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Memphis Embraces Its Own Gritty Soul
January 7, 2002
By EMILY YELLIN
MEMPHIS, Jan. 6 - The new Peabody Place mall in the heart
of downtown here at first seems indistinguishable from the
masses of shopping centers that have sprung up in tourist
districts all over the country. But somewhere along the way
from the Gap to Victoria's Secret to Starbucks, shoppers
with sharp ears can hear a difference.
Instead of the usual canned music, Peabody Place pipes in
home-grown, original recordings, like the earthy soul music
classic "Green Onions," which filled the air one recent
afternoon. That song is one of many recorded just a few
miles away at Stax Records in the 1960's by the hometown
band Booker T. and the MG's, and its being played in one of
the city's newest showcases suggests its nascent pride in a
largely overlooked part of its cultural heritage: Memphis
soul music.
Al Green, Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes are just a few of
the artists who recorded this raw, stirring sound here on
the Stax and Hi Records labels during the 60's and early
70's. Memphis's soul music rivaled Detroit's more polished
pop-oriented Motown sound.
"Memphis music is grittier than Motown," said Mr. Hayes, a
co-writer of songs like "Soul Man" and "Hold On! I'm Comin'
" and writer of "Theme From `Shaft,' " for which he won
both Grammy and Academy Awards. "It's closer to where blues
began. It's down-home soul music, born out of blues and
gospel."
Perhaps because Memphis soul also became part of the
soundtrack of the civil rights movement, it has been slow
to re-emerge and be celebrated here, for it evoked this
city's most wrenching moment, the assassination of the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a downtown motel in 1968.
Mr. Hayes, 59, who has homes in New Jersey and Memphis,
said he often noticed his hometown ignoring the kind of
music he helped create. "All over the world Memphis soul
music has been revered and recognized," he said. "Memphis
just didn't realize the treasure it had in its own
backyard." But, he added, "I think now they are seeing what
they've got."
The most ambitious example of that new recognition can be
found in Soulsville, a $20 million redevelopment project
under way on the site of the old Stax recording studios
near downtown. It includes a museum of soul music and a
music academy for children, now under construction, and
there are plans for a performing arts center. Memphis and
Shelby County governments are behind the project -
contributing a total of $5 million - as part of a push that
began about three years ago to tout soul music.
Even with a drop in tourism here and across the country in
the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, Memphis has
kept up that effort.
"A lot of things have stopped or slowed down in the wake of
9/11," said Jerry Schilling, who, as president of the city
and county music commission, is charged with promoting
Memphis music. "But I think the leaders of this city
continue to support efforts to highlight our soul music
heritage, because they're looking at that longer term as a
key to the future here."
Developing economic opportunity around its musical heritage
is a formula the city first learned from rock 'n' roll.
Elvis Presley of course became ubiquitous here after his
death in 1977, and his Memphis home, Graceland, annually
attracts more than 700,000 visitors. The Sun Records studio
- famous for early recordings of Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis,
Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison - routinely draws
a healthy share of musical devotees.
By the 1990's the Memphis blues tradition, too, was getting
its due with the resurgence of Beale Street downtown,
boasting dozens of blues clubs, like the flagship B. B.
King's Blues Club. The city's Convention and Visitors
Bureau even adopted a new slogan, "Memphis: Home of the
Blues, Birthplace of Rock 'n' Roll."
Then in 1998 came one of the first signs that the city was
finally beginning to embrace its soul music heritage.
WRBO-FM (103.5), a 100,000- watt station, came on the air
and shot to No. 1 among all listeners in its market within
six months by playing only soul music from the 60's to the
mid-70's.
"The music was living all along," said Henry Nelson,
program director of the station, whose playlist is weighted
toward classic Memphis soul. "It just wasn't living
commercially. People had it in their hearts, in their
homes. But you never heard it on the radio."
As the station continued to thrive, Mr. Hayes - whose own
career had been revived with the remake of "Shaft," his
role as the voice of Chef on the animated television show
"South Park" and a stint on WRKS- FM (known as KISS-FM) in
New York - became a D.J. on WRBO five nights a week. He
records his show of classic soul music in New York
exclusively for the Memphis station.
In 2000 another beacon appeared. The Smithsonian
Institution opened its 8,000-square-foot Memphis Rock 'n'
Soul Museum just off Beale Street. It is the Smithsonian's
first permanent exhibition outside Washington and New York.
