By Matt Chaney, ChaneysBlog.com<\/p>\n
Posted Thursday, February 16, 2017<\/p>\n
Classical piano teacher Louise Mercer was worried in Memphis. Musical forces were afoot in the Mississippi River Valley and progressing, but not for this instructor\u2019s preference. It was 1948, and Mercer saw nothing positive for her concerto affection within the region’s folk music, jazz and blues. And hillbilly music, so-called, appalled her.<\/p>\n
Mercer fought back, or brought Bach back to the South, according to The Associated Press, by organizing concert piano competitions for deprived youths. \u201cThe nation\u2019s greatest musical talent comes from the South,\u201d she said. \u201cWe have the romantic and cultural background, although we haven\u2019t the opportunities for study that are offered in other sections of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
The piano teacher was right on, mostly. Southern musical talent stood boundless along the river, the great \u201cdelta\u201d landscape of beauty and struggle, spawning creativity from Cape Girardeau to New Orleans. And Mercer apparently detected\u00a0musical revolution at hand\u2014it just wouldn\u2019t happen for her classics.<\/p>\n
Memphis would mother the uprising, blending music from every direction into what would become known as rock and roll<\/em>. The components were in place\u00a0by 1948, including a teenager of destiny, Elvis Presley, having relocated to\u00a0Memphis with his parents from Mississippi.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The hundred rural counties of Missouri today, as always, generally maintain allegiance to the state\u2019s three cities\u2014St. Louis, Kansas City and Springfield\u2014for extended shopping, entertainment, medical services\u00a0and more. But two counties are unique, Pemiscot and Dunklin, which stand out together on a Missouri map for essentially comprising that\u00a0Bootheel<\/em> appendage of the southeast corner.<\/p>\n As far as an\u00a0adopted city for people of Pemiscot and Dunklin counties, the roads lead to and from Memphis, Tenn., less than two hours away by Interstate 55. And maybe that\u2019s the best explanation why the Pemiscot-Dunklin area\u2014a thousand square miles of flat delta ground, largely farm fields\u2014stands tall in musical heritage, especially the evolution of rock and roll.<\/p>\n Most \u201crockabilly\u201d stars of the 1950s staged shows around here, and many local musicians made a good living, with some cutting records. I recently visited Pemiscot-Dunklin as a writer in search of history. There were legendary spots to see, with an old sharecropper crossroads topping my list\u2014Gobler. \u201cThere ain\u2019t nothing there now,\u201d a friend remarked at Hayti, where I exited the interstate.<\/p>\n What he meant relied on a pretext:\u00a0There used to be something<\/em> at Gobler, something quite special, the notorious B&B Club, rockabilly showplace for Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, among players.<\/p>\n The B&B was an old wooden roadhouse serving watery 3.2 beer, reputed for gambling and fighting. A liquor store next door sold bottles for carry-in. The B&B could seat a few hundred patrons, and Gobler population was 116 in the 1950s. But on a big music night a thousand young people might show up, ready to party, driving in from multiple states.<\/p>\n Jimmy Haggett<\/a>, a radio deejay, musician and promoter, keyed success for the B&B. His Memphis connections included producer Sam Phillips at Sun Records, who stabled rising stars like Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. Haggett, a minor recording artist for Sun, was often instrumental in booking big names for shows across Pemiscot and Dunklin counties, and elsewhere in southeast Missouri. He promoted events on radio and in newspapers.<\/p>\n \u201cJimmy Haggett, he had an afternoon radio show, and he would advertise the B&B,\u201d recalls Al Jordan, a Hayti musician who toured with rockabilly and country legends. \u201cJimmy would say, \u2018Weelll, we\u2019re gonna have a big dance Friday night at the B&B Club at Gobler, and we\u2019re gonna feature the blond bombshell from Memphis, Tennessee\u2014Elvis Presley.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n Gobler is some 10 miles across the fields southwest from Hayti, sitting smack on the borderline between Pemiscot and Dunklin counties. True, Gobler doesn\u2019t offer much these days: a trucking company, a tiny post office, a hunting outfitters store near the old B&B site, and a few dozen homes ranging from clapboard to neat brick. There\u2019s no booze for sale, no gas, just canned soda from a machine on someone’s porch.<\/p>\n But there never could\u2019ve been much to see around here, in literal sense. This is flat farm country, where the horizon begins at top of a tree or fence line. Crop fields stretch out of sight beyond the Gobler structures; in summer the corn plants, beans and cotton are seemingly endless.<\/p>\n I considered my own boyhood in the delta decades ago, and occasional despair. In daylight I might spy a jet airliner streaming overhead at 30,000 feet, flying on to exotic locales, carrying exciting people, and I\u2019d feel small, isolated in this world.