May 1984: Return of the Renegades, The End of School & A Sophisticated Gents Party

After the initial debut of the social club known as The Renegades at Bartlett High School in March, the group had sort of disappeared for awhile, only to resurface in May as the end of the school year approached. There were a lot more members now, including my homeboy Jessie Yancey, and instead of wearing yellow hats as they had in March, they were all wearing suit coats in the hallways. Unfortunately, this time, there were complaints from freshmen that members of the Renegades had "initiated" them in the hallways, incidents that allegedly involved some form of hazing. Frankly, I saw nothing of the sort, although I was called into the principal's office and questioned as to whether I knew anything about such initiations. While I had heard the rumors like everybody else, I told Mr. Farley truthfully that I had no firsthand information of anybody getting jumped or hazed. May 17 was Bartlett's Luau Day, and a lot of students wore Hawaiian outfits to fit into the theme, but the Renegades continued to wear their usual attire, although the administration stepped up patrols in the hallways to prevent any possible hazing incidents. That afternoon, I met up with a young drummer named Willie Triggs, who had transferred to Bartlett High School from Shreveport, Louisiana. Our school didn't have a jazz band, but Willie and I were able to do some jamming in the band room after school, and that was a considerable amount of fun.

Right at the end of the year, a flyer went up announcing the first party of the summer vacation, a Sophisticated Gents party to be held at 7997 Ellis Road out in the Oak Grove neighborhood on June 8th. As was usually the case with the Sophisticated Gents, the flyer listed the members of the club as Jessie Yancey, Randy Mickens, Ricky Dill, Errol Edingborough, Terrance Kelley, James Chaffin, Wayne Kelly, Terry Broome and Kenny Boyce. Although I was looking forward to it, my parents ended up not allowing me to go to the party because I had made a C on my report card. It was not a fun way to start the summer.

April 1984: All-State Chorus & American Music Festival

The month of April 1984 brought two trips to Nashville for me, both of them in connection with my activities in the Bartlett High School chorus. On the weekend of April 14, we had the Tennessee Music Educators' Association Convention in Nashville, which was the occasion for the All-State Chorus, All-State Band and All-State Orchestra performances at the Andrew Jackson Center for the Performing Arts, which was a new state-of-the-art facility in downtown Nashville. Having made All-West Chorus in the Fall of 1983, I had made All-State chorus both as a singer and an accompanist, and had to choose which one to participate in. I had met Kevin Whalum, a baritone from Melrose High School during All-West Tennessee Chorus in December, and he had also made All-State Tennessee Chorus, as I had, so we hung out for most of the weekend in Nashville. The TMEA had put us up at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Nashville, and after our performance on Friday, Kevin had invited me to a room on the 22nd floor of the hotel where a lot of the Memphis students were having a party with Domino's Pizzas and sodas. Eventually, some students from Memphis named Peggye Love and Lisa McGhee joined with a singer from Humboldt named Tommie McCurrie and me, and we walked from the hotel to the Legislative Plaza, and then back to the hotel at about 3 in the morning. After breakfast the next morning, a student from Jackson Northside named Larry Smith and I headed over to the Andrew Jackson Performing Arts Center to check out the All-State Symphonic Band. The band was playing an absolutely amazing modern composition that neither of us recognized, which ultimately proved to be Joaquin Turina's La Procesion del Rocio. I was already somewhat familiar with Turina, a Spanish composer, because of a rather bluesy, sultry piano piece in an anthology of sheet music I had. That piece was called Preludio de Fantasia Sobre Cinco Notas and it had first awakened my interest in Turina. The unexpected accident of hearing the symphonic band play another Turina work that was also full of jazzy, bluesy harmonies made me a huge fan of Joaquin Turina and his music. I remain a fan of it to this day.

