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Memphis - Part 1

© Barney Quick

When a city is a convergence point for three neighboring states and it’s on a navigable waterway, it generally grows fast and becomes a vital shipping and commercial center. Such was the case with Memphis, Tennessee, a spot considered prime by Chickasaw Indians, Spanish and French explorers, and British settlers. Memphis survived through the Civil War and subsequent yellow fever epidemics because it was the mid-south’s port to the rest of America.

Newly freed black Americans settled into an area anchored by Beale Street in the late nineteenth century. As was always the case in such a neighborhood, music was a big part of life there.

By the early twentieth century, Beale Street was home to lots of theaters and nightclubs. One could also indulge in just about any vice to which one was inclined.

The cotton operations of Arkansas and Mississippi fed this colorful scene a steady supply of blues talent, mostly guitarists and pianists. After World War II, these musicians, like those in other cities, made the move to amplification. Memphis was like Chicago in that the raw sound of these newly revved-up axe-wielders was only one step away from the primitive sounds they had made on homemade instruments in the delta before going electric.

In 1948, Bert Ferguson, the white owner of Memphis radio station WDIA, was in a desperate situation. His station, which had tried both country and classical formats, was financially on the skids. He made what was a daring move at the time: switching to a black-music format and hiring blacks for the announcing and programming staff. The new format included local talent and the big r&b, jazz and gospel names from other musical centers.

His early disc jockeys included Nat D. Williams, whose distinctive laugh became a signature, and Maurice “Hot Rod” Hulbert, who hosted the gospel program “Tan Town Jubilee” in the morning, the romantic “Sweet Talkin’ Time” in the middle of the day, and “Sepia Swing Club” at night.

Riley B. King, originally from Mississippi by way of the U.S. Army, hosted a show sponsored by Pepticon, which was pitched as a cure-all elixir. WDIA used to send King around to black neighborhoods on the back of a flatbed truck playing his guitar and singing the Pepticon jingle.

King and a few other players, Roscoe Gordon, Johnny Ace, Bobby Bland, and Junior Parker, held frequent jam sessions and became a loose aggregation known as The Beale Streeters.

In the late 1940s, a white disc jockey for WREC radio named Sam Phillips was eager to record some of the local blues virtuosos. He amassed some equipment and began to get some of their work on tape. The question then became how to get it on vinyl.