Memphis 68 E-Book

Stuart Cosgrove

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: The Soul Trilogy
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 549

Beschreibung

Winner of the Penderyn Music Book Prize In the 1950s and 1960s, Memphis, Tennessee, was the launch pad of musical pioneers such as Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Al Green and Isaac Hayes, and by 1968 was a city synonymous with soul music. It was a deeply segregated city, ill at ease with the modern world and yet to adjust to the era of civil rights and racial integration. Stax Records offered an escape from the turmoil of the real world for many soul and blues musicians, with much of the music created there becoming the soundtrack to the civil rights movements. The book opens with the death of the city's most famous recording artist, Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash in the final days of 1967, and then follows the fortunes of Redding's label, Stax/Volt Records, as its fortunes fall and rise again. But, as the tense year unfolds, the city dominates world headlines for the worst of reasons: the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR STUART COSGROVE’SDETROIT 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, innercity rebellion and riots, the rise of Black Power, and the FBI’s secret war on social progress. I hope I have done 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 CosgroveGlasgowAugust 2017

Beale Street – the pumping artery of black Memphis life and self-styled Home of the Blues.© SuperStock/Alamy Stock Photo

ROOSEVELT JAMISON’SBLOOD 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.

Memphis was already a city divided along racial lines, so it conceded to the prevailing orthodoxy and segregated its blood banks. Collection points targeting different communities sprang up across the city. But there was resistance, too. Many citizens boycotted the Red Cross and refused to donate to the charity, preferring to give blood to community blood banks. Gatemouth Moore, a gospel programmer with the Sound of Memphis, Radio Station WDIA, and the first blues singer to perform at Carnegie Hall, grew up accepting segregated healthcare as the norm. ‘I remember when the black ambulances could not haul white people. They had a white company . . . called Thompsons,’ he recounted. ‘I was on my way to the station and when I came round the curve there was the ambulance from [the black healthcare company] S.W. Quails and there was a white lady lying in the ditch bleeding. And they were waiting for Thompsons to come and pick her up. I guess I waited thirty or forty minutes and still no ambulance. They tell me that the lady died.’

Roosevelt Jamison’s Interstate Blood Bank was funded by the University of Tennessee and one of the most popular within the city’s African-American community. Using the most basic equipment – rubber tubes and glass jars with metal bails – Jamison collected blood from Beale Street donors and frequently paid small sums of money to vagrants. He would do his rounds, first to John Gaston Hospital, and then on to the laboratories of the University of Tennessee, where Professor Diggs was the director of research. Remarkably, given the racial barriers of the time, they not only became colleagues but close friends who met on a weekly basis throughout the fifties. Diggs defied the laws of the day and began surreptitiously to teach Jamison about the basic science of haematology. It was against this backdrop of passionate research and separated blood that Diggs began the first experiment to understand the mutations of sickle cell anaemia. Eventually Jamison would come to share his knowledge with students at Druaghon’s Business College where the apprentice blood scientist taught anatomy and physiology.

At the rear of Jamison’s blood bank was a small cluttered warehouse, lined with jars, medical equipment and boxes of customer cards. A space had been cleared to accommodate a crude recording desk with a stand microphone, box speakers and a reel-to-reel tape, and makeshift soundproofing had been nailed to the walls. There was barely enough room for a band to rehearse but the blood bank tapped into the talent on Beale Street and quickly became one of the city’s many busy and underfunded studios. Not as famous as Stax, nor as historic as the old Royal Theater – a primitive rockabilly studio transformed by the legendary Willie Mitchell into the House of Instrumentals (Hi Records) – the blood bank played a vital community role in the southern soul scene. Like Detroit in the north, Memphis had become a creative Klondike for aspiring musicians, who flooded to the city in search of a break. This was where the tense trinity of blues, gospel and country music met and merged. Southern soul was raw and unpolished compared to the more metropolitan music of the north; its blood was thick and heavy.

