Seeds planted in Delta blues
By MICHAEL SCHUMAN
Special to the Journal Sentinel

Memphis, Tenn. - The evidence is clear. Rock 'n' roll was born here, blossoming in the river city after taking root in seeds planted in the Mississippi Delta.

Any doubters should pay a visit to the Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum, open in its present location since 2004 just a block from and within earshot of the bluesy horns of famous Beale Street. The museum, created in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, tells the story of the most important musical art form of the last half of the 20th century and completes any music-lover's trip to Memphis.

Black and white sharecroppers in the 1920s and '30s may not have realized it at the time, but they were raising more than cotton. Life-sized dioramas of two sharecroppers weighing a bale of cotton symbolize one of the few times during the Jim Crow era in the South when laws and traditions of segregation were ignored.

In the museum's audio tour guide, rockabilly singer Billy Lee Riley remembers, "On weekends, the sharecroppers - the black sharecroppers AND the white sharecroppers - would sort of mingle . . . A lot of the older guys would be sitting on the porch playing guitar, singing the blues. And blowing harp."

The guitar- and cotton-picking sharecroppers wrote songs about their ways of life, and several can be heard on the audio guides as you stand by five jukeboxes representing different periods of rock and soul history. By the first jukebox, dating from 1934, one can hear titles such as "Mule Boogie," by Jim Boyd and "Mississippi Bol Weevil Blues" by Charlie Patton.

At times the same songs were rendered by both white and black musicians in distinct white and black styles.

Southern migration

By the late 1940s many former sharecroppers had moved to cities; tractors and picking machines had made a lot of sharecroppers' jobs obsolete. Between 1935 and 1960 more than 7 million Southerners left rural life behind for urban opportunities. In the Delta region, those opportunities often were in Memphis.

One refugee was Vernon Presley who relocated with his wife and son from Tupelo, Mississippi, to Memphis in 1948. His son Elvis became the most prominent musician to blend hillbilly music and blues while recording at Memphis's Sun Studio.

Listen to two versions of the classic "Blue Moon of Kentucky," one by bluegrass legend Bill Monroe, and the other by Presley. Rock pioneer Carl Perkins says on the audio guide, "I always figure that rockabilly music was a white man's lyric to a black man's rhythm . . . cause that's what Blue Moon of Kentucky was. And that was the first rockabilly record out of Memphis."

The museum credits Elvis Presley as a pacesetter, but also touches upon a controversy yet to be settled. Did Elvis steal black music, or did he merely bring it to broader audiences, thereby allowing black musicians to profit with more song royalties and bookings?

Sun and Stax Studios

The marriage of hillbilly and blues music gave birth to more than Elvis. A recreation of the Sun Studio control room is here, with the original control board intact. The engineer, usually Sun owner Sam Phillips, would often sit in the control room chair, monitoring one of a myriad of recording artists.

Phillips's motto was "We Record Anything - Anything - Anywhere - Anytime." He meant that literally, and Sun was one of the few recording studios in 1950s Memphis to record black artists such as B.B. King, Ike Turner and Howlin' Wolf and white artists like Elvis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis. It was blues, rhythm and blues, hillbilly and rockabilly, the ingredients of a new art form called rock 'n' roll.

Phillips laughs, "And believe me, I have to say . . . without the cooperation of total resentment on the part of parents, rock and roll would have had a rougher time making it."

While hillbilly music would gravitate east to Nashville and become known as country and western, Memphis rhythm and blues stayed on the banks of the Mississippi and morphed into a new musical style called soul.

Of course, soul was not the only music with black roots that captured the minds and wallets of teenagers in the 1960s. Up north in Detroit, Berry Gordy had begun his Motown empire based on the talents of artists such as The Supremes, The Temptations, and The Four Tops. But while Motown emphasized polished graceful melodies and harmonies, Memphis-based Stax Records was funkier, meatier, grittier.

Yet Stax was a wholly integrated company. It was founded by a white brother and sister, Jim Stewart (the "St" in Stax) and Estelle Axton (the "ax"). Stax's early hit-makers Booker T and the MG's and the Mar-Keys were integrated bands.

It was in the Stax studio that household names such as Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers and Wilson Pickett churned out hits.

Stax stalwart Rufus Thomas, said, "Originally, people said, 'It can't happen . . . blacks and whites working together . . . it won't happen . . . it just won't work . . .

"One of the biggest lies ever told."

And even though rock and soul and its descendents are today generated across the globe, artists still feel the urge to come to the river, to the genesis of the most popular music in the world.