The new year of 1986 brought a new milestone to my life in January when drummer Joel Tate arranged for us to play a gig for a wedding reception at a small building on Beale Street about a block east of the old Universal Life Insurance Company headquarters. This was the first real public gig I recall playing, and it was just piano and drums, but the families of the bride and groom said they enjoyed it. I really don't recall what tunes we played, but it was a beginning, of sorts. A week later, I made the All-West Tennessee Jazz Red Band, despite the fact that Bartlett didn't have a jazz band, and I had no experience as an improviser.
As in the previous school year, I remained an equipment carrier for the Bartlett basketball team, and since I was still writing for the Panther newspaper, the job gave me an opportunity to travel to the away games, and report on the team from within. Now the road trips were even more fun, however, since I had a big boom box, and most of the time, I would let Ricky Fields hold it and be the DJ. He had tapes from Club No Name that Ray the Jay and DJ Sundown were giving him, and his taste in music was exquisite. However, on a Friday evening in February where we were headed to Somerville to play Fayette-Ware, I had arrived at the Bartlett gym fairly early, and, as I recall, the weather was unusually warm, so I sat outside the front doors with my box, searching on the radio dial until I was caught by an absolutely luscious piece of classical music on WKNO that I didn't recognize. The beautiful piece seemed to match the Spring-like weather we were having (out of season), and although some students wanted me to change to a different station, I couldn't do it before getting to the end of the piece and finding out what it was. As it turned out, it was the Fourth Symphony of the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, a work subtitled "Deliciae Basiliennes" that was composed in 1946. Although I knew of Honegger, and loved his piece "Pastoral d'Ete," I had not heard the symphony before that afternoon. Once we were on the bus and on Highway 64 however, Ricky put on the new cassette album by a rapper named L. L. Cool J, and I was enthralled. Over two albums, the group Run D.M.C. had seemed to move toward a harder, more stripped-down sound, and now Cool J's album "Radio" carried that to its logical conclusion. The beats were basically nothing more than percussion and scractches, over which the 15-year old rapper from Queens delivered his cocky lyrics. Even the song "Rock the Bells," the clear single, was basically built around timbales rather than bells, the sparse drum-based aural landscape suggesting the gritty urban environment of New York City. It was easy to imagine J as a young streetwise B-Boy. This album would remain on my playlist throughout the rest of the semester.
Also in February, just in time for the first cool snap and snowstorm of the year, some of the choir members traveled to Martin, Tennessee for the UT-Martin Honor Choir. This was a trip that allowed me to consider Martin as a potential college destination for the fall, and while I was there, I met many of the music faculty, and I also caught up with Paul Edwards, a former Bartlett student who was going to UT-Martin. However, the dreary winter weather did not make the trip enjoyable, nor did the behavior of the two other Bartlett choir members who attended with me. Our old choir director, Ed Riddick had gone back to the University of Mississippi for his master's degree, and his replacement was a man in his 70s who had been choir director at Rosemark Academy. He did not choose to travel to the Honor Choir in Martin, so my fellow Bartlett singers skipped the rehearsals during the day, and when I came back to the hotel room, I found a pharmacopia of drugs. I considered music almost something sacred, and it was more in outrage over their failure to recognize the high calling of music than any laws broken that I flushed all their drugs down the toilet. When I returned from the performance (which as I recall they also skipped), they had locked me out of the room while freezing rain was falling. I had to get a chaperone from another school to get me back into my room. Not a word was said between me and the other two Bartlett students, but when I awakened the next morning, they had stolen $40 out of my wallet. I let the matter drop. About the only high point of the trip was a piece we sang called "I Beheld Her, Beautiful As A Dove," by the Canadian composer Healy Willan. It was absolutely lovely, and I have loved it ever since. A few days later, I had to decide whether to compete for a singing chair in the All-State Tennessee Chorus, or whether to compete as accompanist. I decided to go for a singing chair instead, and won second-chair baritone statewide, for a concert and convention that would be held in April.
Although we did not have a jazz band, we did have a percussion ensemble, and a few of the pieces we played, particularly one called Pentatonic Clock had a piano part. Such percussion ensembles were not common at the high school level in our area, although I think that Overton High School had one, as they were a performing arts high school in the city. So it came as no surprise that we were scheduled to perform at the Percussive Arts Society's Day of Percussion in March at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. Our band director Mr. Cooke drove us to Murfreesboro the night before, where we checked into a hotel, and then he took us to Tower Records in Nashville. I had never seen such a record store before (nothing in Memphis came anywhere near it) and soon I had found an album by the jazz drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson called Pulse.