Every day, Jamison drove around Memphis collecting blood, hauling musical instruments from place to place, and delivering flyers to promote his shows. It was a journey that took him around a city coursing with soul music, each new artery leading to a studio, a record store or some makeshift venue at the rear of a sidewalk bar. Jamison had a regular ‘arm’ – a very good customer – who lived in a two-storey low-income block on Azalia Street. The man was B negative, one of only a tiny percentage of people in America with that blood type, and so his blood was highly sought after. The man had long since retired, and Jamison knew that one day soon he would die, so he treated him like a rare bird’s egg, being soft and tender with his arm, and stroking his skin like feathers. He always gave the agreed price of $10 in a crisp new note, nothing crumpled or grubby. The man’s wife looked on proudly as the blood flowed into Jamison’s jar, standing by with sweet tea and an Oreo cookie. It was the only money the couple earned beyond welfare. When enough blood had been extracted from her husband’s arm, his wife kissed him sweetly, as if he was special, which according to the Red Cross almanac he most certainly was.

On his weekly visit to Stax, Jamison hugged the rail tracks along Southern where freight trains lumbered slower than life itself and remembered the days when it was nothing but a dirt-track road. He drove on past parched blue signs implausibly selling catfish and diesel oil from the same paint-blistered shack. Jamison felt an affinity with the owner; the needs of business bringing two unlikely products together in the same company – in his case, blood and soul. Then, after bumping over the McLemore and Dunavant rail crossing, his car dipped bumpily into a new kind of poverty in the hidden side streets above the darting tunnels of the Mississippi Boulevard, on through a sad desperation, and on again to Stax where the old movie sign came into view – ‘Soulsville U.S.A.’.

Since 1964, Jamison had helped to develop the careers of two of the city’s greatest vocalists – James Carr and Overton Vertis (O.V.) Wright. Neither was an easy option. Both were brilliant singers who drew effortlessly on blues and gospel, but they were also difficult and, in many respects, troubled individuals. Carr suffered throughout his life with debilitating bouts of depression, and was unable to read or write. His illiteracy and dark moods made him incoherent and at times painfully withdrawn. O.V. Wright was a heroin user who, despite numerous attempts to overcome his addiction, suffered several heart attacks before dying in the back of an ambulance on his way to emergency care in Birmingham, Alabama, at the relatively young age of forty-two. In an obituary in the Wall Street Journal, Jesse Drucker hinted at Wright’s pained self-destruction: ‘There is a tortured, sometimes even menacing feel to many of his recordings. Many soul singers of that period could sing sad lyrics, but the grief was often feigned. Not Wright. His hurt was real.’ The titles of some of the songs he recorded provide a clue: ‘Drowning On Dry Land’ (1972), ‘I’d Rather Be Blind, Crippled And Crazy’ (1973), ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Cry’ (1965), and Wright’s masterpiece, an emotional tribute to the instruments of his addiction, ‘A Nickel And A Nail’ (1971).

It was as if the three men – the blood bank clerk, the depressive and the addict – were destined to find each other. The renowned music critic Peter Guralnick saw in Jamison an unrestrained generosity: ‘He seemed to possess an empathy gene, a need to be of service that carried over into every aspect of his life. He was the kind of person who couldn’t see a stray dog without needing to feed him.’ In the early sixties, Jamison began to manage local groups, often rehearsing them in the blood bank’s back-office. Among them were two of Memphis’s great gospel groups, the Jubilee Hummingbirds and the Harmony Echoes. James Carr and O.V. Wright emerged from their ranks. Wright rehearsed by night in the blood bank and by day worked as a garbage man for the Department of Public Works, a place of desperate conditions, and one soon to become the source of the city’s notoriety in 1968. Excited by the raw talent he had discovered, Jamison, a wiry extrovert man with a distinctive goatee beard, dragged Carr and Wright to Stax Records. The timing was unfortunate; the studios on McLemore were bursting at the seams and Stax boss Jim Stewart turned them away, recommending that they talk to Quinton Claunch. They were given similar advice by a local saxophonist, Richard Sanders, and so, with two separate recommendations, the unlikely trio went on a late-night journey to Claunch’s suburban home on the outskirts of East Memphis.