"What happened in Memphis was what happened in America,"
said Charlie McGovern, curator of cultural history at the
Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. "We
hoped to offer Memphians as well as visitors the sense of
how important their own history was to American culture."
The inclusion of the word soul in the museum's name was not
lost on Memphis.
"By saying rock and soul, we were trying to show that black
and white cultures intermixed over a long period of time
beginning back before the blues and country music," Mr.
McGovern said. "But for the period that the exhibit focuses
on, from the late 40's to the mid-70's, you really see the
interplay of white and black forms of popular music."
Mr. Schilling, a friend and associate of Presley and former
road manager for the Beach Boys and Billy Joel, agreed.
"Most of Memphis music, even the rock stuff, is really
based on our soul and rhythm-and- blues heritage," he said.
"That's where Elvis got his music."
The Soulsville redevelopment project, which was officially
begun last spring, encompasses a 27,000- square-foot
academy to help troubled students through music and a
17,000-square-foot museum of American soul music, both of
which are under construction. A 500-seat performing arts
center is also planned.
The Soulsville project has raised $15 million in public and
private money, including $1 million in federal funds
approved by Congress in November. And during a two-day,
grass-roots fund-raiser on WRBO in October, another $70,000
was raised, with many of the $5 to $25 pledges coming from
residents of the surrounding economically depressed
neighborhood. That district, a roughly three-square-mile
area known as Soulsville U.S.A., encompasses musical
landmarks including the house in which Aretha Franklin was
born.
"We have so much here that we have not properly mined,"
said Andy Cates, chairman of Soulsville. "And I think we
are mining it in a respectful way. We are doing this purely
nonprofit. We're trying to create a musical village and to
use the music as a gateway to revitalize and restore a
neighborhood."
Deanie Parker, director of Soulsville and a former Stax
employee, said the music academy and community building
were essential to the museum project. "It would be very
selfish," she said, "if we were to look back at soul music
without a sense of social conscience."
In the 60's, when racial mixing was rare, especially in the
South, Stax Records provided a haven of sorts for young
white and black musicians. That was reflected most clearly
in Booker T. and the MG's, the Stax house band, led by the
organist Booker T. Jones. The group consisted of two black
and two white members.
"We were living the dream," said Ms. Parker, who wrote and
recorded a few songs herself while working as Stax's
publicity director. "We were people of different races,
religions, genders working together. And it affected the
writers, who were clearly writing songs that reflected the
emotions of both black and white America."
Mr. Hayes said, "We had a great relationship at Stax,
because it represented a lot of races in Memphis." But
after the King assassination the bottom fell out.
"It affected me in the most profound way," Mr. Hayes
remembered. "I was just devastated. I was confused. I
marched with him in his last march, and the dogs were
sicced on us, and we were Maced. White people were doing
that. Some of my friends got beat so bad. It paralyzed my
creativity for a year, because I was bitter."
Mr. McGovern of the Smithsonian said: "This is a moment
where the wider world intrudes. And it encourages a kind of
musical expression that was much more overt. We went from
`Soul Man' to `Respect Yourself' and `Shaft' in the matter
of a couple of years. The course is clear, and while songs
were still about love and stuff, over this period soul
music really began to speak to black life, and there were
more people listening."
Referring to his composition and performance of the "Shaft"
theme in 1971, Mr. Hayes said, "You had a black man
onscreen at last being a hero, so you wrote about that with
a bit of bravado. You know, he's a `bad mother - shut your
mouth.' "
But by 1976 Stax had gone bankrupt.
"With the death of soul music in this city coming a few
years after the assassination, there was sadness, there was
hate, there was grief," Mr. Nelson of WRBO remembered. "And
for years nobody wanted to talk about it. We swept this
music under the rug. Then there was this resurgence of
Elvis that kind of overshadowed it."
Now, though, it seems Memphis has banked much of its future
on a full recognition of its cultural past, with the Rock
'n' Soul Museum, Graceland, Sun Studios, Beale Street, the
weekly Sunday church service conducted by the soul and
gospel star the Rev. Al Green, a new namesake restaurant
and nightclub downtown owned by Mr. Hayes, WRBO-FM, and the
nearly 10-year-old National Civil Rights Museum built on
the site where Dr. King was assassinated. In addition,
Soulsville is scheduled to open next fall.
"Years later, it's not just about Elvis," Mr. Nelson said.
"There is a rich heritage in R&B in Memphis that we can now
celebrate."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/07/arts/music/07SOUL.html?ex=1011397733&ei=1&en=ab4e907a9cacbf84
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