December 1983: All-West Tennessee Chorus, Snow, Somerville Christmas Parade and Bartlett Christmas Parade

The rehearsals for All-West Tennessee Chorus were held the week of my birthday at Wooddale High School in far Southeast Memphis. They proved to be an incredible amount of fun. For one thing, I got to meet singers and musicians from many different schools, a lot of them in the inner-city neighborhoods of Memphis. There were quite a few gospel musicians, and many of them were surprised that I watched Oris Mays on television on Sunday mornings, or that I liked the gospel group Commissioned. The baritone a chair ahead of me in the section was a guy from Melrose High School named Kevin Whalum. His brother Kirk was a famous contemporary jazz saxophonist, and his uncle Wendell P. Whalum was the choir director of Morehouse College in Atlanta. We hit it off instantly, and he seriously suggested that I consider going to college at Morehouse. Many times I wish I had taken his suggestion more seriously.

In addition to new friendships made, I quite enjoyed the music that we were performing at All-West. One of the pieces was called Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day by the British composer John Gardner. I was at once thrilled with its rhythmic diversity and high spirits, and wondered what other interesting works Gardner might have composed. We were also rehearsing American composer Daniel Pinkham's Sinfonia Sacra, a work which reminded me of Benjamin Britten. As I recall, other pieces included a double-choir version of In Dulci Jubilo which I had previously known only as "Good Christian Men, Rejoice", and one of the Robert Shaw Many Moods of Christmas suites.

This was also the time I began to be more and more interested in rap music. I had heard early rap before, and could recall songs like "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, or "Tough" by Kurtis Blow, which I had always liked because of the percussion-laden breaks it had. But this was the time when Run-DMC and Whodini had started to appear, and rap was really increasing in popularity, even in the South. During one of the breaks in All-West rehearsal, we found that some guys had set up a jam boix in the foyer in front of the auditorium. They were playing the song "Electric Kingdom" by Twilight 22 and were practicing breakdancing to it. I wasn't sure if they were just ordinary Wooddale High School students, or if they were some of our All-West participants, but I do recall being amazed by what I saw. The last day of rehearsal was my birthday, December 2, and as I recall, the performance was on Saturday December 3.

It had snowed that week, and the accumulation made for attractive Christmas scenes, as most people already had put up their lights and trees. My dad was back from Canada, and with it being my birthday, I asked him to take me to Somerville in Fayette County to the Christmas parade they were having that night. (My pictures of Bartlett's parade from that December are captioned with the date December 5, a Monday....apparently they had postponed Bartlett's parade due to the snow). Despite snow still on the ground, the roads were not bad, and Dad drove us over to Somerville, and I seem to recall us eating dinner at The Hut. If this is the occasion I remember, they had barbecued ribs, and they were very good indeed.

The main reason for me wanting to go the Somerville parade (aside from Bartlett's being postponed), was that I was fascinated by Fayette-Ware High School's marching band. I had heard great things about them, and wanted to see them for myself. By this time, I was becoming interested in the Black marching band style and tradition, and Fayette-Ware was somewhat unusual, in being an all-Black rural high school. When schools had been integrated in Somerville in 1970, white parents avoided integration by sending their children to a recently-formed private academy. Then the school board, whose children attended the private school, set about making sure that integration could not work. They put the 9th and 10th grade at the campus of W. P. Ware High School, the former Black school, and the 11th and 12th grades at Fayette County High School, and then ran buses back and forth between the two campuses all day long. Even parents that had no objection to integrated schools would likely have objected to that sort of arrangement, and that was probably the point. Thereafter, the county appropriated only the barest minimum of funds for the public schools. But despite the impossible conditions at Fayette-Ware, there was a resilient culture exhibited by the students there. They excelled at athletics and music, dancing and the visual arts. And their marching band was well-known throughout the Mid-South.

As for Somerville itself, it was a Southern gothic movie-set of a town, with the mandatory courthouse in the center of a square surrounded by local commerce, with a few two-story buildings with the upper balconies. This was long before anyone thought of Fayette County as a potential suburb of Memphis, and one could have imagined the town as the scene of a film version of a Faulkner novel. Snow was still on the ground, but a large crowd gathered to see cheerleaders, majorettes, drummers and band members from various schools in Fayette County as they marched in front of the Fayette County Courthouse. But it was the band and majorettes of Fayette-Ware High School that stole the show at the end of the parade, playing, as I recall, a Prince tune as they marched down the street in front of the courthouse. By then the crowd had grown even larger. It was a great way to spend my birthday.

On the following Monday, Bartlett held their Christmas parade along Stage Road. In addition to our high school band, bands from Frayser High School, Colonial Middle School and Sherwood Middle School were also in the parade, and there were a number of floats. By now, I was thoroughly in the holiday spirit.