Claunch was a one-time country guitarist who in his early years had played for the Blue Seal Pals, a hillbilly group who took their name from a southern brand of refined flour. He moved north from Tishomingo, Mississippi, a dirt-track town near Highway 25, and settled in Memphis, where he was a featured musician on early releases by Carl Perkins, on the city’s most famous rockabilly label, Sun Records. By day Claunch had a job selling hardware supplies and repairing air-conditioning units but in the evenings he operated in the city’s start-up studios. One night in early 1964, he was woken by the sound of knocking on his front door. ‘Here’s what happened,’ Claunch relates. ‘I was layin’ in bed, twelve o’clock, big knock on this door . . . it was Roosevelt Jamison, James Carr, O.V. Wright.’ They had a crude tape of demo songs in their possession and a portable tape recorder. Jamison charmed the sleepy Claunch into sitting on his front-room floor to listen to the songs. They were by all accounts primitive but outstanding. Among the tracks was a song Jamison had written for his girlfriend, ‘That’s How Strong My Love Is’, sung by O.V. Wright. Within days of hearing the raw tapes, Claunch took Wright to American Sound Studio, on the corner of Thomas and Chelsea, where master-producer Chips Moman cut a recording that became Goldwax’s stepping stone to deep soul immortality – O.V. Wright with the Keys’ ‘There Goes My Used To Be’/‘That’s How Strong My Love Is’ (1964). It was destined to become an international best-seller and was subsequently recorded by Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones, Taj Mahal and a host of others. Jamison never received the full remuneration he should have. Over a lifetime royalties trickled in, always underestimated, from a system that was heavily skewed to the famous major labels and to those most connected to the powerful collection agencies. It was blood not deep soul that funded his family.

On 15 January 1968, Jamison called in at the Satellite record store next door to the Stax studios to buy tickets for a concert by James Brown and the Famous Flames, who were scheduled to perform at the Mid-South Coliseum. His was a regular face at all the major concerts in Tennessee, where he promoted Carr and O.V. Wright, and often took the opportunity to distribute blood-donor information leaflets to what was guaranteed to be an all-black crowd, yet success had neither been instant nor straightforward. There were the obligatory legal disputes, first with Peacock Records, a company owned by the mercurial Houston-based hustler Don Robey. According to Jerry Leiber of the renowned songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller, Robey was a gangster who managed his various entertainment enterprises ‘using violence, the threat of violence, and murder’. Unbeknown to the gentler and more generous-spirited Jamison, Wright had previously signed a gospel contract with Robey that had to be untangled. Then there were disputed contract agreements with Goldwax, and various failed attempts to cure Wright’s addictions, and the endless efforts to drag Carr from the pits of clinical depression. None worked entirely successfully, but he kept on trying. He felt an obligation to Carr that went far beyond simple kindness. He had first met the vocalist in the early sixties when they were both featured singers on the gospel caravan circuit. Jamison had been a member of the Memphis gospel group the Redemption Harmonizers, who travelled the Delta towns crammed into a Cadillac. He sang with some of the unheralded giants of deep soul and shared a stage with Wee Willie Walker, and remembered meeting Carr backstage as far back as 1962.

Carr was a mystifying genius. He was born in Coahoma County near Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1942. During his infant years, his parents moved to Memphis, where his father, a street-corner preacher, formed a gospel group called the Southern Wonders. Carr was only nine years of age when he first took to the stage. Rarely in school, he never learned how to read or write, and although Jamison tried to tutor him with simple stories and basic word recognition, Carr lived his life functionally illiterate. As an adult, he gained most of his experience on the road as a member of in-demand gospel circuit groups, the Sunset Travellers and the Harmony Echoes, while working part-time as a labourer, breaking up with partners, and trying, not always successfully, to support a young family. He followed Wright to the doors of the emergent Goldwax label, with Jamison acting as his manager and confidant, and between 1966 and 1969 he released ten singles, breaking into the R&B charts with his third single, ‘You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up’, in 1966. By January 1968, with his mentor hawking discs from the back of his car, Carr came to record songs that were poised to join the great legacy of southern soul music. His definitive version of the illicit-love song ‘The Dark End Of The Street’ (1967) was a stone-cold classic and his rousing ‘Freedom Train’ (1969) became one of the great anthems of the civil rights era. ‘The Dark End Of The Street’ was a visceral and challenging number about secret love and betrayal in the dark streets of downtown Memphis. It had been hurriedly written by Dan Penn and Chips Moman in a hotel during a break in a marathon poker session. Moman had earned the nickname ‘Chips’ from his lust for gambling, and, according to music historian Robert Gordon, the two friends were ‘pilled up at a music convention in Nashville [when] they took a break from a poker break, went to a piano, and hammered out the song in less than an hour, returning to play another hand’. The ballad’s lasting complexity eclipsed its humdrum origins and it was recorded first by Percy Sledge, then by Aretha Franklin, as well as Ry Cooder and Linda Ronstadt. The New York Times was to describe his voice as ‘a robust baritone that embraced amber-toned purity and desperate growls’. He could turn an already unhappy love song into three minutes of tortured heartsick drama. But mental illness hampered his career, and none of his releases seriously bothered the pop charts. ‘He had a hard life,’ Quinton Claunch said. ‘He lived the blues and was not always good at taking medication.’ Author Hank Cherry saw in Carr’s depression a route to a profound depth: ‘When you listen to him sing his songs, a freeway opens up and drives right to the soul of raw emotion. While Otis Redding certainly sang with supreme emotion, that emotion was predicated on confidence. James Carr dove into his own embattled soul, and pulled from the painful reaches of his psyche.’

