arkansas - talk business

52 TBQ • Q2 2009 www.talkbusiness.net

53TBQ • Q2 2009www.talkbusiness.net

From Nashville to Memphis down to the Mississippi Delta

and over to Austin, they celebrate a great

nation’s musical heritage. But something is missing

along that axis. It’s called Arkansas.

provides the very melting pot of

America’s musical heritage. Instantly you’re

thinking that someone has badly overstated.

You’re thinking this compares to saying

the Razorbacks are good in basketball.

You’re saying it’s provincial, even

myopic, by which you mean near-sighted

and narrow-minded.

But you should never rush to judgment.

And you should never allow yourself to fall

victim to the dreaded inferiority complex long

besetting and hamstringing Arkansas.

Why did those Rolling Stones get arrested

that time in Fordyce? It’s because they took off

one afternoon from Memphis into eastern

Arkansas in search of the treasured musical

influences of their youth.

By JOHN BRUMMETTContributing Writer

Arkansas

Photo by bob ocken taken at lucky dog audio Post in little rock, arkansas.


He was a charismatic African-American saxophonist, vocalist, bandleader and composer out of Brinkley. He rose to prominence in the swing era of the 1940s.

“Caldonia” and “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” were among his hits. They called him “King of the Juke Box.” This was the time of big bands, except that Jordan, for financial reasons as much as anything else, made do with five or six pieces. The music he played was a confluence of influences, which is what all music is, of course, and for which Arkansas has always been a veritable magnet. Jordan’s style was drawn largely from the black Delta blues as well as from swing and jazz. But it introduced a faster, adrenaline-pumping, foot-engaging, mood-elevating rhythm, accentuated by a charismatic and at times clownish front man. Put all that together and what do you get? Well, let’s see. You have rhythm and then

you have blues. Why, that’s called “R and B,” rhythm-and-blues, and that’s merely what rock-‘n-roll is, or at least sprang from. And remember Jordan’s small band of five or six players with a charismatic, occasionally comedic front man? That became the very prototype of the rock-‘n-roll band. It wasn’t the Dave Clark Forty; it was the Dave Clark Five. Chuck Berry, James Brown, Mick Jagger — all owe their iconic legend, at least in part, to the innovations of Brinkley’s Louis Jordan. When Rolling Stone magazine compiled the supposed greatest hundred rock performers ever, Jordan was 59th. Some wondered who he was. Those who knew wondered why he wasn’t in the top ten.

Ever heard of Albert King? He actually came from north Mississippi close to Memphis, but his musical career began when he was living in Osceola. He died in 1992 and is buried in a small community

Ever heard of Louis Jordan?

The Center of America’s Musical Universeil

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in Crittenden County just on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River. He is only widely considered one of the greatest blues guitarists ever. People say Eric Clapton and the “three Kings,” meaning Albert, B. B. and Freddie. Albert King was left-handed, but he played a right-handed guitar upside down and his chords inside out. And he was the first, musical historians will tell you, to take standard blues guitar techniques and adapt them to the emerging “soul” sound emanating largely from black musicians in and around Memphis.

Ever heard of Johnny Taylor? He came from Crittenden County and he did vocally what King did with his upside-down guitar. “Who’s Makin’ Love to Your Old Lady (While You Were Out Makin’ Love)” was a monster hit in the late ‘60s, representing one of the first blends of a blues singer doing soul, or a soul singer doing blues. Either way.

Ever heard of Al Green? He’s a preacher now in Memphis. His hometown was Forrest City, right there between Louis Jordan’s Brinkley and soulful Stax Records of Memphis. And he took this blend of blues and soul to places maybe only Marvin Gaye, up in Motown, could also take it. “Let’s Stay Together,” Rev. Al’s classic hit of the early ‘70s, a silky, soulful vocal accom-panied by almost primitive instrumentation, is very possibly the song by which an entire generation was conceived. Al could provide sexual healing without calling his song “Sexual Healing,” if you get the drift. Turn the lights off on a cozy Saturday night and put “Let’s Stay Together” on the stereo, and, well, one’s mind does tend to wander when one begins to hum the sounds of Al Green. Before Viagra, there was music from Arkansas.

Ever heard of Scott Joplin? He was the king of “ragtime.” He actually

came from eastern Texas, but spent formative years on our side of Texarkana.

How about Jimmy Driftwood? He took the influences of the mountain music coming out of Appalachia and became one of our most influential and popular folk/country composers, musicians, historians and folklorists. That you can’t define him in one label, but only with a slash and commas, merely proves his Arkansas bona fides. He wrote “The Battle of New Orleans,” celebrating Andrew Jackson’s military legend with these spectacular lyrics: “They ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles and they ran through the bushes where the rabbits couldn’t go. They ran so fast the hounds couldn’t catch ‘em, on down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.”

