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Memphis, TN. Pre-1960

Unlike many US cities, Memphis has a rich and varied history.¹ Wounded by civil war, it has survived widespread yellow-fever epidemics² and been forced through the reconstruction and reform movements. But Memphis is best known for its music. The city is considered as the ‘Birthplace of the Blues’; it was a major player in the evolution of rock’n’roll and it has long been a hotbed of soul music. Many factors have contributed to the musical history of the city, with its geographical position³ and racial mix being two of major ingredients.

At the head of the Mississippi delta, as the river runs north to south – from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico – the city of Memphis spreads east from the river’s banks. Its position meant that it picked up a large amount of passing trade from migrating workers and entertainers travelling between Chicago and New Orleans.⁴ With drugs and drink easy to acquire and Beale Street’s thriving back-room gambling culture, the extra ingredient for patrons wanting a little excitement in their lives was sex. Memphis’s burgeoning whorehouse district was one of the only places where black men could sleep with white women. These establishments operated a white man’s curfew. At around two in the morning the whites went home and blacks were allowed in for the rest of the night.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Memphis had become the murder capital of the United States, even though its population barely exceeded 150,000. The drinking culture of the downtown area coupled with hundreds of gambling rooms created this chilling statistic. At this time the music there was mainly of the rowdy alehouse variety but that soon changed, thanks in large part to a man by the name of W.C. Handy.

W.C. Handy moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, just south of Memphis on Highway 61, in 1903. Around Clarksdale were thousands of blacks working the cotton fields in the stifling heat. Their ‘hollers’ in the day and their singing on shantytown porches at night caught the ear of the twenty-year-old who was an accomplished cornet player. Legend has it that while waiting for a train he was transfixed by a young man plucking away at a battered guitar and singing the blues. Two years later he moved to Memphis and was soon a regular player on Beale Street, helping to bring the blues to a wider audience. In 1909 his ‘The Memphis Blues’ became a massive hit: it is credited as being the first blues song actually committed to paper. Handy’s dragging of the blues away from the cotton fields and into places where a white audience could hear them was a major step, changing Beale Street and Memphis forever.

While liquor and drugs formed an underground economy for much of Memphis’s local government, Beale Street was the only place in the south that allowed the black population to be actively involved in any business ventures, even if most of them were illegal.⁵ For black businessmen the Beale Street region was the financial and social epicentre of the south if not the whole country. Cocaine had spread through western Tennessee when the Coca-Cola company set up a bottling plant nearby and, though cocaine was removed as an active ingredient in 1905, the local dealers had already set up direct links with South America for their supplies.

The collision (and collusion) of black and white cultures spilled over into music. The 1920s saw a second wave of blues men. Walter ‘Furry’ Lewis (who in 1975 would open for the Rolling Stones in front of fifty thousand people) and ‘Sleepy’ John Estes further entrenched the city as ‘Home of the Blues’ while just down the road Robert Johnson was supposedly making his pact with the devil. The Great Depression was fast approaching but the effects of the still-thriving cotton trade helped to soften the economic burden on Memphis. Prohibition was introduced but the drinking didn’t slow down, it just became less visible.

Outside the Beale Street area, Memphis was still cut in half by colour restrictions. Most hotels, restaurants, public toilets and cinemas were white only. This was manageable while the blacks were in the minority but a great flood in 1937 meant many thousands of black farm workers lost their homes and moved into the city. World War II boosted the Memphis economy with the building of the Millington Naval Air Station, an Army depot and the Mallory Air Force Depot. The fact that cotton prices rose steeply during wartime also helped the local economy.

The mayor eventually clamped down on the Beale Street vices, which put many black businessmen out of business or forced them just across the river into West Memphis, which was actually over the state line with Arkansas and out of his jurisdiction. Anyone wanting a night out with an edge to it now had to cross the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge that was built in 1949.

Much of the music that the night-clubbers crossing the bridge were going to listen to was a new mix of Memphis jazz and blues played on the newly electrified guitars that were becoming more popular. The resultant sounds were christened ‘rhythm and blues’. At the time record labels were still somewhat mystified by the new forms of music and used terms such as ‘race music’, ‘ebony music’ or ‘sepia music’ to define and catalogue the rapidly growing market. Despite the politically incorrect naming of the product, rhythm and blues and its offspring – rock’n’roll – would cross all racial boundaries and sweep young America off its feet.