When the Goldwax label eventually folded in 1969 they left James Carr, O.V. Wright and Wee Willie Walker with no royalties to show for their careers. Walker continued to work in a corrugated cardboard plant and Wright could not even afford his own apartment, and so shared a low-income home with his mother on the notorious Le Moyne Gardens, relying largely on welfare. There were many honourable attempts to resurrect Carr’s professional career, but his apparent lack of energy and an inclination to drift into lengthy depressive silences undermined them. He suffered from what Peter Guralnick described as ‘a crippling paralysis of spirit, a graver and graver malaise’. His fear and anxiety about the outside world led him to move into his sister’s home in Memphis, after which he rarely emerged from his depression and eventually died of lung cancer in 2001.

Throughout the early months of 1968, as his career as a community haematologist and blood-bank manager grew, Roosevelt Jamison’s role in trying to develop the career of the lost spirit of Carr inevitably took second place. He promoted Wee Willie Walker’s full-throttle cover version of the Beatles’ ‘Ticket To Ride’, but always alerted friends to the B-side, the peerless ‘There Goes My Used To Be’, an agonising tale of lost love. He remained a concerned friend to Carr even as his final two Goldwax releases, ‘A Man Needs A Woman’/ ‘Stronger Than Love’ (Goldwax 332, 1968) and ‘Life Turned Her That Way’/‘A Message To Young Lovers’ (Goldwax 335, 1968) stalled and failed. The slower Carr’s life became, the more it seemed to propel Jamison forward. He kept up a relentless pace, racing around the small towns of the South handing out promotional copies to radio DJs, then back to the corner of Beale Street and Fourth, where the blood bank rehearsal room was attracting the next generation of hopeful singers. By 1968 he had befriended yet another Memphis act, the Ovations, and directed them to Goldwax. He would juggle the demands of soul and blood, the values of gospel and haemoglobins, as he accelerated east along E Trigg Avenue and turned onto Lauderdale where he would park at Royal Studios, the old nickelodeon that was now a factory of instrumental soul under the guidance of local bandleader Willie Mitchell. The owner, Joe Cuoghi, was well known in the music industry for his pioneering store Poplar Records, which had been a local institution since 1946. It was where Elvis hung out and where the different strands of Memphis music, from hillbilly to R&B, found common company. Cuoghi was usually good for a pint of blood, but since a serious illness he had all but disappeared. Willie Mitchell had always promised him an ‘armful’ but that never seemed to happen; the time was never right, his arm was always elsewhere, and so Jamison hung out with the Hodges brothers: Charlie, Leroy or Teenie. They were the rhythm section at Hi Studios and a reliable source of music gossip, but curiously reluctant to allow their blood to flow.

The evenings would bring Jamison full circle back to Beale Street. This was the busiest time of his working day, when the singers and musicians arrived from their day job and rehearsals would begin. It was also the time that regular donors, many from Baptist churches across the city, finished their work for the day and could take time to donate, and when alcoholics turned up, needing a few cents for a drink. Jamison had been told by the university not to take blood from drunks for fear of contamination, and he tried to stick scrupulously to the rules, but witnessing the broken lives and gaunt faces around him tested his deeply held Christian views, so he kept a small jar of quarters under the desk to give out to the most needy. Generosity oozed from the pores of Roosevelt Jamison, but charity alone could not solve the problems of Memphis. Powerful forces were gathering outside the Interstate Blood Bank, and they came with a mandate to challenge the deep discrimination that still lingered in the city. Within a matter of months, the decaying corners of Beale Street would be visited by righteous fury, pathological racism and unprecedented grief.

