphis during the fifties and sixties.
Image: Sun Studios (Bill Spicer)
The final element in the making of the new Memphis sound was the creation of a series of recording studios, where artists could meet and experiment. The first of these, Sun Records, was set up in 1950 by Sam Phillips. The new studio attracted a wide range of musicians. B.B King recorded there, as did Ike Turner. In 1951, Ike Turner arrived at Sun studios with his Kings of Rhythm band and recorded an R&B song called “Rocket 88”, which was issued under the name of Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats. Brenston was the group’s saxophonist. The song was inspired by several earlier recordings from the late forties and, just as Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight” had done in New Orleans in 1947, Ike Turner’s song pointed the way to a new kind of popular music, that the public responded to very positively. “Rocket 88” went to number one on the R&B chart. Perhaps the most famous meeting at Sun studios took place in 1956, when Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins started experimenting with a rockabilly style of music. The informal session was recorded but was not meant for official release. It was not until 1981 that the album appeared, in Europe! The four young men were certainly a “million-dollar quartet” but the session led to Nashville rather than Memphis. The real Memphis sound lay elsewhere.
Then, in 1957, Jim Stewart decided to set up Satellite Records. Everything was primed for the birth of Memphis Soul. All that was missing was the vision of Chips Moman and he was soon to arrive on the scene, helping to set up Stax Records. For the next twenty years, Soul music blossomed alongside the Mississippi River in Tennessee.
Memphis: (Wikimedia Commons Leonard23)