<\/p>\n But moonlight turned the delta dreamy in blue hue. Barren fields transformed into calm, glowing sea. Scattered farmsteads cast imaginary boat lights. The night sky was enormous but inviting, intimate, stars glistening like diamonds within a child\u2019s reach. Anything seemed possible in those moments.<\/p>\n There\u2019s an inspiration about this region, rather inexplicable, that fosters individual expression. Among youths I’ve seen that manifest typically in sport with tremendous athleticism, but delta mojo also motivates art. Southeast Missouri first stirred my creative soul in the 1960s, long after piano teacher Louise Mercer saw the dynamic among Memphis kids, after World War II.<\/p>\n Passing through Gobler last month, I thought of an observation by writer John Pyle, who reviewed one of my Missouri books. \u201cWe live our lives in a place<\/em>, and sometimes it\u2019s just place<\/em> that\u2019s important,\u201d Pyle wrote.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n During the mid-1950s, Al Jordan\u2019s brother-in-law owned a rockin\u2019 roadhouse in southeast Missouri, Smitzer\u2019s Club east of Malden, down in the bottoms along Highway 62. Al was around 10 years old when his father started toting him along to Smitzer\u2019s on Sundays for live music. The 3.2 beer flowed while little Al enjoyed bottles of soda, plopping himself at the stage to watch history in the making.<\/p>\n \u201cBack then Roy Orbison, Conway Twitty and Narvel Felts all used to play there,\u201d Jordan says of recording artists at their outset. \u201cThey\u2019d be up there playing that rockabilly, and I\u2019d drink a Dr Pepper. I\u2019d think, Boy, I\u2019d like to do that someday.\u201d<\/p>\n Jordan was 14 when he visited a friend\u2019s house in Gideon, his hometown where New Madrid County edges down into the Bootheel by latitude. Another youth brought a guitar for a jam session. \u201cI\u2019d never sat down at a set of drums before in my life,\u201d Jordan remembers. \u201cThey had a little set of drums, and this guy played guitar. He was doing a song called \u2018Walk, Don\u2019t Run,\u2019 a Ventures<\/a> song. I accidentally ended up sitting down at the drums, and just started keeping the beat. And it just came natural for me, God-given.\u201d<\/p>\n Like most Bootheel boys, Jordan had one option for paying work, picking cotton. The job was back-breaking, knee-tenderizing and finger-slicing, and hot as hell in delta sun and humidity. Meanwhile Jordan kept at the drums, practicing by avocation until a local bandleader hired him for a teen dance at Puxico, Mo.<\/p>\n Jordan received eight dollars for the evening gig, astounding him. In the cotton field he had to bag almost 300 pounds of fluffy bolls to earn eight bucks, more than a day\u2019s work except for a champion picker. \u201cNext morning my mom woke me up. She said it\u2019s time to go to the field. I said, \u2018Nope, I ain\u2019t going to the cotton field no more. I\u2019ve found an easier way to make a living.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n It was 1959, and kid Jordan\u2019s drumming paid off. By age 16 he\u2019d played in fifty clubs between Memphis and St. Louis, accompanying luminaries on stage such as role model Twitty and Charlie Rich. \u201cMost of the places were honky-tonks,\u201d Jordan recalls, who saw it all, as the saying goes.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019d be in an old place playin\u2019, and everything would be lovely, and then all at once you\u2019d hear beer bottles crashing and tables turning over. I\u2019d just duck down behind my drums and let \u2019em get with it. But I played for years and never had a problem. Most of the time they never bothered the band guys, you know. And the old stories you hear about the bandstands with chicken wire across the front\u2014I played a couple places like that, to keep us from gettin’ hit by flying beer bottles.<\/p>\n \u201cThe music was rockabilly\u2014that was the term. What they did, they took country music and put a jazzed-up beat to it. Actually, Bill Haley and the Comets<\/a> [in Pennsylvania], he was like the father of rockabilly<\/a>, and rock n\u2019 roll. But then Elvis<\/a> came along and they christened him as \u2018The King\u2019 of rock n\u2019 roll.\u201d<\/p>\n Elvis energized youths of the delta, where music production spiked. \u201cElvis kicked everybody off, you might say. He jump-started everybody. They thought, My God, if Elvis Presley can do it, I can too.” Jordan laughed. \u201cBut\u2014they failed to realize, Elvis had the looks, Elvis was something new, and Elvis had Colonel Tom Parker to promote him.\u201d<\/p>\n Elvis appeared twice at the B&B in Gobler during 1955, on April 8 and Sept. 28. At the latter date the village was in uproar over a murder at\u00a0a dice game outside the club. Elvis, his career soaring, had outgrown venues like the B&B. Colonel Parker made sure of that.<\/p>\n Gerald Burke, an owner of the B&B, later told Jordan he paid Elvis $300 after the September show. Soon Elvis signed with RCA Records and released \u201cHeartbreak Hotel,\u201d smash hit. Burke said he checked again on booking Elvis, and the new\u00a0price was $3,000.<\/p>\n \u201cNeedless to say, the B&B didn\u2019t have Elvis anymore,\u201d Jordan says.