November 1983: The Guys and Dolls, Sophisticated Gents, and the Death of the Press-Scimitar

With the end of football season and the beginning of colder weather, there began to be announcements of indoor events and parties. Bartlett High School really didn't have fraternities and sororities, but there were social clubs, not officially recognized by the school, but rather known in the rural Black communities. One of them, the Guys and Dolls, announced a party to be held at Jessie Yancey's house on November 18th after the first basketball game of the season against Raleigh-Egypt. Jessie's sister Tammy was a member of the club, and I would have liked to have attended, but I didn't have transportation out there. A week later, a club called the Sophisticated Gents announced a party to be held on Ellis Road, and that one I did make it to. About 100 people attended, and it had really just started to jump off when I had to leave at midnight, and a lot of my friends were there, including Rhonda Holloway, LaGrant Kearney, Freida Cross, Randy Mickens, Junior Becton, Earnest Greenleaf and Vicki McCrary. That was the earliest occasion I can remember being aware of K-97 radio station in Memphis. I know it existed before that, but I don't recall knowing about it before that.

November also brought an end to the Memphis Press-Scimitar, our city's venerable afternoon newspaper. I had been faithfully keeping up with our Bartlett Panthers football team in both the morning Commercial Appeal and the Press-Scimitar, and was shocked and saddened by the sudden closure. Little did I know back then that afternoon papers were failing from one end of the country to the other. The advent of radio news and television news was making newspapers seem old and obsolete. Yet newspapers made people dig deeper and think harder about events than the fast-paced shallowness of TV news. Nowadays, we can get headline news 24 hours a day from cable sources. But we are all a little poorer and more ignorant from the transition.

October 1983: Bartlett Homecoming

Bartlett High School's 1983 football homecoming was held the week of October 21, 1983. We had built the sophomore float across the street from my house at Terrance Latour's house, and on Thursday evening we had had the homecoming parade on the streets around the high school campus. As I recall, I had ridden on the sophomore float, and the Bartlett High School band had led the parade. Jessie Yancey, Eugene West and Randy Mickens were all out there watching the parade, and we had thought that our float was certainly the nicest, and that we would win the competition. Had we known the political realities of homecomings, we would have realized that the senior float would win the contest, regardless of which float was really the best.

Unfortunately, the outcome of the parade float competition didn't sit well with someone, and the senior float was destroyed during the night after the parade, leading the high school principal Tate W. Thomas to cancel the afternoon pep rally that had been scheduled for homecoming. This led to several class walkouts and some protests, one of which was a march through hallways with signs reading "No Rally, No Game". Apparently, there were meetings between student government officials, faculty members and the administration, and later in the day, an agreement was reached and a pep rally was held. I don't remember much about the homecoming game, except that there was a bonfire, that the game was against Millington, and that we won.

This was also around the time that Bartlett's student newspaper changed names from the Gleaner to the Panther. The rationale was that Bartlett was no longer the big agricultural high school and community that it had once been, and our mascot was after all the Panther. But I found the name change somewhat disappointing, to say the least. Even more disappointing was the fact that although the Gleaner had existed for almost 60 years, our school had none of the back issues. Apparently, they were never preserved.

September 1983: A Family Reunion in Jackson

Every year, usually in September, the Amsler family would have a large family reunion in Jackson, Mississippi, based around a Mississippi State football game. My aunt and uncle, Sue and Owen McCoy would come, their children Rick and Marcy, my grandad Dutch Amsler, my grandmother Sally Amsler, and my great uncle Stanley and his wife Una would come, along with me and my parents, and at least the men would go to the football game. By the 1980's, we had settled on the Passport Inn in North Jackson as the hotel where we stayed. We would get several rooms, and in my memory it was always warm and sunny. The motel had a decent restaurant as well, and I usually would walk up there on Friday or Saturday night and order a steak dinner. On one of those occasions, I had met a young employee there named Moses Kendrick. He was a football star at Madison-Ridgeland High School, and we had hit it off talking about football, rap music, and a lot of other things as well. After that first year that I had met him, we always managed to reconnect on the yearly family reunion trips. His goal was to go to Jackson State University, and his enthusiasm for J-State actually made me interested in the school as well. In 1983, our reunion was on the weekend of September 18th and 19th. I don't recall who Mississippi State was playing in the game, but everyone was at the reunion except my dad, who was still in Canada working. Over time, the reunions came to an end, for a number of reasons. My grandfather passed away during Hurricane Elena in 1985, and my uncle Stanley and grandmother Sally got more feeble with age. And Mississippi State started playing fewer and fewer games at Mississippi Memorial Stadium in Jackson, preferring to play their home games in Starkville. The last reunion was held in 1992, and in 1993, I started my fall tradition of going to Grambling's homecoming weekend instead.

September 1983: Barbecue Smoke, Football and Oak Grove

I hadn't really wanted to move back to Bartlett after spending the summer in Calgary, but I soon adjusted to being back home. For one thing, I was back in public school for the first time since 1980, going to Bartlett High School as a sophomore, and I soon made friends with some of the football players, including the star running back Jessie Yancey, who was a senior, but was playing his very first year of varsity football. At 5 feet, 6 inches and 155 pounds, he had been considered too little, but he had played junior varsity for three years, and was quite tough. He and I met at a JV game, and before long we were hanging out. Through him, I met Eugene West, Dennis Person, Randy Mickens and others, many of whom lived out in the same rural community that he lived in.

