NASHVILLE SCENE
FEBRUARY 26 - MARCH 3, 2004
Cover Story

Saving Our Soul

Before, Music City's history was in black & white. A new compilation CD puts it
in color

By Jim Ridley

History teases us with the prospect of counterfactuals--worlds and possibilities
that might have been but weren't. So let's play make-believe for a second and
imagine: What if Nashville hadn't been whacked into two halves, a white half and
a black half, in the guise of "urban renewal" in the 1960s? What if the thriving
black social and business district with Jefferson Street at its hub hadn't been
kneecapped in the process?

We might be Atlanta--congested on one hand, home to the epicenter of
21st-century pop music on the other, stank you very much. We might be Memphis,
coasting on a glorious legacy of rhythm and blues that continues to draw
pilgrims from all over the world. We might be something other than what we
are--mildly progressive, cautiously imitative, socially segregated. At the very
least, we might not have the inferiority complex that leads us, as a city, to
eye our neighbors to the south and west with envy.

That Nashville seems so white to the rest of the world isn't the problem. It's
that the city seems self-consciously white. We're not talking unabashedly white,
like Franklin. To Memphis and Atlanta, we're the white guy who prides himself on
eating once a year at Swett's while talking loudly about the time he watched
Moesha. The rest of the world looks at our chief export, country music, and its
vanilla touring company, and says, "Damn, they're white. Always were, always
will be."

It's time we shook off this stereotype once and for all. And the way to do it is
to embrace the richness, the beauty, the pulse-quickening joyousness, of the
musical heritage that belongs mutually to black and white Nashvillians. This, by
God, this is a city that broke down racial barriers at the height of segregation
with a 50,000-watt howitzer booming from Toronto to Tijuana. In a Nashville
radio station, WLAC-AM, white deejays (who sounded black) played records by
black artists (whose producers and sidemen sometimes were white) for a united
audience of black and white teens. However divided they were by day, under the
inhumane strictures of Jim Crow and enforced inequality, jocks and crooners with
konked pompadours and kids who huddled under blankets with flashlights became
one single rhythm-and-blues nation once the late-night dial locked in on 1510.
The first step toward reclaiming this heritage, and making Nashville whole
again, is learning about it. Toward that end, two related events have just
arrived to give the city a massive boost of hometown pride. One is a monumental
long-term exhibit opening next month at the Country Music Hall of Fame devoted
to the history of Nashville R&B (see sidebar). The other, and possibly more
momentous, is an accompanying two-disc compilation called Night Train to
Nashville: Music City Rhythm & Blues 1945-1970, a painstakingly assembled
collection of 37 vintage singles, B-sides and radio transcriptions.
For many listeners, the set itself will appear counterfactual. Quite simply, the
songs on Night Train to Nashville are nothing less than a revision of
Nashville's musical history. To be found here are staples of the oldies-station
canon, along with blues instrumentals, soul shouters, girl-group pop and loping
jump blues--all testaments to a hitherto unheralded depth of talent, ambition
and even influence among the city's oft-neglected R&B industry. Together,
though, they add up to something even larger. They form a portrait of the
Nashville that was a half-century ago--and suggest a broader, richer Music City
that might have been. And, perhaps, that still might be, particularly as tens of
thousands of immigrants and refugees bring their rich musical legacies to the
city.

The Nashville that swaggers forth on Night Train to Nashville seems unimaginably
vital. It is the most exciting place in the world for the duration of one
two-minute single--and the next, and the next, and the next. It is a city
crackling with energy and humor and nervy ideas, a crossroads for cultural
collision and change. "To young blacks growing up in East Tennessee, the city
was our version of Harlem, Chicago, 52nd Street, Central Avenue and Beale Street
combined," writes critic Ron Wynn, a Knoxville native who grew up forming his
vision of Nashville--like listeners all over the South--from the wee, wee hour
broadcasts on WLAC.

