NEW BEALE STREET SHEIKS AND THE RETURN OF WILL SHADE
(1963)
I proposed on New Year’s Eve. We had been to Steady Eddie’s house party. George Tidwell was there with his new bride, an airhead with an infectious, disarming Gracie Allen appeal. Mary Lindsay watched her and smiled. It looked like she was thinking about the future.
We had other married friends. Phil Arnault, from the Market Theatre, and his wife lived in Vets Village. She taught Mary Lindsay to make green pea casserole with mushroom soup and canned fried onion rings. It became the backbone of our early marriage.
Mary Lindsay didn’t say yes right away. The second time I asked, we had doubled with Newport and Vera (not a really great idea). We were both pretty drunk. She said yes.
I was engaged. I was finally no longer a freshman in college, and had my second recording contract. I hoped to get a little further than I had with Rubin Cherry and Home of the Blues. Justis booked a recording session for me at Sam Phillips’s studio. A week before the session, I got an envelope from Justis with a lyric sheet to a song written by Playboy cartoonist Shel Silverstein. Obviously, Bill meant for me to record it. There was no way. The song was “The Unicorn,” which was later a big hit by the Irish Rovers. I couldn’t hear myself singing the words “humpty back camels and chimpanzees.” I acted like I never received it. I knew whatever I recorded had to be really good.
Whiskey Chute! Seeing Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band at Club 47 had jarred my memory. I called Crosthwait and asked if he had considered playing the washboard. We went to a hardware store by Memphis State and got a Zinc King washboard and half a dozen sewing thimbles to use as picks. We drafted George Gillis, who had played bass on my Home of the Blues session, to play washtub. The New Beale Street Sheiks were born.
We rehearsed once, played a gig Friday night at the Pastimes Peanut Bar, and showed up at Sam Phillips’s studio Saturday morning for the session. Nobody was there except Scotty Moore, Bill Black, and Rowsey, the repairman. Justis had failed to nail down the booking for the session, and Scotty wasn’t buying it. We looked pretty bad. Crosthwait had hair trailing down his back. Gillis and I were hungover. I told Scotty to call Justis in Nashville. After he got off the phone, Scotty okayed the session and it fell to Rowsey to engineer. Later I found out it was his first and only session. We set up around a couple of RCA 77s and laid down four songs as fast as we could. While we were cutting, Bill Black called people on the phone to come over and laugh at us from the control room.
When we finished Bill shook his head. “Dickinson, this is the wildest thing you’ve ever done,” he chuckled.
I tried to get the tape, but Scotty wouldn’t let me have it. “I’ll send it to Bill,” I said.
“No, man. I’m going to Nashville tomorrow. I’ll take it to Bill myself.” Scotty still didn’t trust me. More than a week went by, and I didn’t hear from Justis. I called him. “What did you think of the tape?” I asked.
“Great, man! Great. The record comes out Thursday. Chet Atkins tried to buy it. It’s a hit.”
“Record?” I choked. “That was a demo.”
“Oh, man, you could never do it that bad again,” Bill said.
“Bill, you have no idea how bad I could do it,” I said, with all my heart.
“What’s that playing bass?” he asked.
“That’s a washtub and a clothesline tied to a broomstick,” I answered.
“A rope! A rope!” Justis shouted. “I went all over Nashville trying to EQ a rope!”
The record came out on Thursday. We got a Cash Box review and a pick-hit on the cover of Billboard. On Sunday, the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan for the first time. Our hour in the sun was brief. John R played it for two nights on WLAC. The first night he said, “Wait a minute, y’all. There’s some kind of racket down in the parking lot. I’m gonna stick a microphone out the window and see what we can hear.” Then he played the record. The next night he said, “I’ve been in the music business for thirty years and this is without a doubt the worst record I’ve ever heard.”