Ever heard of Levon Helm? He was the only non-Canadian member of The Band, which rose to international fame backing Bob Dylan, then went on its innovative own for a few highly successful years. Levon, born “Lavon,” from a cotton farm in the Marvell-Helena area, was the drummer and distinctive raspy vocalist on “The Weight” and “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down.” A young Martin Scorsese made a now-legendary documentary film based on “The Band” and its valedictory concert in San Francisco, called “The Last Waltz.” The film is best remembered for a snippet of Scorsese’s interview with Helm. In a smug, mildly mischievous tone, Helm explained to Scorsese that the rural musical entertainment of his boyhood often came from traveling minstrel shows that peddled elixirs and featured black entertainers and dancers. Inevitably, Levon explained, they’d let loose only at midnight for what was called “The Midnight Ramble.” He said the lyrics would get a little cruder

and the dancers a little lewder. And what they would be playing, Helm said, was a mix of influences – gospel out of the churches, blues from the blacks of the Delta, jazz percolating up from deeper Dixieland and mountain music and bluegrass coming from rural points north and east. And it all came together there in a short radius of Memphis, Levon explained. If you could dance to it, you really had something, he said. Scorsese wondered what you had. Why, Levon said obviously, you had rock-‘n-roll. There are theories about all this. One is that everyone needs an outlet of expression and that music tended to prove the most accessible for poor rural people who found inspiration in the congregational gospel singing of churches and the distant sounds they heard via the radio. Another is that most original American music came out of the South and Arkansas offered especially fertile ground by being so centrally located in this South, close to the black Delta blues of Mississippi, and to Memphis, and to the mountain influences commonly called “hillbilly,” the poor white man’s blues, which evolved into modern-day’s so-called country and western. Helm holds “Midnight Ramble” shows on Saturday nights even now at the place he calls The Barn next to his home in the Catskills in New York. He’s won recent Grammy Awards for so-called “roots music,” meaning the purest and perhaps most primitive form of early American music. To Levon, it’s all just music. He grew up listening to Hank Williams, Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson, probably only the world’s best blues harmonica player ever and who, though a native Mississippian, spent many of his playing days living in eastern Arkansas. Levon says he never categorized the icons by race or style. He only enjoyed them and absorbed them as distinctive parts of a greater whole.

The Center of America’s Musical Universe


we haven’t yet mentioned, as if to save the most famous for last and in case anyone is not yet persuaded of the state’s centrality to the American musical universe.

One of the leading cable television music channels, VH1, once rated the top hundred country and western performers of all time. Hank Williams was second. The Texans — Bob Wills and Willie Nelson — came next. The proud Okie from Muskogee, Merle Haggard, came along shortly. First place, though, went to J. R. Cash, an old boy born in Kingsland and who grew up in Dyess, both tiny farm places in Depression-era eastern Arkansas. He dubbed himself John when the draft board told him he needed an actual name, not merely initials, and eventually he became, immortally, Johnny Cash. He spent a five-decade career as a country music giant who, in the fine Arkansas

tradition, stubbornly defied stylistic labeling. Like Elvis, he’d always do gospel. He was active early in the brief pre-rock rockabilly heyday of Sun Records of Memphis. He had clear folk influences and was a close friend of Bob Dylan. In his autobiography, Cash wrote that it was the way of life in Arkansas that formed his music. Cash acted in a few movies and had a hit television variety show in the early ‘70s. Before that, in the late ‘60s, he became famous for doing shows in prisons – Folsom, San Quentin, and, for a 90-minute KATV, Channel 7, special in April 1969, outdoors at Cummins Prison. For the Cummins show, which you can watch today in four installments on YouTube, Cash brought along, as if to flout his variety of influences, such special guests as Carl Perkins, the rockabilly master of “Blue Suede Shoes,” and the Statler Brothers, the harmonizing, gospel-styled quartet. Cash agreed to do the Cummins show in exchange for being allowed to conduct videotaped interviews with Death Row inmates. Ben Combs, prominent advertising man in Little Rock who directed the Cummins telecast as director of public affairs for Channel 7, recalls that Cash envisioned using snippets of the interviews on his forthcoming ABC variety show. But that never happened, surely because network executives wanted music, not politics. And music they got. Cash provided network musical debuts to Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Haggard, John Fogerty, George Jones and countless others. Kristofferson once said Johnny Cash’s face ought to be on Mount Rushmore.