The city takes its stride from Night Train's opening track, a walloping boogie
called "Nashville Jumps" by Cecil Gant, a proto-rock-'n'-roller who left his
native Nashville for California and war. Billed as "Pvt. Cecil Gant," the
hard-driving piano player had scored an unexpected hit while in the service out
west: a plaintive 1944 ballad called "I Wonder" that would later be covered by
Aretha Franklin and others. It was Gant's version, though, that scored so deeply
with the war-sick home front that the demand almost destroyed his record
company. In 1951, seven years after his career-making hit, Gant would die in a
Nashville hospital of causes variously reported as pneumonia or alcohol
poisoning. He would not see age 39.
But this is five years earlier, in 1946, and Gant's thundering left hand evokes
nothing but the can-do gait of postwar optimism. His lyrics tell a different
story. His girl's left him, he's broke and there's nothing to do but go to
Nashville and get his juice on. The cool thing is, everybody else is going there
too, fueled with some swill "from Jack Daniel's still." It's an utterly urban
record, an all-points bulletin from the big-city South, in which the shuffling
late-night rhythm of New Orleans rises to meet the dawning light of Memphis rock
'n' roll. The groove just barrels along, gathering steam. When Gant punctuates
his solo with the command, "Jump, Nashville!," he expects the whole city to ask
how high.

So how high did Nashville jump in those days? The city's position as a major
railroad conduit whisked most of the early century's leading lights through
town, from Caruso to Rudolph Valentino. For touring musicians after the war, it
was a can't-miss stop, since they'd likely have to pass through on their way
south. That brought a steady stream of outsiders through Nashville, creating
ample opportunities for musical cross-pollination with the hungry young
performers rising on Nashville's own chitlin circuit.

These forces tended to converge on Jefferson Street, the center of African
American culture in segregated Nashville at the time. The clubs were there or
close: the Del Morocco, the Club Baron (now the Jefferson Street Elks Lodge),
the New Era on Charlotte. Conveniently nearby was Brown's Hotel, the lodging of
choice for black musicians forbidden to stay in white-run establishments. It was
not uncommon for bands to play the swanky Plantation Club for white supper-club
audiences, then repair to Jefferson Street for late-night jam sessions and
hanging out.

Thus, at various stages in the development of Nashville's R&B scene, a visitor
could have seen Ike & Tina Turner or James Brown perform in an Exit/In-sized
club, or witnessed the meeting of jazz legend Charlie Parker and a young TSU
grad named Hank Crawford at the Del Morocco. Years later, Crawford would return
in triumph to play the East Nashville roller-rink Maceo's with his new boss, Ray
Charles, for whom he played baritone sax and later served as bandleader. At the
Del Morocco, bassist Billy Cox and guitarist "Jimmy" Hendrix gigged regularly,
and reportedly it was down the street at Club Baron that Hendrix had his famous
head-cutting match with the city's fieriest blues guitarist, Johnny Jones.

In the 1960s, Hendrix even made his very first TV appearance in Nashville, in
the house band on the short-lived WLAC-TV show Night Train. Hendrix was already
a vision of the future, even though he ducks, bobs and sways right in line with
the other musicians, members of Little Richard's road-honed band The Upsetters.
They back an R&B duo introduced as Buddy & Stacey, thin and limber as whips, who
do a hip-swiveling dance in high-waisted slacks of R-rated tightness. When the
Night Train episode screens as part of the Hall of Fame exhibit, sometime in
May, it will blow your mind that local TV was ever this cool.

Up to now, Nashville's homegrown R&B has been treated as a footnote--significant
mostly for its relationship to tangential figures such as Charles and Hendrix,
as well as its not inconsiderable influence on the blues-loving bands of the
British Invasion. The young Keith Richards ordered his American R&B sides from
Randy's Record Shop, the appliance store turned mail-order powerhouse once
located downtown. Not coincidentally, one track on an early Rolling Stones album
was a cover of "You Can Make It If You Try," a majestic single written by local
producer Ted Jarrett and sung with heartbreakingly fervent belief by Nashvillian
Gene Allison. The Beatles covered another Nashville R&B classic, Arthur
Alexander's "Anna (Go to Him)."
Yet as Night Train to Nashville proves, the diverse, dynamic and deeply felt R&B
coming out of Music City needed no gilding by association. The record's yeoman
producers, Daniel Cooper and Michael Gray, don't make a case for a "Nashville
sound" of R&B as defining as that created by country pickers and producers on
Music Row. Instead, they celebrate what Cooper calls "the sweep of the
dial"--the abundance of styles that collided at Nashville's crossroads. That
sweep includes not only music recorded in Nashville by visiting artists, such as
Etta James' classic Rocks the House live album, but music made by Nashvillians
outside the city limits.