This was never more apparent than on Memphis radio. The white owners of the WDIA station, John Pepper and Bert Ferguson, made the earth-shattering decision to change to an all-black play format. It was the first black station in America and ensured that Memphis had a dedicated blues station. Soon after the broadcasts started, a young man by the name of Riley King walked in off the street and asked for a job, which he got, later changing his name to ‘Blues Boy King’ or ‘B.B. King’. He went on to become a blues legend in his own right, with his first chart-topping single, ‘Three O’ Clock Blues’, coming along in 1952. WDIA proved one of the Black America’s biggest cultural breakthroughs, especially in the South, where racism was rampant.⁶ Including the rural areas surrounding Memphis, the potential listenership was almost half a million black Americans. With cross-town competitor WHBQ also spreading the word of black music and a new type of popular music by the name of ‘rock’n’roll’, Memphis soon had twin points of attack on the record buyers of America.

With Beale Street fast fading into musical folklore, a new up-and-coming recording studio shook the world. While the first half of the century had seen the city gaining a reputation as a hotbed of blues and jazz excellence, the second half belonged to rock’n’roll. But then, as now, a high proportion of Memphians either didn’t know or didn’t care what was going on on their own doorstep while the sounds of Memphis were being lauded around the world and especially in the UK, as the Beatles and Rolling Stones would later prove. The Beatles’ cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ was just one example of their love of Memphis music, while the Stones’ championing of the blues was legendary.

It was in 1953 that this musical revolution unwittingly began. Elvis Presley walked into the Memphis Recording Service to make his first single. The owner of the studio was thirty-one-year-old Sam Phillips. He’d opened the studio at 706 Union Avenue in January 1952, catering to people who were willing to pay to record their own piece of vinyl. Presley paid his money, cut his songs and left. It would be another two years before he returned to record a single for Phillips’s own Sun label.

The early 1950s record-buying public was eating up the easy listening sounds of Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby but that was all about to change. Phillips with his Sun label was now recording B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf while his friend the local DJ Dewey Phillips would play them on his WHBQ radio show, ‘Red Hot & Blue’. It was Dewey Phillips who got hold of a test pressing of the first Presley single for Sun, ‘That’s All Right, Mama’, and proceeded to play it over and over on his show. The response was phenomenal; the post-war boredom vanished for the nation’s teenagers and a new mix of music and sex flooded into every American living room.

Suddenly parents and children were not listening to the same music any more. James Dean became a new kind of screen idol and rock’n’roll provided the rebellious soundtrack. Record stores and music shops seemed to spring up on every street. In Memphis the success of Presley helped open the door for the likes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Presley was basically a white man singing black music. Sun Records made the most of the opening as young men from around the South travelled to Memphis to try their hand at being a rock’n’roll star: Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash were just some of the ones that became superstars.

While the 1920s were the golden age of Memphis Blues and the 1950s were the glory years of rock’n’roll, the 1960s saw Memphis emerge as the bona fide centre of soul. The prime mover behind the new direction of Memphis’s music was Stax Studios.

Banker Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton founded Stax (and gave it its name from the first two letters of their surnames, St-Ax) after Stewart had begun recording country acts in 1957. His studio had had its first hit with the Mar Keys’ instrumental jam ‘Last Night’ in 1961. The Mar Keys were the first white band in Memphis with horn players, a black band trademark. Booker-T and the MGs’ ‘Green Onions’ in 1962 was another nationwide success for the studio. The next decade saw Stax have over 150 Top 100 singles. The ‘Stax sound’ came from bands that were used to playing to both black and white audiences, and then synthesizing this mix to a precise degree. Otis Redding, Carla Thomas and Sam & Dave became international stars on the back of it. Stax would later become embroiled in the Big Star story.

The future members of Big Star arrived just before rock’n’roll took off. Chris Bell was born in Memphis on 12 January 1951, the second youngest of six children: Virginia, David, Vicky, Sara, Chris and Cindy. Bell’s mother, Joan Branford, was English. She met US B-17 bomber crew member and Memphis native Captain Vernon Bell in Norwich during the Second World War. The pair married in England, moving back to the United States at the end of the war.

Once back home, Vernon was discharged from his military duties and set up what was the first of a string of cafés and restaurants. The Little Tea Shop opened its doors for business in January 1946, the Knickerbocker restaurant on Poplar Avenue followed, as later did a series of Bonanza Steak Houses and Danvers Fast Food outlets.⁷

The Bell family expanded as fast as their restaurant business and with the family home fast becoming too small for six children the Bells moved out to East Memphis in 1956. Chris and younger sister Sara were closest in age and were often mistaken for twins, not just because of their similar looks and age, but because they went everywhere and did everything together. All of the Bell children attended White Station Elementary School at the corner of Poplar and Perkins and went on to White Station High School, although Chris changed schools later on. The Bells were a typical well-off middle-class family who attended the local Episcopal church on Sundays.