I didn't know the name of the community along Appling, Ellis and Germantown Roads where they all lived back then, but it occurs to me now that the area must have been called Oak Grove. Certainly that was name of the Black church along Highway 64, and there had once been a Black elementary school beside it, also called Oak Grove. I soon was spending many an afternoon out there, both after school and on weekends, and although it wasn't close to my house at all, I was usually down to walk out there, or ride my bike. Stage Road changed into Highway 64 at Summer (the intersection was called Shelby Center in those days), and the road was only two lanes east of Summer. There were lots of woods, and farm houses. When I would get to Appling Road, the first house on the right was little more than a sharecropper's shack, but Michael Branch and his older brother Stanley Branch lived there. Further down on the same side was Dennis Person's house, then Angela Crutchfield's (her younger brother Lynard people called "Prunie Mane" for some reason-he went on to become a star football player and later a coach), Darrel Pugh's and Wayne Williamson's. The first house on the left was Jessie's, which he shared with his mother Fannie Lou, his sister Tammy, and his older brothers Leo, Leon and Jerry (Jerry moved to Detroit that fall). Orgill Road branched off to the east there, and further up, Ellis Road, where Angie Carraway lived on the corner. Down Ellis were more friends of mine- Terrance Kelley, James Chaffin (whom Jessie called "Ralla", but that might have been the way he said "Rattler"), and Byron and Sharon Cross. On the corner of Ellis and Germantown Road was Randy Mickens' house. There were no stores in the community, although there probably had been at one time, but there was another oddity: a privately-owned baseball and softball field, just south of Ellis Road along the east side of Germantown Road (which was also a wooded, two-lane road in those days). I didn't know then (but do now, of course) that such Black-owned ball fields were extremely important in rural Black communities. They were not merely used for ball games, but also for family reunions and picnics, and occasionally for the picnics sponsored by social clubs and fraternal lodges that featured the fife and drum bands. I soon knew just about everyone my age along those roads, and they knew me. And hanging out there, learning the ways of that community was one of the most fun times of my life.

Of course, Wolfchase Mall wasn't even thought of then, and the area where it now stands was nothing but woods. Across the street, around what is now Giacosa Lane was a large farm that belonged to the Viglio family, and several Black families lives in old houses on that property, including one of the football players at Bartlett, Warren Lurry. It was still very much a rural community, and on one occasion, hanging on the front porch at Jessie's house (the address was 3231 Appling Road- the site is now some industrial plant), I heard the sound of drums beating at a distance. Joking with me, Jessie said there was "a tribe" back in the woods beating the drums. I later learned that something was going on at either Ellendale or Brunswick, and have always wondered if this was the last of fife-and-drum activity associated with the Independent Pole-Bearers Society at Brunswick.

Another comfort during the long autumn with my Dad away in Canada was the opening of a new barbecue restaurant on Stage Road called Bubba's BBQ. "Bubba" was Thomas Farley, a former basketball coach at Bartlett High School, who was currently the assistant principal for discipline. Located in the building that later became Easy Way Foods, Bubba's sent so much smoke into the surrounding area that the air often turned blue, and the delicious smell could be detected for miles. I had learned to love barbecue at a place called the Boar's Back Inn (now Brad's BBQ), but that place had since turned into a meat-and-three place, so Bubba's opening was just what I had asked for. And on one of my first visits there, I had met an employe that looked so much like Jessie Yancey that I had to ask him if they were kin. As fate would have it, he was Leon Yancey, Jessie's older brother. Whenever I had extra money, I would eat there, and sometimes I would invite Jessie to go with me. Ultimately, rumor had it that the Shelby County school board took a dim view of a school principal owning a restaurant and hiring school students (or their older brothers and sisters) to work there. At any rate, sometime in 1984, Mr. Farley sold it to a couple from Virginia, who ran it for a couple of months and then shut it down.

Friday nights would find me at the stadium on the Bartlett High School campus. Not only did I enjoy the marching band, but we were having quite a football season thanks to Jessie Yancey. Our team had been predicted to be good, but this was before an injury to our starting quarterback in the pre-season. But because Jessie hadn't played varsity-level ball before, opposing teams were not familiar with him at all. And because he was so short, his center of gravity was extremely low, and it was hard to legally tackle him. Furthermore, he was amazingly fast. So Bartlett's game plan was remarkably simple- hand the ball off to Jessie on nearly every play. Although teams eventually knew what was coming, few had an answer for Jessie's speed and strength. It was fun to watch us win and win, week after week. Occasionally, I would also walk up to watch freshman and junior varsity games. They occurred on other nights of the week, but there usually wasn't much else going on, and sometimes friends like Jessie or Eugene would be up there.

Because I had enrolled late, I had been placed in beginning chorus, but the director, Edward Riddick, was cool about allowing me to try out for All-West Tennessee chorus, and ultimately I made it. This really started my love affair with choral music, that continues to this day. By the end of September, I was thoroughly at home again, and involved in a lot of new activities and friendships.