After Mud Boy’s near riot at the 1977 Beale Street Music Festival, I tried to hit all the civic concerts. One blues band caught my ear at a downtown summer event as the 1970s were becoming the eighties. The group was tight, sounded modern and urban, but they also conveyed a strong sense of traditional blues. They told me their regular gig was Friday nights at the J&J Lounge.
This was long before GPS was available. The phone book pointed me to Mississippi Boulevard. A more organized person would have brought a map. My friend Cam McCaa (a three-lettered poem of a name) and I crisscrossed streets until we found Mississippi, drove one way on it and then the other until we found the club. We returned regularly, never bringing a map, and never doing daylight reconnaissance.
The Fieldstones recorded only two albums, both for the University of Memphis record label, High Water. That enterprise was fueled by ethnomusicology professor, author, and jug band revivalist Dr. David Evans. Were it not for High Water, many of Memphis’s great bands from the 1980s would have been lost. (On their million-selling album Raising Sand, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss recorded an almost-to-the-note version of the song “Let Your Loss Be Your Lesson” as rendered by High Water artists the Blues Busters.) The Fieldstones cut some very deep blues, a few tracks evoking their Saturday night gig. The release of the second album, Mud Island Blues, was subject to university budgets and delayed twenty years. Most of the band did not live to see it.
That first night I experienced them at J&J, the Fieldstones became one of my all-time favorite bands, and then their second home, Green’s Lounge, became one of my all-time favorite clubs. Both really spoiled me: They were that hard to beat and that easy to access. I cherished them in their time, bringing friends from all over to share the experience. Their demises—the band’s and the club’s—have been like the death of family, a yearning for one more experience, one more sound, one more moment in their presence.
Liner notes to Mud Island Blues, 2005
My buddy Cam was already tanked when I picked him up just before the liquor stores closed. It was near eleven P.M. on a Friday night in 1980, summer, and we were driving from the more-monied suburban East Memphis to the less-monied inner-city neighborhoods we didn’t usually go to, looking for the J&J Lounge.
“Hey,” I’d shouted the weekend before to a man who’d just left the stage at a Memphis blues festival, “Y’all sound good, where do you play?”
There was only one J&J Lounge in the phone book, so, after buying a fifth of Kentucky Tavern, Cam and I set out. We found the J&J and would return often; the bar’s exterior was never well lit, and our landmark became a large Victorian home with red lights glowing from behind all the drawn window shades. You paid the cover charge and bought your beer in an anteroom; the club was through a door. It was hot that first night and we decided to cool off with a couple beers before we hit the whiskey. (Play it in any key—play it in whiskey!) We laughed when the barman, to our suburban white-ass surprise, set out two quarts. Me and Cam, with three bottles glinting in the club’s dim light, stayed popular that night at the J&J.
The Fieldstones were in mid-set, their warm, welcoming blues—so narcotic—enveloping us. The stage, unlike the club, was not barely lit; it wasn’t lit at all. The music poured from the darkness like night from sky.
The band moved to Green’s Lounge, where they developed an international reputation. It was not uncommon to meet people there who spoke no English but understood perfectly what was going on, and brought their own guitars to prove it. Green’s Lounge was nothing but a double-shotgun building made of cinder blocks, half the front dividing wall cut out to create a U shape, allowing more audience to see the band and easily reach the bar. Sometimes the kitchen served food. People were always dancing—real, real dancing, dirty dancing, leaving little room for imagination or for the neighboring couple. As Green’s increased in popularity, selling more quarts of beer, they got more popular with their distributor, and not long before the roof burned off, lighted beer signs were illuminating the dark corners, diminishing the mystery.