There is oneother musical icon

from Arkansas

The Center of America’s Musical UniverseJo

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At the Arkansas Economic Development

Commission, we’re just as devoted to

keeping existing business here and

prospering as we are to bringing new

business to Arkansas. That’s why so many

Arkansas business owners have made a

partner out of the Business Retention &

Expansion Division of AEDC. Here, you

will find problem-solving tools, marketing

resources, technical assistance, and access to

business studies, surveys and analysis. Plus

counseling, information, and referral services

are offered at no cost. Learn more about our

BR&E Division at 1-800-ARKANSAS, or visit

arkansasedc.com.

AttrActing new businessesto ArkAnsAs is good.keeping the businesses wehAve is even better.



Ten years ago, a Little Rock journalist named Stephen Koch, obsessed with Louis Jordan specifically and the influence of Arkansas music generally, began a weekly program titled “Arkansongs” on the National

Public Radio station in Little Rock, KUAR-89.1 FM. He recalls that, when he started, people asked him what he was going to play after he had depleted all the albums of Johnny Cash and, to invoke an uncommonly talented and versatile Arkansas musician we haven’t even mentioned, Glen Campbell.

Today Koch’s problem isn’t running out of Arkansas songs but running out of time to play a reasonable sample.

Four years ago, Koch worked with state Sen. Stephen Bryles of Blytheville – “one politician who gets it,” Koch says – to get state money appropriated for a monument in Mississippi County marking the spot on the road, near a community called Twist, where B. B. King’s legendary blues guitar got the famous name of “Lucille.” Yes, that’s right. As if Arkansas wasn’t prominent enough already, B. B. King’s Gibson guitar got named inside our state’s borders. It seems that, in the mid-1950s, B. B. was playing at a dance in Twist. Some men began fighting and they knocked over a stove, starting a fire. King got out safely, along with everyone else, but then realized that his $30 acoustic guitar was back inside. He ran back in to retrieve it. He later learned the men had been fighting over a woman, of course. Her name was Lucille. So B.B. thus named his guitar and kept the name for all the guitars of his that would come after. Arkansas has made other small and dissipated attempts to commemorate its influence and encourage tourism. We have

Main Street El Dorado recipient of the 2009

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the blues museum in Helena, the folk center in Mountain View and the Entertainers Hall of Fame in Pine Bluff. In the recent legislative session, a bill was approved naming the portion of U. S. Highway 67 from Newport north to Walnut Ridge the “Rock-‘n-Roll Highway.” That’s because of the popular roadhouses along it in 1950 where Elvis and Fats Dominos sometimes played, and for the early rockabilly greats who came from the stretch and played there, primarily Billy Lee Riley and Sonny Burgess. This session, Bryles secured $50,000 for Arkansas State University to plan a Johnny Cash heritage museum in Dyess, which was a resettlement farming colony designed as a semi-socialist experiment by Franklin Roosevelt. The Cashes were among five farm families from Cleveland County chosen. But our state’s prominence far transcends our typically hit-and-miss efforts to capture and promote it. Nashville, Memphis and even Austin, where the so-called “progressive country music” community settled, benefit from

tourism and entertainment dollars owing to their showcasing of their prominence in American musical heritage. Nashville has the Grand Ol’ Opry and country music recording; Memphis has Graceland and Sun Records; Austin has the popular TV show “Austin City Limits.” Isn’t there something missing along this route, along this very cradle of American music? Isn’t there a place where the prominence isn’t as widely known or properly commemorated and celebrated? Isn’t it that place where the Rolling Stones once got thrown in the small-town slammer? Where Louis Jordan started rhythm and blues? Where J. R. Cash and Levon Helm cooked their musical stews? Where a saxophone-playing future president grew up, getting called “Saturday Night Bill and Sunday Morning Clinton,” which, when you think about, represents the very eclectic and paradoxical musical and cultural mix that Helm was trying to tell Scorsese about? Amid our state’s ever-obsessed and often frustrated efforts for economic

development and tourism enhancement, maybe our policy-makers and civic leaders and opinion-shapers could turn some of their attention to something we’d need not recruit, because we’ve always had it and because it is, in fact, our very culture and heritage and essence. Might there be some way to consolidate, coordinate and accentuate our monument to our music? This would take vision. It would take presumptuousness. It would take initiative. It would take ambition. It would take quite a bit of money. But it would not take any exaggeration, no license with history. Not a whit. For in Arkansas, we surely have the music in us. TBQ

To explore Arkansas’ rich musical legacy, visit the Old Statehouse Museum

and other great resources through our web site at www.talkbusiness.net.

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