Memphis 68 Read online

  PRAISE FOR STUART COSGROVE’S

  DETROIT 67: THE YEAR THAT CHANGED SOUL

  ‘Cosgrove weaves a compelling web of circumstance that maps a city struggling with the loss of its youth to the Vietnam War, the hard edge of the civil rights movement and ferocious inner-city rioting. His prose is dense, not the kind that readers looking for a quick tale about singers they know and love might take to, but a proper music journalist’s tome redolent of the field research that he carried out in Detroit’s public and academic libraries. It is rich in titbits gathered from news reports. It is to be consumed rather than to be dipped into, a whole-hearted evocation of people and places filled with the confidence that it is telling a tale set at a fulcrum of American social and cultural history.’

  The Independent

  ‘Broadcaster Stuart Cosgrove lifts the lid on the time when the fight for civil rights and clash of cultures and generations came together in an incendiary mix.’

  Daily Record

  ‘The set-up sparks like the finest pulp thriller. A harsh winter has brought the city to its knees. The car factories are closed and Motown major domo Berry Gordy is fighting to keep his empire afloat. Stuart Cosgrove’s immaculately researched account of a year in the life of the Motor City manages a delicate balancing act. While his love for the era – particularly the music, best exemplified by the dominance of Motown, whose turbulent twelve months are examined in depth – is clear, he maintains a dispassionate, journalistic distance that gives his epic narrative authority and depth. With the backdrop throughout of a seemingly never-ending Vietnam War, Detroit 67 plays out like a series of dispatches from the frontline. History is quick to romanticise Hitsville USA but Cosgrove is not quite so credulous, choosing to focus instead on the dark shadows at the heart of his gripping story. *****’

  The Skinny

  Online reaction

  ‘A thoroughly researched and fascinating insight into the music and the times of a city which came to epitomise the turmoil of a nation divided by race and class, while at the same time offering it an unforgettable, and increasingly poignant, soundtrack. With his follow-up, Memphis 68, on the way, Cosgrove is well set to add yet another string to his already well-strung bow, becoming a reliable chronicler of a neglected area of American culture, telling those stories which are still unknown to most. By using his love of the music as a starting point he has found the perfect way to explore further themes and ideas.’

  Alistair Braidwood

  ‘The story is unbelievably rich. Motown, the radical hippie underground, a trigger-happy police force, Vietnam, a disaffected young black community, inclement weather, The Supremes, the army, strikes, fiscal austerity, murders – all these elements coalesced, as Cosgrove noted, to create a remarkable year. In fact, as the book gathers pace, one can’t help think how the hell did this city survive it all? In fact such is the depth and breadth of his research, and the skill of his pen, at times you actually feel like you are in Berry Gordy’s office watching events unfurl like an unstoppable James Jamerson bass line. I was going to call this a great music book. Certainly, it contains some of the best ever writing and insight about Motown. Ever. But its huge canvas and backdrop, its rich social detail, negate against such a description. Detroit 67 is a great and a unique book, full stop.’

  Paolo Hewitt, Caught by the River

  ‘The subhead for Stuart Cosgrove’s Detroit 67 is “the year that changed soul”. But this thing contains multitudes, and digs in deep, well beyond just the city’s music industry in that fateful year . . . All of this is written about with precision, empathy, and a great, deep love for the city of Detroit.’

  Detroit Metro Times

  ‘Big daddy of soul books . . . The riot that tore Detroit apart in 1967 was one of the worst in US history. Over twelve month-by-month chapters, the author – a TV executive and northern soul fanatic – weaves a thoroughly researched, epic tale of musical intrigues and escalating social violence.’

  TeamRock

  ‘As the title suggests, this is a story of twelve months in the life of a city. Subtitled “The Year That Changed Soul”, it is much more than that. Leading black music label Motown is at the heart of the story, and 1967 is one of Motown’s more turbulent years, but it’s set against the backdrop of growing opposition to the war in Vietnam, police brutality, a disaffected black population, rioting, strikes in the Big Three car plants and what seemed like the imminent breakdown of society . . . Detroit 67 is full of detailed information about music, politics and society that engages you from beginning to end. You finish the book with a real sense of a city in crisis and of how some artists reflected events. It is also the first in a trilogy by Cosgrove (Memphis 68 and Harlem 69). By the time you finish this, you’ll be eagerly awaiting the next book.’