The first disc covers up to 1960, a period when "black music" was marginalized
despite the growing popularity of rock 'n' roll. The diversity of sound and
styles is still striking. In contrast to the one-man-band spareness of Cecil
Gant's "Nashville Jumps," the track that follows, a zany man-vs.-vulture novelty
called "Buzzard Pie" by Rudy Green & His Orchestra, could pass for one of Louis
Jordan's brassy full-band romps.
Completely dissimilar, even from each other, are a pair of early-1950s singles
by the unjustly obscure Nashville vocalist Christine Kittrell. Possessed of a
deep, smoky voice of surprising flexibility, Kittrell could kiss off a no-good
lover on the chugging "L&N Special" with arm-swinging confidence, then pour on
the mournful vulnerability for an after-hours blues appropriately titled
"Sittin' Here Drinking."

With the entry of Motown, Atlantic and other R&B labels into the pop-music
mainstream, the tracks on Disc Two take on a more polished and adventurous feel,
the sound of the city's musicians breaking down boundaries of race, region and
genre. There are The Avons, two Nashville sisters and a schoolmate from Pearl
High School, whose summery "Since I Met You Baby" introduces some Southern grit
to Detroit's brand of buoyant girl-group pop. There is Joe Tex, the mighty Texan
soul singer who found his stride with white Nashville producer Buddy Killen. His
1965 single "I Want To (Do Everything for You)" amounts to two delicious minutes
of sweet, slow grinding and double-tracked cooing.
Perhaps most eye-opening is the visionary fusion of R&B and country that Night
Train to Nashville commemorates. Given a roomful of Music Row session pros, many
of them steeped in Southern blues and the deep-bottomed soul coming out of
Alabama's Muscle Shoals, a visiting belter like Ruth Brown could recut her own
"Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" and somehow top the original's spitfire
fury. The track gives ample room to a recurring Night Train MVP: the redoubtable
Jerry Kennedy, the guitarist and Mercury Records producer best known for country
acts like Jerry Lee Lewis and The Statler Brothers. Here, backing Brown, he
tears off a solo of equal parts twang and fatback, flanked on piano by none
other than Ray Stevens of "Ahab the Arab" fame. On another of the set's rowdiest
numbers, Peggy Scott & Jo Jo Benson's psychedelic 1969 workout "Soul Shake,"
you'll find Kennedy doinking an electric sitar like an amplified rubber band,
while around him an army of first-call country session players throws down.

In some ways, this Nashville seems less segregated musically than today's. On a
record like Joe Simon's magnificent "The Chokin' Kind," a Harlan Howard cut that
had been a hit for Waylon Jennings, a black soul singer and his white country
sidemen seem to relocate a shared language in the blues, a common ground that
lets everyone relax, settle in and stretch. From Simon's gently rumbling vocal
to Wayne Moss' river-deep bass line, the combination results in an almost
bottomless reservoir of feeling. "I've written some good songs and some hit
songs," Simon says in the liner notes, "but...I can feel the country songs so
much better."

There are hints that this sharing of idioms was leading places no one could have
predicted--a place beyond Nashville, beyond the South, beyond even the narrow
demarcations of "black" and "white" music. The proof is in the single biggest
hit to appear on Night Train to Nashville, a record local listeners will have
heard a million times yet never have connected to their hometown.

The song is "Sunny," a 1966 composition by Nashville native Bobby Hebb that has
become one of the most covered songs ever recorded. It was produced in a New
York City studio, and yet, as Hebb has readily admitted, it's a synthesis of the
many influences he absorbed during his youth in Music City. As members of a
large local family of entertainers, Hebb and his older brother Harold had sung
and danced at Nashville's Bijou Theater, a major downtown venue for African
American variety acts. Yet Hebb had also been handpicked by none other than Roy
Acuff to play spoons and other instruments in Acuff's band The Smoky Mountain
Boys, which he did well into the 1950s.

