Floyd Sun Records: An Oral History (Second Edition)

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-942531-09-8
Verlag: Devault-Graves Digital Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 211 Seiten

The tiny Sun studio at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee may not have looked like much from the outside, but inside musical miracles were being performed daily by its enigmatic owner, Sam Phillips. After discovering a wealth of talent in his own backyard in the Mid-South area, Phillips began his own record label - Sun - with an emblematic rising sun and rooster logo. A white man who loved and understood African-American music, Phillips recorded soon-to-be blues icons such as Howlin' Wolf, Rufus Thomas, and B.B. King. A seismic shift occurred during one session in 1951 when Phillips recorded 'Rocket 88' with Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner. That shift was to become known as rock and roll. A shy white boy named Elvis Presley came in the studio to record a song for his mother's birthday. Phillips recognized something in the young man, and a moment of silliness in the studio ruptured into the first record of the future King of Rock & Roll, 'That's All Right.' Elvis shot to stardom; Sun Records didn't stop there. Hot on his heels came Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. However, there wasn't a day that the studio wasn't searching for other artists, other hits. Sun Records: An Oral History (Second Edition) brings to readers the voices of the pillars of Sun Records, the artists, producers, and engineers who made the place tick. Rufus Thomas (the first hit-maker for Sun), Scotty Moore, Rosco Gordon, Little Milton Campbell, Billy Lee Riley, producer and musician Roland Janes, producer Cowboy Jack Clement, and others all tell their inimitable stories about the making of a music empire, the label that put rock and roll on the world map. Music journalist and critic John Floyd has woven together dozens of priceless stories and anecdotes with his own insightful and artful narrative to make this book definitive for anyon

Autoren/Hrsg.