Chris wasn’t a big music fan – an early favourite was Brenda Lee – but he was an avid comic book collector. ‘I remember Chris being curious about many things as a young child,’ says David Bell. ‘He had a sort of scientific bent along with an aptitude for mathematics. I never had the patience that he displayed in putting things together, whatever they might be.’ This precocious will to learn would later be borne out in his approach to studio work.

On 26 January 1951, exactly two weeks after Chris, Andrew Hummel was born in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where his father, John Hummel, was serving in the Navy. After Andy’s younger brother, Robert, was born in 1952 the family moved back to Elkwood Drive in Memphis and when a third child, Sally, came along they moved to Worthington Circle in midtown Memphis. John Hummel was a doctor who had been put through medical school by the Navy so he was required to serve a certain amount of time afterwards. When his service ended he moved to Memphis to set up his own practice as a gynaecologist.

Their first move to Elkwood Drive was actually covered in some detail in the local press. Andy’s mother, Barbara Jo Walker Hummel, a native of Murray, Kentucky, had been crowned both Miss Memphis and Miss America in 1947 and the local press followed her every move. For example, a full page in the Memphis Press-Scimitar was given over to her brief visit to Memphis in 1947 to look at engagement rings during a stop-off at the airport between promotional duties. ‘Thousands Brave Electrical Storm To Greet Miss America at Airport’ the headline proudly states, covering the meeting of Barbara Jo, her father and John Hummel to look at prospective rings for thirty minutes before flying on. In Memphis she presented a daily TV programme for WHBQ from 1955, called Lady of the House, in which she hosted guests and gave tips to housewives from three till four in the afternoon. Meal planning and food preparation was the main thrust of the show, which was aired just in time for wives to prepare the evening meal for husbands coming home from a hard day at the office. Andy often made a guest appearance on the show before he started at school. Barbara could often be found in the local papers during the 1950s even if it was just a photograph of her dressing her children or teaching them how to read. As well as bringing up three children she found the time to perform in musical comedy stage shows (she was an excellent singer by all accounts), model clothes and later (unsuccessfully) run for political office in the state legislature.

At the same time that Chris Bell was starting at White Station, Andy began at the all-male Presbyterian Day School. ‘Elementary school was kind of a big mystery to me,’ recalls Hummel. ‘I never quite got it and never really fitted in very well. I was very bored and became rather lazy around the third grade. My parents never seemed to take much of an interest in my schooling other than just sending me off, and then screaming at me when my grades were bad. One thing they did do was make me take piano. Starting in the third grade I had a lesson every week and had to participate in recitals, which I hated of course.’

Jody Stephens was born in Memphis on 4 October 1952, the middle of three brothers – Jimmy was two years older and David five years younger. Stephens’s father, James, from Virginia, and mother, Rose, from Massachusetts, met in Washington at a roller skating rink. When they started talking, it turned out that they both were working at the same hospital, the former in the X-Ray department and the latter as a secretary. Jody was enrolled at the Colonial Elementary School before moving on to Willow Oaks Elementary, a middle-class but less exclusive school than either Bell or Hummel’s.

Jody’s father would occasionally sing and play guitar for his boys, usually in a country style, though most music around the house in Jody’s formative years was described by his brother Jimmy as ‘easy listening’. The brothers usually got their ‘pop fix’ by listening to the Top Forty radio shows. Apart from short stints of piano lessons, none of the Stephens boys played an instrument in their early days. ‘Jimmy and I were on the Willow Oaks [Swim] Club which was very middle class,’ says Jody. ‘He was a great diver so he was on the dive team as well. Now that I think of it, I may have been on the dive team but [was] not nearly the diver Jimmy was. I don’t think I ever won a race but did finish second and third occasionally. They used to give us spoonfuls of honey to rev up the energy level and I think they even put ice in the water for faster swim times.’

‘My parents tried to get me to take classroom-style piano lessons,’ explains Jimmy. ‘My first teacher had a nervous break-down; the second was killed in a car wreck; and the third attempt coincided with basketball. And basketball won. My dad had tried to teach me some things by ear on piano but a friend of mine was taking guitar lessons and I wanted to take [them]. But my parents were concerned that my interest in the guitar would go the same way as the piano, so I never took any guitar lessons.’

This was a temporary setback, though, because soon almost every boy in the country wanted to be in a rock band and play guitar. The number of guitar players in America increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Beatles’ prime-time television appearances. In Memphis literally hundreds of bands sprang up from nowhere, playing both the local R&B dance hits and the brand new sounds of the British Invasion. Hummel, Bell and Stephens would be among these teenage rock-star wannabes and, despite living in different parts of town, their love of music would soon cause their paths to cross.