Perhaps my fascination with drums and drummers, despite being a keyboard player, came from my encounter with the Fayette-Ware High School drumline back in 1984, but it was also fueled by my growing interest in jazz, particularly as I listened to Ed Horne's Sunday afternoon jazz shows on WLOK. On his programs, I routinely heard drummers like Billy Higgins, Ben Riley, Eddie Gladdens, Tony Williams, Idris Muhammad and Ed Blackwell, and I was amazed by the way these drummers made use of not only rhythm but pitch. I also had read Valerie Wilmer's book As Serious As Your Life and Amiri Baraka's Black Music, which had discussed Black drummers in jazz, especially the avant-garde, and occasionally in terms that suggested that the liberation of drummers in jazz was analogous to the liberation of Blacks in American society. I had done enough reading in Black history to know that the Southern states had made efforts to keep Blacks from having drums, so I was coming to view Black drummers as "culture rebels" and "culture heroes." They were of course also "culture bearers," but it would not be until my adulthood, when I began a serious study of New Orleans music, that I would encounter that term.
Although I had encountered solo drum tracks on jazz albums, such as Max Roach's "Conversation" off the Deeds, Not Words album, Ronald Shannon Jackson's Pulse was the first solo drum album I had encountered, even if some of the tracks featured spoken word, either by Jackson or by poet Michael S. Harper over the backing drum solos. Perhaps surprisingly, Pulse (the reissue was named Puttin' On Dog) has remained one of my enduring jazz albums, despite being almost strictly drum solos. Only a talented and creative drummer like Ronald Shannon Jackson could sustain interest over the length of an album with just a drumset and his voice, and he does exactly that. The opening solo "Circus of Civilized Fools" starts out with the "Mop-Mop" pattern derived from Max Roach's famous solo "Four Big Sid" before reaching a passage where Jackson coaxes long deep tones with rolls on his five pentatonically-tuned toms. An extremely-fast section follows, which then dissolves into a fierce section of triplets and cymbal crashes over a bass drum pattern which seems derived from Roach's "The Drum Also Waltzes." When this subsides, Jackson sets up a 3/4 rhythm with his bass drum and hi-hats, to which he then adds rolls on the snare and toms. After eight bars of this, Jackson switches the rhythm of the snare and tom rolls to 2/4 while keeping the bass drum and hi-hat pattern in three, which sets up a polyrhythmic aspect. A fast cadenza closes with hard-hitting rolls on the toms to end the piece. Immediately, this is followed by the eleven-minute-long "Richard III, The Raven," which sounds as if it grew out the first piece, but it is a far more harrowing listen. Jackson's humming amplifies to growling and groaning over a basic groove that is suddenly interrupted by a brutal assault on the snare, bass drum and toms, while Jackson's vocal utterances become frantic yelps. Bits of words he seems to speak are incoherent. When he does finally speak noticeable words, they are lines from Shakespeare, "I that am curtailed of fair proportion." Jackson seems to take the words as a cue, seeing in "curtailed of fair proportion" a suggestion of Blackness, but the words are meant to suggest the rhythms he is playing on the drums. He adds a blues-like aside, "Good Lord knows I didn't want to be born." When the fury temporarily subsides, Jackson sets up a pattern of repeated eight-notes on the bass drum, over which he plays snare and tom rhythms which frame the words "Sent into the world before my time." The second part of the piece, built around Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven," is if anything bleaker and more subdued, but the rage remains below the surface, bursting forth at Jackson's interporlation "I have been tired and weary." In a bluesy passage (Jackson grew up hearing blues in juke joints and dives of his native Fort Worth), the drummer states "Nevermore experienced this weary soul the blues, but to say, It ain't supposed to be that way!" whereupon he concludes the piece with a second-line section, a series of hard cymbal rolls, then tom and bass drum attacks, and finally a West-African-sounding tom-tom and bass drum dance which dies away. The remaining tracks are shorter; the solos represent African culture in "Hottentot Woman," Native American resistance to imperialism in "Geronimo's Run," and Jackson's Buddhist beliefs in "Tears For The Earthbound." The poems, Sterling Brown's "Slim in Atlanta" and "Puttin' on Dog," Richard Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," and Michael S. Harper's "Bessie's Blues Song" about Bessie Smith further the overall theme of the album, Black frustration with racism. From Jackson's "It ain't supposed to be that way," to Brown's "laws against N-gg-s laughing outdoors," to Bessie Smith dying in Mississippi after a car crash because a white hospital refused to admit her, Pulse suggests that Black Americans were in fact dissatisfied with Ronald Reagan's America.