A soul requiem. Otis Redding’s death hurt Stax to the core, and the role of talking to the press fell on the young shoulders of crash survivor Ben Cauley of the Bar-Kays.

CARL CUNNINGHAM’SCARDBOARD REQUIEM

8 January

It was a routine delivery. A parcel truck parked illegally outside a dilapidated cinema on East McLemore Avenue in South Memphis. No one even looked at the driver as he stacked a tower of cardboard boxes and delivered them to the foyer, to the ramshackle offices of one of the most prodigious independent recording studios in the world. This was Stax Records, the flagship home of Memphis soul and a beacon of hope for hundreds of young musicians and teenagers who hung around its doors as if it were a fairground. The boxes were addressed only to the company and they lay by the entrance, unacknowledged, for several days. It was only when a curious staff member opened them that their sad significance came to light. They contained the remains of the drum kit of Carl Lee Cunningham, the deceased drummer of the Bar-Kays, the backing band of Stax’s most famous star, Otis Redding. The cardboard lay scattered over the lavender carpeting, a banal requiem to the tragic events of the previous month, when seven young people plunged to their death in a plane crash. The drum cases were in a bad state, battered by the waves and rusted by cold waters, with their skins partly torn from the rims. The red strips of tape that had once secured the cases top to bottom had peeled off in the deep, and now hung pathetically.

Carl Cunningham’s death hurt Stax to the core. He was a familiar face around the studios, a boy obsessed with music and bewitched by the beat, who came from a famous family of drummers well known at Stax and on the streets of Orange Mound. Like many of his generation, he lived a hand-to-mouth existence, holding down a low-paid job as a shoeshine boy at King’s Barbershop on the corner of College Street and East McLemore. Cunningham’s drums were the last items to be salvaged from the crash site. His horn-rimmed glasses had disappeared, and the drumsticks he had cradled in his hand as the plane plummeted were never recovered. They were presumed lost in the frozen waters of Lake Monona, Dane County, Wisconsin.

Talking to the press was a tough thing to ask anyone to do and that role fell heavily on the shoulders of Cunningham’s friend, the trumpeter Ben Cauley, who was still only twenty. He had been hospitalised in the immediate aftermath of the crash and had spent a difficult Christmas recuperating. Now that 1968 had arrived, he was facing up to the loss of his best friends. He stood in the reception area at Stax, head bowed down in grief and holding back the tears, barely managing to answer the questions in a stammering, fading voice. He was dressed in a double-breasted military raincoat with epaulettes and an Ushanka hat that perched perilously on his head and looked as if he had bought it second-hand from the Russian army. It was in fact a hat that he had bought in Wisconsin as the winter winds grew stronger. On his left arm he wore a new wristwatch, to replace the one he lost in the deep waters of the lake. Ben held his hands in front of him as if he were at a wake and his eyes gazed wearily at the floor. He started to explain his ordeal. He had all but passed out in the freezing lake but miraculously survived by clinging on to a soaking wet seat cushion. Hallucinating with hypothermia, he had watched each of his friends try to escape from the wreckage, but fail to keep their heads above the surface. All drowned before the rescue party arrived. Cauley spent twenty-five minutes in the water. When he could no longer hold the sodden cushion in his numb and frozen hands any longer, he drifted into unconsciousness. ‘Just as soon as I let it go, somebody yanked me up,’ Cauley remembered, still bewildered by the randomness that had saved his life and killed his friends. He admitted to the journalists that his near-drowning provoked recurring nightmares in which ‘the rush of the lake’s icy water, the chill of fear, and the helplessness’ lapped through his mind.

The Stax songwriter David Porter watched the press conference in disbelief. From that day on, he described Cauley’s survival as divine: ‘Ben is a miracle. It’s really that simple.’ Yet Cauley was not alone in his luck; bass guitarist James Alexander had travelled by a different route and survived, and the Stax singer Mary Frierson, who had been given the stage name Wendy Rene by Otis Redding and was pencilled to appear as a warm-up act and a backing singer, stayed in Memphis, having just given birth to a baby boy. Frierson eventually drifted away from music as a consequence of the crash, leaving only a few obscure songs as her legacy. Cauley then told the press that he was rushed to the Methodist Hospital in Wisconsin, suffering from exposure and shock, where he remained for several days. His first visitor was James Alexander, another member of the Bar-Kays, who had missed the doomed flight. The group had drawn lots. Alexander lost out and, with no seat available on the private plane, flew safely by commercial airline via Milwaukee. On his arrival at Mitchell airport, Alexander had been met by police who drove him to visit his friend in hospital. Then he was taken on the grimmest visit of his life – to the mortuary, where he was asked to identify the naked bodies of his friends, name tags hanging limply from their big toes.