The second trip which took us back to Nashville was for the Bartlett High School Chorus and Show Choir to perform in the American Music Festival at Opryland USA, an amusement park that later closed and was torn down to make way for the Opry Mills Mall. At the time, the festival was one of the largest such festivals of school musicians in the United States, and we had a considerable amount of fun listening to the other schools from all over the country performing a considerable amount of choral music. Of course it was the modern choral music that caught my attention over the weekend, and I recall hearing Pablo Casals' "O Vos Omnes" and John Rutter's "For The Beauty of The Earth", along with "Feller From Fortune", "Flower of Beauty", "Down By The Sally Gardens" and John Ness Beck's "Song of Moses". We had three choirs entered in the competition, a chamber choir, the regular advanced chorus, and our show choir. The chamber choir had performed a beautiful setting of the gospel standard "Precious Lord" that I recall was handwritten on manuscript paper and unpublished. Despite its unknown (and presumably local) provenance, this arrangement must have circulated extensively, as I encountered it again several years later, played by Jackson Central Merry's marching band as a warm-up before a band competition at Rothrock Stadium, and later yet, the fabulous Memphis singer Earlise Taylor performed the same arrangement at one of her recitals. The Bartlett High Advanced Chorus had performed William Levi Dawson's "Ain't A That Good News" and John Rutter's "Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind", which was just about the first choral piece I ever sang at Bartlett High School. Of course the school could not afford to put us up at as nice a hotel as the TMEA had, so we were at a non-descript Best Western on the east side of the Cumberland River. But the hotel put Bartlett High School's name on the marquee, and we all had a ball. One of our choirs won a first place award, but I can no longer recall if it was the Bartlett Chamber Singers or the Advanced Chorus.

March 1984: Track Season, The Streamliners and The Renegades

When March of 1984 came around, I was on the junior varsity track team at Bartlett. I wanted to do the sprinting events, but I really wasn't fast enough to do them, and I should have focused on cross country instead. But I still had fun, and I recall one track meet at Christian Brothers High School that we had with Fayette-Ware, where I met a young girl on their team named Brenda Anthony. While waiting for our events, we ended up sitting on a levee behind the track, talking and I came to find out that she was from the Good Springs community of Fayette County and was a cousin of my friend Jessie Yancey, who was on our first-string track team. I was looking forward to our next meet with Fayette-Ware at Millington on March 19, but it ended up being cancelled, because Fayette-Ware students had gone out on strike.

At Bartlett High School, we had an official organization called the Streamliners, which was a predominantly-Black organization. Mrs. McKinley, one of the women's coaches, was the faculty sponsor, and the organization sponsored a number of dances during the school year. On March 24, they sponsored one in Bartlett High's cafeteria which was extremely well-attended, and most of my friends were there. Also there was an unofficial organization that had debuted that week, known as The Renegades. Taking their name from an Afrika Bambaataa song called "Renegades of Funk", they had come out in the hallways of Bartlett High School before class on the day before the dance, wearing yellow brim hats. The founding members included Patrick Jordan, Joe Phillips, Michael Branch, Hernert Jones and Bobby Merriwether, all of whom were at the dance, and the DJ played the song and saluted the club. Our school did not have fraternities or sororities, so these kinds of social organizations formed from time to time among the students.

As the weather heated up, there were more activities outdoors, especially pickup basketball games. Games could jump off out on Appling Road, or at Shadowlawn, but a favorite place was at the new courts in Bartlett, behind the city hall and library on Stage Road at Altruria. Ricky Fields and Darryl Carroll were often out there practicing their game.

2/21/84: A Basketball Trip to Munford

After the fun I had at Somerville on the Friday before, I decided to ride with Bartlett's boys and girls' basketball teams to Munford in Tipton County for our ball games there. Wendy Jackson, one of the players on the girls' team, had her big boom box, and we were jamming as we headed north through Millington to Munford High School, which was a relatively-new school. Unfortunately, with it being a Tuesday night, there wasn't nearly as much of a crowd as there had been at Fayette-Ware on Friday. There were no majorettes or drumlines, and not even that many people in the stands. On the other hand, my friend Jessie Yancey from the football team had made the trip with us from Bartlett, and he and I sat together in the stands watching both games. As I recall, our girls won and the boys lost.