Floyd, John

Leseproben

Chapter One: Sunrise MORE THAN FORTY YEARS after the fact, it’s hard to grasp exactly how important Sam Phillips’s role is in the pantheon of American music history. Even if he’d never issued a record on the shining yellow Sun label, even if Elvis Presley had never entered his small recording studio on the outskirts of downtown Memphis at 706 Union Avenue, would rank as one of the most visionary record producers of our time on the basis of his early fifties blues work. Take a look at the roster of blues artists who made their debuts at the Memphis Recording Service—opened by Phillips at the dawn of 1950 and rechristened Sun two years later—and you get a sense of the man’s impact: Howlin’ Wolf, a gravel-voiced acolyte of Delta blues pioneer Charley Patton, whose music once prompted Phillips to pronounce, “This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies”; Junior Parker, whose tight, propulsive combo found a perfect balance between rural boogie and uptown blues, whose handful of Sun singles provided a partial blueprint for rockabilly and, therefore, rock and roll; B.B. King, whose impassioned vocals and biting guitar work would make him the single most influential bluesman of the postwar era; harmonica aces Walter Horton and James Cotton, who would each help Muddy Waters navigate two of his greatest Chicago groups; Joe Hill Louis and Doctor Ross, one-man-bands who could level city blocks with their blazing, over-amped raunch. And don’t forget Rosco Gordon, Rufus Thomas, Little Milton, and Earl Hooker. These men stood at the forefront of the blues. They tower over its past and present, their innovations still providing the benchmark against which every artist after them must ultimately be measured. By the time Phillips opened the Memphis Recording Service, the blues was in what today seems like a period of transition: It had long since emerged from its Delta roots but had barely begun the journey north. Which is to say it was evolving from an acoustic-based music into something electric, with a louder rhythmic drive with more power behind it. Which is also to say that the blues sides Phillips recorded in Memphis shatter one of the great myths in the blues—that it became a truly electric music only after its migration to urban-industrial meccas such as Chicago and Detroit. Without taking a revisionist shot at the legacies of Muddy Waters, Little Walter Jacobs, or Howlin’ Wolf’s post-Memphis output, it’s safe to say that the blues has never sounded as mean, raw, or intense as it did on countless days and nights at 706 Union Avenue. Amplifiers were cranked way past the point of distortion, guitars slashed like straight razors, rickety drum kits were pounded with fury and abandon, and the stories both sung and shouted spanned the gamut of the black Southern experience—from snapshots of a sharecropper’s reality (James Cotton’s “Cotton Crop Blues”) to the torment of a broken heart (Pat Hare’s sadly prophetic “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby”); from celebrations of drunken release (Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”) to carefully painted portraits of sweeping melancholy (Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train,” haunting even in the face of Elvis Presley’s superior version also cut at Sun, two years after Parker’s). If Howlin’ Wolf represented the place where the soul of man never dies, then Sun surely was the place where the soul of man was expertly captured on a regular, workaday basis. Along the way, Phillips dabbled in acoustic blues and doo-wop, gospel, and barrelhouse boogie-woogie, landing a 1953 hit with the Prisonaires’ lilting “Just Walking in the Rain” and recording some jump-blues instrumentals worthy of the swingmasters in California and Kansas City. The breadth and quality of his work is staggering, especially considering that the majority of it didn’t see release until the late-seventies excavation of dozens of unissued Sun tapes. During his nascent years in the music business, Phillips had numerous lawsuits leveled at his fledgling undertaking because of borrowed licks, wrongly solicited masters, and artists who didn’t grasp the concept of a binding contract. Neither Howlin’ Wolf nor B.B. King ever had a record issued on Sun; their work with Phillips was sold to bigger record companies. Likewise, Junior Parker, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and Little Milton hit their commercial strides only after they’d left Sun for more lucrative pastures. Phillips himself has remarked about the difficulties of being a white man in the South working closely with blacks. Yet he followed his vision, fulfilling his desire to provide an outlet for the music he cared about most. “I feel strongly about a lot of the blues that was real true, unadulterated life as it was,” he told Sun historian Martin Hawkins in 1984. “Basically, in the black music I’d heard all my life … there seemed to be something that was musically good and worthwhile.” And for a few short years in the early fifties, Sam Phillips proved it. Rufus Thomas looms over the history of Memphis music like an eternal ambassador of goodwill and good grooves. A resident of the city for nearly all of his eighty-one years, and a performer and disc jockey for just about as long, Thomas’s career parallels the development of black music in the South—from the farms to the minstrel shows to the nightclubs; from hard blues to throbbing soul and funk. His string of hits began in the early fifties and ran through the first part of the seventies and includes a menagerie of dance classics: “Walking the Dog,” “Do the Funky Chicken,” “Do the Funky Penguin.” Even when the hits stopped coming, Thomas kept on shimmying across concert stages in Memphis and around the globe, living up to his self-anointment as the World’s Oldest Teenager. Thomas, born March 26, 1917, was already a Beale Street club veteran in 1948 when his friend and mentor, Nat D. Williams—Memphis’s first black radio personality—gave him a job at WDIA. Between spinning local and national blues hits, Thomas cut his own record in 1950 for the Texas-based Star Talent label, “I’ll Be a Good Boy,” recorded at Johnny Curry’s Club in Memphis. The single didn’t do much, and Thomas held on to his day gig at WDIA while continuing to work nights on Beale Street, emceeing an amateur show that hosted the likes of B.B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Rosco Gordon, and Johnny Ace. Thomas’s initial recordings with Sam Phillips at the Memphis Recording Service were cut in 1951 and 1952; six of them were leased to Chess Records in Chicago. Three singles met the same fate as that Star Talent disc. It was “Bear Cat”—written by Phillips in 1953 as a soundalike answer to Big Mama Thornton’s massive hit, “Hound Dog”—that gave Thomas his first proper release on Sun (No. 181). It was also the studio’s first hit actually issued on the glowing golden-yellow label. —J.F. —Rufus Thomas— I was born in a little town in Mississippi, not far from Collierville, [Tennessee] in Marshall County, Mississippi. A little town called Cayce. I know little or nothing about Cayce because my parents, who were sharecroppers on a farm out there, they moved to Memphis when I was two years old, so I grew up in Memphis. I’ve been in Memphis ever since. Believe it or not, I’ve never really wanted to live any other place. Folks would ask me, “Why didn’t you go to New York?” or “Why didn’t you go to Chicago? Man, you’re good as anybody.” But I just never wanted to go out there. When I was growing up, I went to elementary school through the fifth grade, and while I was there I played the part of a frog on Beale Street. They had a play at a theater called The Grande, and I was hopping on the stage like a frog, not knowing that in later years animals would be the reason for the bigger success that I would have in the business. Then I went to another elementary school called Porter School, but I couldn’t finish the term at Porter. I had to transfer to another school because I was out of the district. In the meantime, I don’t know how it popped in my mind, but I had seen some tap dancers, and lo and behold, I wanted to be a tap dancer. A fella by the name of Edwin Martin who was a schoolmate—oooh, could he dance. So I said, “I want to learn this.” I knew a little bit about it, and I would take the little dance step that I knew and mix it up with something that I had gotten by somebody else—you might say I stole a little—and I put that together with what I knew so I got a whole brand-new dance step. I don’t know where the drive came from. All I knew is I wanted to be a tap dancer, and I wanted to be as good as I could. So I continued to work at it because during those days there was no such thing as dancing schools for blacks, so what I had to learn I had to learn on my own. Nobody could teach me. But in the meantime, I was struggling with this thing. I’d give my mama hell sometime, trying to get those dance steps together. Dancing out on the porch. There were some fellas who would come around and they were learning also, and I was trying to teach them the little bit that I knew. When I left the eighth grade I went to the ninth grade at Booker T. Washington High School, and that’s when things really began to happen for me. I was more or...