When he was asked what had caused the crash, Cauley hesitated, then looked around to Stax’s staff members for guidance. He explained nervously that he had been visited by aviation investigators and had told them that the aircraft had been cold when they first boarded. The Bar-Kays had asked the young pilot if he could crank up the heat, but ominously he told them that the battery reading was too low for extra heat and almost certainly too low to guide the plane to safety.

The crash that killed Otis Redding and six others was a mess of misinformation. Even eye witnesses were unsure of what had happened. It seems that around 3.30 p.m. on 10 December 1967, just three miles from the safety of Dane County’s regional airport Truax Field, a twin-engine Beechcraft-18 plane plunged through low-lying clouds and fog. The gusting rain and squally conditions seemed to tip the plane into a tailspin and it crashed down into Lake Monona. Only a few witnesses saw the crash, but many more claimed to have heard the engine fighting with itself as the pilot tried desperately to descend into an instrument-led landing pattern. What no one knew at the time was that the plane was a private jet owned by soul singer Otis Redding, one he had bought several months earlier from James Brown. The distinctive green-and-white livery, recently painted and emblazoned with Redding’s name, was barely visible in the low-lying clouds, and, according to one of the few eye witnesses, the plane seemed to break apart as soon as it hit the surface of the lake. If it had continued for another mile it would have crash-landed into Madison’s heavily populated East Side. By some small mercy a major catastrophe was averted. That was cold comfort to Stax, whose heart had been ripped out by the crash.

Police divers and volunteers, including a small contingent of local doctors, quickly gathered at the scene. Defying the freezing cold, they plunged into the water to look for survivors, but when it became clear that there was little likelihood of saving lives, a crane was hired from a local contractor, and police began what was to become a painstaking rescue operation. A razor-thin film of ice formed on the bitterly cold waters of the lake, the temperature plunged, and after a day of searching, the search was called off. Later, they managed to winch the wreckage up from the lake. The body of Otis Redding, one of the greatest soul singers in the world, was slowly dragged up from the water. A police photographer captured the moment. Redding’s head was inelegantly trapped between the winch and the police barge, his mouth battered and blood clotted around his lips – those lips that had sung the saddest of songs with such elegance and pleading – ‘Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, I keep singing them sad, sad songs y’all, Sad songs is all I know.’

The police barge headed at a glacial pace to the shore, obscured by the dense fog that hung over the lake’s surface. The remnants of the Bar-Kays’ stage suits, bought at Lansky’s on Beale Street back home, floated pathetically to the surface. Only these freezing waters knew the full story of what had actually happened. On board was the plane’s log, which had been found near the aircraft. It was eventually turned over to Federal Aviation Agency officials, but by the time it was in their safe hands, the impact of one of soul music’s greatest tragedies was reverberating around the world.

Redding had been scheduled to play a concert at the Factory, a club in a converted garage in the city’s West Gorham Street. Local art student William Barr had designed a surreal psychedelic poster advertising Otis, the Bar-Kays and a warm-up group from Illinois, prophetically known as the Grim Reapers, who later morphed into the rock band Cheap Trick. By the time Redding’s body arrived at the laboratory of Dane County, much was still to be unexplained. Coroner Clyde Chamberlain trundled the gurney down a corridor past the county sheriff’s department, with no idea whose the body was or its significance. Chamberlain had never heard of Otis Redding, Stax was a name he was entirely unfamiliar with, and Memphis was a remote southern city he had never visited. Nor was he expecting the attention that would descend on his office. Usually, dead bodies arrived at his autopsy room on gurneys or carried on police stretchers, and with a brown paper carrier bag containing the personal effects of the deceased, typically small sums of cash, a wristwatch, a cigarette lighter, a wallet and a photograph of wife and family.