2/17/84: A Basketball Homecoming at Fayette-Ware

I don't recall now how I managed to end up on the basketball team bus from Bartlett, heading to our games with Fayette-Ware in Somerville, but I probably had volunteered with Coach Farley to help with equipment in exchange for being allowed to make the trip. I had always been fascinated by Fayette County ever since I had read a book about it called Our Portion Of Hell by Robert Hamburger, which dealt with the Civil Rights Movement in the county. In Fayette County, the movement led to a particularly-nasty response. People were evicted from their tenant farms for registering to vote, and had to move into "tent cities" on Black-owned land. A Black grocer, John McFerren was boycotted by wholesalers, and had a hard time keeping gasoline in his gas pumps. Nothing came easy in Fayette County, which was 95% Black in those days- not integration of stores or restaurants, not school integration and not voter registration. In 1969, the beating of a Black mother by a white grocer led to a months-long boycott of the square in Somerville. Merger of the Black and white schools led to a near-total white exodus from public education in the county. By 1984, Fayette-Ware High School was all-Black. As for our basketball team, 1983-1984 was not a good season for us. Our men's coach, as I recall, had resigned before the season started, so Coach Tom Farley, who had been Bartlett's head coach when it merged with Shadowlawn in 1970-1971, became the interim head coach. Bartlett had talented players like Bobby "Bebop" Merriweather, Ricky Fields, Darryl Carroll and Coach Farley's son, but the shock of losing a head coach right before the season, and having an interim coach thrown into the mix with short warning took a toll on Bartlett, and as I recall, we lost most of our games. Still, I was looking forward to our trip to Somerville. Wendy Jackson was on the girls' basketball squad, and she had brought a large jam box onto the team bus. This was the era of huge "boom boxes" and the dawn of rap, at least in our neck of the woods. As we rolled out Highway 64, which at the time was a dark, rural, wooded road through sleepy communities like Eads, we were listening to hits of the day, probably on K-97, although I cannot be sure. I do recall that when we reached Oakland, which was also another tiny rural farming community, Run-DMC's "Hard Times" came on the box, and some of our players started chanting the words, as this was the big hit at the time. The game was held at the North Campus of Fayette-Ware High School, which was the former Fayette County High School. (The South Campus was the former Black high school W. P. Ware, at the intersection of Highway 76 and Macon Road. Buses ran students between the two campuses all day long, every day, which further deterred parents with a choice from keeping their children in public school). IT turned out to be Fayette-Ware's basketball homecoming, and the gym, which I remember as being hot and sweaty despite the time of year, was filled to overflowing. Fayette-Ware's drumline was there, dressed in all-Black and ready to perform. At the end of the girls' game and before the boys', they lined up near the north entrance to the gym. The majorettes from Fayette-Ware performed first to a recording from a jam box, but soon the drummers came out and rocked them with a hard funk beat which brought the crowd to their feet. A break-dancing crew followed them before the boys' game tipped off. After the game, I got a chance to meet the drumline captain, Edward Thompson Jr., who introduced me to the other drummers, Vick, Tony, Val, Anthony, Regg and Reynaldo. (I later ran back into Edward Thompson Jr. in my freshman year of college at UT-Martin. He was an excellent set drummer there). All of this made a big impression on me at the time. I honestly think it was my first encounter with the African-American drumming/drill-team/majorette tradition, which later became so important to my way of thinking. It probably also furthered my thinking about the importance of drums and dance in Black American culture, and may have indirectly led to my interest in musicology. But of course I wasn't thinking about any of that as we headed back west on Highway 64 toward Bartlett. I honestly don't recall if we won the game, but we must have, because I recall the ride back being rather upbeat, with Twilight 22's "Electric Kingdom" blasting on the box as we passed through Oakland in the late-night darkness. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that this night changed the course of my life.