The Fieldstones at Green’s Lounge. Left to right: Mr. Clean (dancing, left), Boogie Man (rear, of the Hollywood All-Stars, sitting in), Chester Chandler, aka Memphis Gold (guitar), Joe Hicks (drums), Lois Brown (bass). (Courtesy of Erik Lindahl)
The band. The Fieldstones weren’t known for their solos. The music came out as a whole, even when one member stepped forward. Joe Hicks, the vocalist / drummer, used to say, “Time to move on down the line,” and he’d tap the snare a couple of times. He’d say it in between songs and always to start a set. “Got to move on down the line,” tap tap, and the Fieldstones would fall back to their instruments. Bobby Carnes played the keyboard, and he rarely spoke, leaning into those fat church chords instead, the ones still smoky from Saturday night. Lois Brown, she played bass and had a beautiful smile. If the band got hot, she’d tug a string for the ceiling fan without missing a note. Lois was tough, and when acting as the band’s manager, she brooked no jive. But her playing made the music lithe. She didn’t move a lot, a little rocking to the beat, but there was a touch, a jump to her jump, that made the bass—and that band—so sinuous. People who never danced would dance to the Fieldstones. One guitarist’s spot rotated, mostly between the soul band veteran Clarence Nelson and blues original Wordie Perkins.
Toni the drummer, left, and Rose, the proprietress of Green’s Lounge. (Courtesy of Huger Foote)
The star of the band was Will Roy Sanders. For a while, he got a job driving a truck and was out of town on many Saturday nights. Without him, the gigs were good—hell, if you didn’t know about the possibilities of Will Roy, they were great—but he could take the band to a higher, or lower, or deeper place. He had a long rubber face and he sang out of the side of his mouth; you could film a tight shot of him singing and, with the audio turned off, be entertained all night. He’d step up to the mic, wail out an opening verse or line or word (like he does on “Put Your Loving Arms Around Me”), and the band would kick in like your favorite tractor getting its first spark on a warm engine.
For their third set, the band would invite guests on stage. Saxophonist Evelyn Young would often show up—the young B. B. King had modeled his guitar parts on her solos; Evelyn didn’t have to wait for the third set. Little Applewhite was a regular, but he never sounded more late-night than he does here on “That Ain’t Right.” A woman named Toni was always around, bumming drinks and dollar bills, sitting in on drums. One night, a wispy third-set bass player named Shorty who’d been sitting in for years sang a gospel song of such stirring beauty that the band had to quit for the night. Albert King sat in, Teenie Hodges, and a lot of those visiting people who couldn’t speak English. The Fieldstones made everybody sound good. Their blues swallowed you.
Week after week they played world-class music until two or three in the morning. Whenever I took their Saturday night presence for granted, hearing them would refresh my wonder. For a long time, the oversight seemed indecent: Such huge talent, such obscurity. I wanted them to get wider recognition, to be heard by millions. But fame is relative, and in some ways this weekly gig was the best kind of success. It put extra money in their pockets, it gave them time in the spotlight, it drew people from all corners of the globe to their Saturday night home, to the community they had made within those unassuming cinderblocks across from the automobile graveyard.
The years have not been kind to the Fieldstones. Making this music was not glamorous. The last time I saw Lois, her health was failing seriously; I heard she lost a leg to diabetes. Joe Hicks had a series of light strokes; Clarence died; Wordie sobered up and, I think, works in a factory. Last time I dropped Toni off at her place in the projects, she borrowed fifteen bucks and has been hiding from me ever since. Evelyn Young passed, Applewhite has had serious kidney trouble. After Green’s Lounge shut down in the mid-1990s, Will Roy purchased it and ran it with his wife, Dorothy. That’s when a fire shuttered it.
I’ve waited nearly twenty years to hear this album. I bought their first one the day it came out, and it livened up many a party. Week after week I’d badger them for information on the release of their follow-up, and they’d say it was in the can and they hoped it would come out soon. Now that we’ve got it, here’s my suggestion: Get one forty-watt light, maybe two. You’ll need either a smoke machine or a convenience store’s worth of burning cigarettes, definitely a cooler full of beer quarts, also setups—a maraschino cherry on top of a hotel ice bucket, napkins stuffed inside tiny drinking glasses. Find a real diverse group of humans: large, small, very fat, quite skinny, black, white, others. Put a sign on the wall that says NO DOPE SMOKIN’, then ignore it. Hire a skinny old man you could push over with a sneeze, give him a loaded gun, and let him frisk everyone as they enter. Call me and I’ll pick up Cam on the way. Turn up Mud Island Blues. Dance.