As a senior, I was required to write a senior paper, and had had a difficult time in finding a subject to write about which my English teacher would approve. My initial plan was to write a history of Shadowlawn High School; after all I had done much research on the subject, and had even been to the library at the School Board offices to see what they had about Shadowlawn, but my teacher refused to approve the subject. So I finally hit upon the idea of writing a history of the drum and bugle corps known as the Memphis Blues Brass Band, affectionately called MB3 by its members, friends and fans. This she did approve, and my senior paper entitled The Parades of Summer: The Memphis Blues Brass Band 1980-1983 was the result. Viewed from today's perspective, it was overly dependent on the Commercial Appeal and magazines like Drum Corps World, and short on interviews with people who were actually there. All the same, it was basically my first work of historical and musicological research. Perhaps at some point I will revise and improve it.
Spring Break was always a big deal each year for Bartlett students. The majority of white students typcially went to Panama City Beach, but my parents forbade me to go, because the events were unofficial and unsupervised, and they felt I might get into trouble. But the predominantly-Black Streamliners club of which I was a member was sponsoring a trip to Orlando and Daytona Beach from March 26-30, and because Mrs. McKinley, our sponsor, was going, along with other parents, my parents felt more comfortable about me making that trip. I remember having my jam box, sitting in the charter bus, waiting for our trip to get under way. It was warm and sunny, and a new song came on K-97 called "The Screams of Passion" which sounded exactly like Prince. It was actually by a band called The Family, which had emerged out of the breakup of Morris Day and the Time, but Prince had produced it, and this short-lived band also introduced the Prince song "Nothing Compares 2 U." We were listening to L.L. Cool J's album as we headed down Highway 78 in Mississippi, but eventually one of the parents put on Bobby "Blue" Bland's Members Only album. It's hard to imagine that I wasn't a blues fan then, but I really wasn't. I was into jazz, and I was into classical, but I had not learned to appreciate blues. By the time that I did, it was really too late; both R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough had died. We stopped at some sort of buffet in Montgomery, Alabama, and after that, I fell asleep.
I don't recall everything we did every day, but I remember that we spent a busy day at Walt Disney World, and it was really quite enjoyable. I remember also going to the mall in South Orlando, where we checked out clothing stores and record stores. I also remember that I took pictures of Rhonda Holloway and others on that trip, but I no longer know what happened to the pictures. The next day, we were to have gone to Sea World, but there was something of a rebellion. We made Mrs. McKinley understand that we would prefer to go to Daytona Beach instead and go swimming in the Atlantic, and she agreed, so we made the trip on the day we otherwise would have gone to Sea World. I thought it was a good decision, and we all had a ball. The next day, as I recall, was Easter Sunday, one of the few I ever spent away from family. Mrs. McKinley insisted that we have a sort of devotional and prayer beside the swimming pool at our motel, and I found that wholesome and comforting. Then we began the long journey back from Orlando to Bartlett. Although we were tired, we had lots of fun, and there was not even one untoward incident.
By April the end of school was upon us. Joel Tate had recruited a couple of lead guitarist (one was Derek Harris) and a bass guitarist for our band, and for a brief time, I was serious about trying to make it work. Ultimately, there were just too many different directions of different people, and Joel ultimately lost interest in music altogether. At the same time, I spent a lot of time continuing to research the Shadowlawn High School history, interviewing people along Ellis Road, Appling Road, Ellendale Road and Old Brownsville Road who had attended the school. Although I never found any copies of the old yearbook, or pictures of the Shadowlawn teams, band or cheerleaders, I did get lots of stories about the realities of Shadowlawn High School from former students, and eventually from former teachers as well. One former student, Andrew Nolen, was in fact a groundskeeper at Bartlett High School, and he told me about a sad incident in which some Shadowlawn students were suspended for singing Shadowlawn's alma mater at a Bartlett school assembly in 1970 or 1971, after their school had been closed by the Federal courts and they were forced to transfer to Bartlett. The head of our building maintenance was a musician from Fayette County named George Dean, who was well-known as the leader of a quartet called the Gospel Fours; in fact he sometimes drove the group van to work. By April or early May, the song I recall is "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," which was on radios and loudspeakers everywhere. Its reliance on a major seventh chord was not particularly common in popular music, and it had a pleasant, hot, summertime vibe to it. And almost without warning, there I was, walking across the stage at the old Mid-South Coliseum to receive my diploma. There was some heckling in the balcony when my name was called (not everyone took kindly to my hanging with Black students), and I was sorry that my parents had to hear and witness that, but I had graduated and it was on to bigger and better things.
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