The circumstances that created "Sunny" were anything but. Vietnam was looming,
and the tensions of the civil rights era seethed. On top of that came a
devastating double blow of national and personal tragedy. According to Gray's
liner notes, on Nov. 23, 1963, as the nation mourned President John F. Kennedy's
assassination the day before, Harold Hebb was knifed to death outside Club Baron
on Jefferson Street. "All of my intentions were just to think of happier times,"
Hebb said, "basically looking for a brighter day, because times were at low
tide."

Indeed, what makes "Sunny" a strange and beautiful single is that it refuses to
commit itself to any mood besides a cautious, fearful, but inextinguishable
optimism. It's less about sunshine, in whatever metaphorical sense, than about
the promise of sun when only darkness is visible. Hebb sings with mounting
intensity, as if to convince himself. The tentative melody, with its sudden
fluctuations, adapts readily to country or R&B, and yet it doesn't really
conform to either. The ominous vamp and ghostly vibes that wind through the song
resemble nothing so much as the James Bond theme. The mixture proved so
haunting, though, that it became a crossover smash. The next thing Bobby Hebb
knew, he was opening for The Beatles. The dandelion seeds of Nashville R&B had
scattered around the world and spread.

For all the joy and high spirits captured on Night Train to Nashville, a
lingering melancholy seeps in as well. It isn't just confined to "Sunny." For
the most part, the music's beauty and exuberance hold hard times at bay.
Sometimes the songs just give in, as on the evergreen "Just Walkin' in the
Rain," a despondent 1953 doo-wop ballad of unearthly loveliness. It was a major
hit for The Prisonaires, a group of Tennessee State Prison inmates for whom
singing was essentially a work-release program. In the liner notes, Bobby Hebb
wonders if "Sunny" wasn't just expressing the same sentiment as "Just Walkin' in
the Rain," only from another point of view.

Where "Sunny" and "The Chokin' Kind" might have led, for other Nashville R&B
artists, we'll never know. The city's R&B scene was crippled by the onslaught of
urban renewal and the building of I-40, which severed the artery of the
Jefferson Street scene. Clubs closed. The Del Morocco was razed. The Bijou
Theater was demolished to make way for Municipal Auditorium. At the same time,
R&B as a genre was fading as the flag of funk was raised. Soul artists continued
to make records in Nashville, but the vitality of the city's R&B scene greatly
diminished.

Even WLAC, which had done so much to change American pop culture from its
hardscrabble perch in Nashville, eventually phased out all but its late-night
gospel show. Today, that too is gone. The station that once broadcast the late
Hoss Allen's good-natured, all-embracing call to a colorblind America now hosts
Rush Limbaugh.
Ironically, as our R&B history has receded from view, and country has become our
sole identity to the rest of the world, Nashville's insecurity about its
hillbilly roots has only intensified. Apparently nobody realized that, to much
of the world, R&B was the urban complement to our rural tradition. Like the
down-home hybrid of "The Chokin' Kind," the two added up to a greater whole, a
city of bright lights and back porches, a city with room and possibility for
all. One wonders what would already have happened with Nashville's rap and
hip-hop communities if they had had the foundation of a thriving urban-music
industry to build upon. Or just the access to that history.

For the Country Music Hall of Fame, then, to train its vast resources on
Nashville's rhythm-and-blues legacy has enormous symbolic weight. So does the
Hall of Fame's decision not to open its mammoth 18-month exhibit until March,
immediately after Black History Month. Both gestures say that this is not "black
history." This is our history. To hear Night Train to Nashville, to hear Cecil
Gant jump and Christine Kittrell wail, to hear Little Richard yelp like a madman
on a riotous WLAC commercial for Royal Crown pomade, to hear the Prisonaires
sing as if emotion could melt bars, is to realize this is a richer, fuller, more
wondrous city than we often allow ourselves to believe. It is up to us only to
believe it.

Fittingly, Night Train to Nashville ends with that most jubilant of pop singles,
a paean to earthly and celestial love that has been covered by everyone from
Gloria Estefan to U2. It was written and produced by two white Nashville rock
'n' rollers, Buzz Cason and Mac Gayden, and it was delivered as if it were the
most urgent message in the world by a Franklin-born singer named Robert Knight.
The message is no less profound for being simple: "From the very start / Open up
your heart / Be a lasting part of / Everlasting love."

Words to live by.

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