  Socialist Review

  ‘A gritty portrait of the year Motown unravelled . . . Detroit 67 is a wonderful book and a welcome contribution to both the history of soul music and the history of Detroit.’

  Spiked

  ‘A fine telling of a pivotal year in soul music’

  Words and Guitars

  MEMPHIS 68

  The Tragedy of Southern Soul

  STUART COSGROVE

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Polygon,

  an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

  Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Stuart Cosgrove 2017

  The right of Stuart Cosgrove to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders.

  If any omissions have been made, the publisher will be happy to rectify these in future editions.

  ISBN 978 1 84697 373 4

  eBook ISBN 978 0 85790 938 1

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

  Typeset by 3btype.com

  Printed by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc, Bungay, Suffolk

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Roosevelt Jamison’s Blood Bank

  Carl Cunningham’s Cardboard Requiem

  Echol Cole’s Long Hard Day

  Wilson Pickett’s Ferocious Temper

  Albert King’s Strange Morning

  Larry Payne’s Day Off School

  Ben Branch’s Solemn Promise

  Agent 500’s Busy Afternoon

  Ernest Withers’ Blood Vial

  Johnnie Taylor’s Sexual Dilemma

  Guy Canipe’s Record Store

  Booker T. Jones and the Paris Riots

  Al Bell’s Big Thermometer

  Juanita Miller’s Long Walk to DC

  Dino Woodard’s Trip to Miami

  Sonny Yancey’s New Job

  Bill Hurd’s Fastest Race

  Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-Fried Chicken

  Jim Stewart’s Christmas Party

  Epilogue: The Final Pay Cheque

  Bibliography

  Index

  FOREWORD

  Memphis 68: The Tragedy of Southern Soul is the second part of a trilogy on the social history of soul music. The first part, Detroit 67: The Year That Changed Soul was published last year and the concluding book Harlem 69: The Future of Soul will be published later in 2018. It has been a mammoth task pulling together the unfolding stories of an era rich in music and social history, including the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, inner-city rebellion and riots, the rise of Black Power, and the FBI’s secret war on social progress. I hope I have d
one these subjects justice and paid them due respect.

  So many people have contributed to the research that it is not possible to thank everyone individually. But special thanks go to my friends and contemporaries on the UK northern soul scene, a remarkable source of knowledge, information and determination. I am also indebted to academic institutions across the USA and I’d like to thank the staff of the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the Ned R. McWherter Library at the University of Memphis, in particular the staff of the library’s Special Collections Division who patiently located newspaper clippings, digital material and primary sources that have hopefully enriched this book. Thanks to the staff at the Hollis F. Price Library on the LeMoyne-Owen campus in Memphis, the Stax Museum and Detroit Public Library, and for the co-operation of the FBI Academy Library in Quantico, Virginia.

  Although I do not know them personally, two authors have paved the way in writing books about Stax Records that were invaluable – thanks to Rob Bowman and Robert Gordon.

  Finally I’d like to thank the editorial team at Polygon in Edinburgh for requiring world-class standards from their independent base in Scotland, particularly my resilient editor Alison Rae and cover designer Chris Hannah.

  Most of all, thanks and deepest love to my close friends and family.

  Stuart Cosgrove

  Glasgow

  August 2017

  Beale Street – the pumping artery of black Memphis life and self-styled Home of the Blues.

  © SuperStock/Alamy Stock Photo

  ROOSEVELT JAMISON’S BLOOD BANK

  1 January

  Generosity oozed from the pores of Roosevelt Jamison. He was a kind man, easy to like, and, surprisingly, for a man raised in the nefarious ways of Memphis soul music, he knew all there was to know about blood plasma. Jamison had a kind word for everyone, even the drifters who hung around his doorway, and he wished the world a good New Year as he navigated his way through the early-morning debris of Beale Street, bypassing the drunks, the panhandlers and the torn ticker-tape from the night before.