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Elvis Presley died in 1977 at age 42, reduced to a caricature for crass commercialization and his weight problem. Twenty years later, Pennsylvania writer Cathleen Miller personally reflected on the icon in her piece for The Washington Post<\/em>:<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I was in high school, I went to see the fat, bejeweled singer in concert at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, and sat in awe\u2014not of the man, but of the crowd’s reaction. He sang the same old songs I’d listened to a million times on the jukebox in my grandma’s diner\u2014but with the slightest swivel of those infamous hips, the women in the audience would go insane. The Pelvis, it seemed, was taunting them: a little swivel here, then reverse, then stop dead in the middle and wait for the screams.\u201d<\/p>\n Miller was native of Kennett, Mo., the Dunklin County seat. She grew up only a few miles by blacktop road from Gobler, years after its heyday with Elvis. But she heard plenty. Miller recalled \u201ceverybody had stories about Elvis\u2014and not the kind of stories that would make you think he was anything special.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen my mom and dad were dating in the ’50s they used to go see him play at the B&B Club, a honky-tonk in nearby Gobler that was the rowdiest place around for white people. My uncle best described it by saying, \u2018If they didn’t have five fights on a Friday night, they didn’t have a crowd.\u2019 The B&B Club was prestigiously located in the middle of a cotton field\u2026 My best friend’s dad said he went there to see Elvis once and after the show handed him $50 to come back out and sing his favorite song. He said the young King took the money but left hurriedly through the back door.”<\/p>\n \u201cSo we didn’t think much of Elvis.\u201d<\/p>\n Miller passed through Memphis with her husband in the 1990s, intent on purchasing goofy trinkets for an Elvis theme party in California. Her husband planned his costume as Singing Elvis Lamp.\u00a0\u201cBut while visiting Graceland and the haunts of my childhood, I gradually realized that I had taken for granted Elvis’s contributions to American music,” she wrote. “On this trip, I discovered the \u2018real\u2019 Elvis.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen my husband and I drove into Memphis on a steamy summer afternoon, boarded-up storefronts were much in evidence on the west side of the city, and families sat out on the front stoops of run-down tenements, fanning themselves in the heat. Still, the streets were clean, and the parkways exploded with azaleas. As we headed east toward Overton Park, the sights began to look like the Memphis I remembered: large Southern homes separated from the street by expanses of shady lawns, magnolias, moss-covered oaks and willow trees. The contrast had intensified during 20 years\u2014or maybe 20 years had changed the way I looked at things.\u201d<\/p>\n Gaudiness surely met the couple at Graceland, home of late Elvis, but a 1960 film of the young man captivated Miller. \u201cHe was so young and handsome and fresh. Joking with the reporters, smiling that gorgeous smile, wearing no visible jewelry,\u201d she noted. \u201cHe hinted that he had met someone special in Germany [during military service], but no, he couldn’t call her his girlfriend.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the museum, we learned that Elvis had been awarded more gold and platinum records than anyone on the planet. We watched a film about his life, and when he sang \u2018Blue Christmas\u2019 I remembered listening to the same song on the radio as a child, wondering why he sounded so sad when it was Christmas time. The music had reminded me of the songs we sang in Sunday school; most of them were sad also.<\/p>\n \u201cSadly, I realized that the Elvis I had known all these years was the \u2018Old Elvis,\u2019 the King of Kitsch in jeweled jumpsuits. The real Elvis was a simple Southern boy who, through his music, had given a voice to the restless, pent-up youth of the ’50s. He had taken gospel, blues and country and fused them into a unique style\u2014a style that would revolutionize the music industry.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd it all happened because of this place. Memphis,\u201d saluted Miller. \u201cSometimes we have to leave home to see things for what they really are.\u201d<\/p>\n We live in a place, often all that matters. We make do, and big things can happen when we strive, even\u00a0from a lonely crossroads and\u00a0cotton fields. Down in the delta, folks understand.<\/p>\n Matt Chaney is a writer, editor and publisher in Missouri, USA. For more information visit <\/em>www.fourwallspublishing.com. <\/em>Email: <\/em>mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Matt Chaney, ChaneysBlog.com Posted Thursday, February 16, 2017 Classical piano teacher Louise Mercer was worried in Memphis. Musical forces were afoot in the Mississippi River Valley and progressing, but not for this instructor\u2019s preference. It was 1948, and Mercer saw nothing positive for her concerto affection within the region’s folk music, jazz and blues. … Continue reading Missouri Boasts Its Place in Rock ‘n’ Roll History<\/span>