Otis Redding had always been conscious of his appearance. His colleague and collaborator at Stax, Isaac Hayes, called him ‘a statue of a man’, Jerry Wexler, the emperor of Atlantic Records, described him as ‘a natural prince’, and others talked about him as being of ‘chiselled marble’ and ‘god-like’. A keen amateur pilot, Redding had been sitting upfront, and had been propelled forward into the control panel at the time of the crash. His leg was broken, and a small attaché in which the soul singer kept his cash earnings from two previous concerts was missing, but unlike Cunningham’s drum kit the missing attaché was never found. It has always been the subject of unresolved intrigue – and long-term family resentment. Redding had just completed a lucrative three-night concert trip to Cleveland and the attaché was presumed to have contained $10,000 in cash. Redding’s widow Zelma always presumed that it was stolen by rescue workers or expropriated by a rogue police officer. However, it is more likely to have remained in the silty grey unforgiving waters of Lake Monona.

Redding had died at the pinnacle of his career. His now classic album Otis Blue, released in the autumn of 1965, had gone to number one in the R&B charts and stayed in the pop charts for thirty-four weeks. Rock critic Dave Marsh was convinced it was vocal range that set Redding apart, describing him as ‘one of the great live showmen . . . a masterful ballad singer and a true rocker in the spirit of his boyhood hero, Little Richard’. Three months prior to his death, Melody Maker selected him as the world’s top male vocalist, dethroning Memphis’s most famous son, Elvis Presley, who had held the top spot since 1956. Redding’s fame had brought him to the attention of the White House and he had recently accepted an invitation from Vice President Hubert Humphrey to head a troupe of Stax/Volt artists to entertain US troops in Vietnam in the spring of 1968. He had destroyed all before him when he appeared the previous summer at the celebrated Monterey Pop Festival. In the few weeks prior to his death, Redding had undergone a period of intense creativity, scribbling lyrics down on notepaper as he travelled, improvising ideas on stage, and soaking up influences from urban soul to the new festival rock. Excitedly, Otis was in daily contact with his collaborator and sometime producer Steve Cropper, who as a teenager had bought his first guitar by mail order and was now a mainstay of the Stax studio system. Redding rarely completed songs. He threw ideas out there like confetti, often asking for help to complete the best of them. Cropper was his sounding board and often brought shape to the initial idea, moulding it until it was ready to record. Unlike the more controlled Motown system, or, more famously, the Hollywood studio system, Stax was informal, haphazard and collegiate, and in contrast to the urban sounds from the north, Stax was heavy with southern heat. Cropper was drawn to a ballad that Otis had sketched out while relaxing on a houseboat on Waldo Point, California, after a residency at the Fillmore. He sensed that ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay’ had a wider appeal, way beyond the narrow register of Redding’s trademark deep soul ballads, like ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ or ‘Try A Little Tenderness’. The song’s narrative was one of departure, loneliness and yearning for home, universal themes that could appeal far beyond the ghetto bar-rooms. It was one of a catalogue of songs Redding recorded in a period of intense activity at Stax studios in December 1967, and his death brought the songs prophetically to life. In a fast turnaround, motivated by a mixture of remembrance and market greed, Stax – with the help of their distrusted colleagues at Atlantic Records in New York – rush-released the song. It hit the streets on 8 January 1968 and became an instant success – number one in the USA, the UK and much of Europe – selling over four million copies and dominating awards throughout the year. Out there on radio stations, and in the stores, it took on a watery mournfulness, as if Otis had written the song as his final farewell. Suddenly, a song about love took on much greater significance, and the metaphor of the dock of the bay came to mean a lover’s requiem, suicidal self-reflection, or the chronicle of a death foretold. The song ends with Otis whistling the final refrain, as if he is lost for words, fading into a distant forever. Many have claimed that in the recording session Redding had simply run out of words and ideas, but keyboardist Booker T. Jones was adamant that it was all planned, observing that the song was ‘beautifully simplistic – all major chords. Otis’s lyrics touched me – about leaving home and watching the bay, trying to figure things out as everyone’s pulling at you. My notes on the piano fed into that. I wanted to capture a maritime feel – the sound of a boat on the Mississippi River, and the sounds of gospel and New Orleans. I put those flourishes around Otis’s voice.’ Cropper filled out the under-produced parts of the song by borrowing sound effects from a rival studio on Union Avenue. ‘I went over to a local jingle company [called] Pepper-Tanner, and got into their sound library and came up with some seagulls and some waves, and I made the tape loop of that, brought them in and out of the holes, you know. Whenever the song took a little breather, I just kind of filled it with a seagull or a wave.’ The finished recording remains one of the greatest posthumous pop songs of all time: enriched by death and given profundity by the circumstances. Writer Jack Hamilton describes the song as ‘another thing entirely, a song about homesickness that Redding turns into something elemental, existential . . . It is personal, bold, warm and warming, completely magnificent. And written and performed by a man who was only twenty-six years old.’