  When he reached home he would sleep restlessly. He often complained that freight trains lumbering on the rail tracks along Old Southern Avenue kept him awake and he once told the singer James Carr that he thought the trains were trying to shake his old wooden-frame home to its foundations.

  A small pack of dogs was scavenging from overturned garbage cans, and nothing about the first day of 1968 hinted at the dramas to come. It was a new year, but the old ways clung on in Memphis. The city was reluctantly negotiating racial integration, a school bus programme was under way, and new legislation was set to challenge decades of segregation in the housing market. But, despite all the progress of the years of civil rights, the most basic commodity of human life – blood – was still stubbornly racist. Jamison knew it for a fact.

  He ran the Interstate Blood Bank, which sat on the bustling corner of Beale Street and South 4th, at the intersection near the First Baptist Church of Memphis and the New Daisy Theater – between the Lord and late-night entertainment. Beale Street was the pumping artery of black Memphis life. Its legacy reached back to the itinerant blues singers of the Great Depression and it still had a reputation for attracting iridescent creatures of the night. It was the street where the first zoot suit was tailored, and among its many inhabitants were the Stax singer Rufus Thomas, who had worked as a teenage emcee at the Regal Theater on Beale, when a member of the boisterous Rabbit Foot Minstrels. Thomas once said, ‘If you were black for one Saturday night on Beale, you’d never want to be white again.’

  Beale Street was a place of sounds and smells. In his classic book Hellhound on His Trail, the historian Hampton Sides imagined ‘a street of chitlin’ joints, of hoodoos and fortune tellers, with jug bands playing on every corner. The street smelled of tamales and pulled pork, pot liquor and lard. Day and night, Beale throbbed with so much authentic and violent vitality that in the words of a song by the legendary originator of Memphis blues, W.C. Handy, “business never closes ’til somebody gets killed”.’

  Jamison felt at home on Beale. This was the stomping ground of Ma Rainey, Gene ‘Bowlegs’ Miller, Johnny Ace, Bobby Bland and B.B. King, and for a time they all played residencies on Beale. The Stax guitarist Lewie Steinberg, the original bassist of Booker T. and the M.G.’s, had been suckled on raw R&B; his father was the pianist at Pee Wee’s Saloon and he remembers playing at his feet as the bar howled with drunken energy. Talent flocked there. At the back of his blood bank Jamison had opened a primitive recording studio and rehearsal room. A few streets away in a grubby office in the Mitchell Hotel, Stax housed unsolicited tapes and ran an offsite office for promising talent. Ernest Withers, society photographer, operated his studio on Beale, and it was there that Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, and Sam and Dave posed for promotional shots, and where a generation of Memphis lovers had their wedding photographs taken. Wilson Pickett, Bobby Womack and most of the local soul artists had been fitted with their stage suits at Lansky’s, an old Jewish clothier at 126 Beale Street, where Elvis Presley had sung hillbilly elegies as he waited for his drapes to be fitted. When Bobby Bland was soundchecking at Club Handy, further along Beale, Jamison often watched silently from the rear of the empty club. He reckoned it was the best time to watch Bobby. Devoid of an audience, Bland would run the scales and stretch for notes that no ordinary soul could hope to reach, pleading amid the sticky carpets and faded lampshades for absolution.

  By 1968 Jamison had invested much of his time and money in soul music but it had proved a fickle and cruel companion. He had lost the best of his singers to Goldwax Records and to other local independents, and all he had left in the whole wide world was blood: red, gushing and plentiful.

  Just as the New Year bells finished chiming, Memphis swore in a new mayor, the obdurate Henry Loeb. Unconventionally, the rituals had not taken place in a civic building but in the sitting room of Loeb’s home at 365 Colonial Road. Loeb was a local businessman, whose family owned a chain of laundries across the city, and he had won the election on the back of promises to turn back the hands of time and reverse integration. County Court Clerk Robert Gray administered the oath, standing self-consciously with a hefty bible between the settee and heavy draped curtains. The unusual circumstances had come about because of an acrimonious election and an ungracious handover by the previous lame duck mayor William B. Ingram. Seven contestants had put themselves forward for election; Rufus Thomas, the most recognisable black musician in the city, had canvassed exhaustively for the civil rights candidate, Walter A.W. Willis, but Willis fell far short of the vote required, and dogged by competing candidates from the African-American community the vote was split. Loeb’s win was as much due to the fragmentation of the African-American community as his own policies. Being sworn in, in his own sitting room, cast a farcical start to Henry Loeb’s tenure as mayor, but his unconventional and dogmatic reign was to worsen in the piercing heat of 1968 and eventually bring Memphis to the brink of civil war, pitting communities against each other and stretching the fabric of the city to its limits.