Justis set me up with Ray Brown, the notorious booking agent who had aptly named Jerry Lee Lewis “The Killer.” Brown, an ex–disc jockey, booked all of the Memphis artists: The aforementioned Killer, the Bill Black Combo, “Ace” Cannon, “Jumpin’” Gene Simmons, the Mar-Keys, and anybody else he could sell to a college fraternity, radio station, or nightclub honkytonk. His office downtown was an incredibly fun place to hang out. Ray had the same caustic sense of humor as Bill Justis. My act’s strangeness appealed to him. He booked the New Beale Street Sheiks as a novelty. We played conventions and happy hours. Nobody had any idea who we were but it always went over. Jug bands have a universal appeal.
I quit doing my blanket act at the Oso: I didn’t want to push my luck with Mary Lindsay. We were in the audience when Furry Lewis played and got to be friends with the wise old man. Charlie Brown had found Will Shade. After all those years, I would finally meet the genius from Whiskey Chute, the leader of the Memphis Jug Band!
It was another “parents in Little Rock” weekend. I was supposed to go to Nashville to meet Fred Foster, the owner of Monument Records, who distributed Southtown, Justis’s label that had released “You’ll Do It All the Time” by the New Beale Street Sheiks. The day before I was to go, Charlie Brown called wondering if I wanted to meet Will Shade. I met Charlie and Bailey Wilkerson (his partner in the Oso) at their joint, and we drove down to Beale Street. Furry lived in a basement unit in an apartment building on Beale. We climbed the stairs to the third floor and knocked on a door.
Will was dressed in a bathrobe, pleated suit pants, and suspenders over a wife beater. He wore old blown-out house slippers. His wife, Jennie Mae Clayton, stood mute at the stove with her mouth poked out. Will welcomed us in.
Furry had taught us that it was impolite to come empty-handed. Charlie Brown unsacked a fifth of Old Charter. The woman at the stove grunted. We drank and Will told stories. He went to his chifferobe, shuffled through socks, and pulled out a well-worn official-looking document. He shook it, and told us about suing Duke Ellington over “Newport News.” He reached under his bed and pulled out what I swore was the same old Gibson I had seen at Gus Cannon’s. He played big band block chords and sang in a whisper.
Furry appeared from out of nowhere. He bristled with anger, obviously pissed that “his” white boys were paying attention to Will. Bailey Wilkerson had a guitar with him. It was a nylon-string classical instrument totally unsuited to Furry’s bottleneck style. I can still hear his aluminum conduit slide clacking as it bogged down on the neck of that Goya student model guitar. If anything truly deserved the term gutbucket, it was the awkward, chopped-off, no sustain of Furry trying to blow Will away. It was old-school head cutting. Furry played his repertoire and headed for uncharted territory. Will seemed oblivious to his competition. It wasn’t pretty. Suddenly Will cried out, jumped up, and shuffled out the door down the hall. He didn’t make it. When he came back he had pissed in his pants.
“Look at dat!” his woman hollered. “Yeah, now, look at that. You done done it.” She was all over him. “Fuckin’ around with white trash! Go on out of here! Get on out. Let me clean this ol’ fool up.”
Jennie Mae was once known as the most beautiful woman on Beale Street; duels to the death were fought over her. She had concealed her old friend Memphis Minnie in the county poor house, protecting her from the blues Nazis. She was a remarkable woman from another era, living out her days where she had been a queen.
Charlie Brown thought it was hysterical. I drove home in silence. Our house was empty and cold. I built a fire in the fireplace and watched the flame. I woke up in the morning in the den with my clothes still on and TV screen buzzing with snow. I did not go to Nashville. I never told Justis why. I called Mary Lindsay, who came over right away. We spent the weekend together. She never asked me what was wrong.
I couldn’t put it together. Obviously there was a lesson here. These two old men, who in youth had lived and played peculiar music that spoke to me, made me think of old Sam Hess, though they could not be more different: Mountain country and city slicker, white and black, sons of Dionysus, who sang the music in their souls. I saw the common thread; the women, Emmer and Jennie Mae Clayton, living out their time with an almost forgotten musical treasure. We too were the common thread, crazy white boys, searchers, who invaded their world looking for hidden secrets. The two worlds only came together in what we sought.