The coroner’s office in Madison had become a place of chaotic activity. One by one, the bodies of young black men were brought in, and all were pronounced dead due to drowning: Jimmy King (18), guitarist with the Bar-Kays; the drummer, Carl Lee Cunningham (18); organist Ronnie Caldwell (19); Matthew Kelly (17), a personal valet to Otis Redding; and pilot Richard ‘Dick’ Fraser (26). Fraser had been raised in Warner Robins, Georgia, near Otis Redding’s hometown of Macon. Although there was talk of low battery power and ice on the carburettor, the consensus within the light-aviation industry was pilot error.

The Bar-Kays had been students together at Booker T. Washington High School, deep in South Memphis. It was the informal academy of southern soul, and many of its most precocious pupils had gravitated to Stax Records as odd-job staff, session musicians and eventually soul superstars. In the improvisational world of the East McLemore studios, the Bar-Kays hustled a Top Ten hit with the infectious ‘Soul Finger’, a storming party track that opened with the riff from the nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’. Propelled by Cunningham’s relentless drums, it became a street funk anthem. The song captured the spirit of the place and the times. Young neighbourhood kids from the Memphis ghettos had packed into the studio to add authenticity as they chanted effusively to the music. A few days after high-school graduation, the Bar-Kays joined Otis Redding on the road, and once performed at the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, where, unrehearsed, James Brown had jumped onto the stage and performed an unscripted duet with Redding. Resplendent in their canary-yellow suits, the Bar-Kays tore up the theatres on the old Chitlin’ Circuit and were blasting a reputation nationwide until the day that the last remnants of their yellow suits floated to the surface of Lake Monona.

It was to be death, rather than street funk, that bound the lost Stax boys together. Between registering the deaths of the teenage band members and liaising with the Madison police, Clyde Chamberlain eventually managed to make phone contact with Redding’s widow, Zelma. She insisted on travelling to the Wisconsin morgue together with her father-in-law, Otis Redding Sr, in order to accompany her husband’s body back to his native Georgia. Redding’s father, a southern preacher, had resented his son’s career as a soul singer and chastised him for appearing in godless nightclubs, but fame, critical respect and money had tempered his criticism. With the unspoken blessing of the dead star, they agreed that the final resting place would not be Memphis, but Redding’s 300-acre Big O Ranch, which was situated about twenty-five miles north of his hometown. Redding had bought the ranch in 1965 for $125,000 on the back of two years of hits and a relentless itinerary of live shows. ‘He always wanted a ranch,’ Zelma told the US news broadcaster CNN, recalling the ‘freedom I could see him have when he came home off the road’. Redding’s ranch was a world apart from where Carl Cunningham and the teenage Bar-Kays grew up. They were from the blistering segregated streets of Memphis’s Orange Mound, the biggest African-American community outside Harlem. It was this contrast and contradiction that gave Stax uniqueness – urban and country were thrown fortuitously together. Redding was most at home in rural environments, raising cattle, riding horses and working away in his barn while Cunningham grew up thrashing skins on a makeshift drum kit in his family’s overcrowded shotgun-style house near Kimball Avenue.

Unintentionally, Redding’s death has always overshadowed those who died with him and the funerals reflected that hierarchy. The young members of the Bar-Kays were remembered together as a band of brothers; Redding was given a dedicated service, a lying-in-state, and a memoriam that reflected his remarkable status. Although he had become synonymous in music circles with Memphis, it was not a city Redding knew particularly well. Unlike Cunningham, who had lived and breathed the city’s tense discriminations, Redding had a more rural upbringing. He was born in Dawson, in southwest Georgia, and raised in the central state city of Macon; a place with its own claim to fame, it was where both Little Richard and James Brown were raised. Always a creative magpie and not yet fully settled in a distinctive style of his own, Redding borrowed heavily from both of them. At times, his grunting ‘gotta, gotta, gotta’ refrain in live shows made him sound too much like James Brown – and dangerously short of subtlety – but his derivativeness was also a strength.