  After the swearing-in ceremony, the new mayor arrived at his office long before his staff had gathered. Mayor Loeb was obsessively hard-working but his hyperactive demeanour masked a slowness to adapt to change in society. He was ultra-conservative, suspicious of the march of civil rights, and emotionally attached to the policies of racial segregation he had grown up with. On his office desk, the outgoing mayor had left only two objects: a tape recorder and a box of aspirins. The message was simple: the press would distort everything, so keep a record, and as for the aspirins they were there to ward off the headaches that he would inevitably encounter in the year ahead. It proved to be one of the greatest understatements in the city’s unique history. Loeb’s headaches in 1968 were to become an intense migraine that was to consume his life, blight his time in office, and scar his reputation for ever. Oblivious to what lay ahead, Loeb got to work. His first action as
mayor was to dismiss eight senior municipal figures who had been appointed by the previous regime. He gave them twenty-four hours to proffer a letter of resignation or risk the humiliation of a public sacking. Loeb imagined it would show him as a decisive leader rejecting the cronyism of the Ingram era; in fact it revealed a belligerent and vengeful streak that was to worsen as the year unfolded. In his first press conference, Loeb told the assembled journalists that he was ‘humbled by the magnitude of the problems we have at hand’, saying prophetically that ‘the next four years will not be easy ones’. It proved to be a serious miscalculation. The first four months of Mayor Loeb’s tenure were among the most testing that any civic leader has ever faced, and, at least in part, he was the author of his own problems.

  Loeb was the grandson of an entrepreneurial German-Jewish family who had established a chain of coin-operated launderettes across the city. He inherited his grandfather’s suspicions of communism, and was among a group of conservative southern Democrats who supported McCarthyism and were naturally opposed to any form of radical social change. He had bequeathed from his family considerable wealth from one of the most luxurious whites-only Turkish baths, located on the corner of Main and Monroe. As late as 1968, he still clung to the belief that the races should be kept apart – ‘separate but equal’ – and, paradoxical as it may seem, heartily supported Roosevelt Jamison’s Negro blood bank facilities as it provided a social service for a community on equal but segregated terms.

  The Interstate Blood Bank was a business with an unconventional past. One day in the late forties, as Memphis sweltered in the heat, Jamison’s life was changed irrevocably by a chance encounter with a professor at the University of Tennessee, one of America’s leading haematologists, Dr Lemuel Whitley Diggs. At the time, blood was a massively controversial subject. Blood transfusion and contamination unlocked latent fears of racial integration, miscegenation and covert sexual intercourse. At the height of the Second World War, the American Red Cross had become embroiled in a deeply divisive dispute about transfusions. On the country’s entry into the war, the Red Cross announced a nationwide drive to build up blood supplies for the military. Patriotic African-Americans responded to the call and lined up in most urban centres to donate blood, only to be turned away. Newspapers led with headlines like ‘American Red Cross Bans Negro Blood!’ and a furious backlash against the policy of exclusion engulfed the famous charity. It is now one of the forgotten struggles in the civil rights movements, but the Red Cross were forced into a hurried compromise, secretly meeting with the heads of the army and navy to thrash out a new policy that could defuse the situation. What they agreed was muddled and unhelpful. Under a new policy, Negro blood would be accepted, but, in line with the segregationist doctrines of the past, the blood of black donors was to be separated by race and ethnicity, presumed to be of lesser importance than blood donated by white donors. For many years this plasma apartheid public health policy dominated the southern states, opening up a wound in society that worsened after the war, as health centres and private hospitals sought new and separated sources of blood.