Memphis Mayhem by David A. Less

Author:David A. Less
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

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There must be something about old men and their recliners. Just as Nate Evans’s recliner seemed to envelop him, Thomas Pinkston wore his chair like a comfortable jacket. Both men had been integral to certain aspects of Memphis music. Interviewing them in the same year helped me understand Wexler’s conflation that “a Jew ain’t nothing but a nigger inside out.”

From an early age, I had a passion for African American culture and music that matured in the late 1960s during the vogue of black hipness. In the mid-1970s, I began researching Memphis music under a Younger Scholars grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. There was scant information available, and most of the work that had been done earlier focused on blues music and rural areas surrounding Memphis.

Naturally, the opportunity to interview a member of W.C. Handy’s Memphis band was exciting. Thomas Pinkston was bright, articulate, and had a wealth of information about his fellow members in the band. He told me stories about Beale Street and the music made there. Then the conversation changed from music to race. His views on race and politics were unconventional, to say the least.

“Mr. Handy told me once, ‘Let nobody fool you. With all the strikes against you, the United States is the greatest place in the world for anybody.’” Pinkston sat up in his chair as he spoke to me. “We got the Ku Klux killing us. Why don’t we go back to Africa? . . . I’m glad they brought my ancestry over here, because I’ve acquired your ways of living, your knowledge, and everything. Just to think, I’d be sitting up over in Africa barefooted with that diaper on, eating a banana hollering ‘boola boola’ if they’d left me in Africa.”

His voice rose as he made his point. “But since they brought my ancestors to this country, I’m quite proud. Because the American white man and the American Negro are two of the most respected figures on Earth. Ain’t nobody beat the United States doing nothing. They might try. I’m grateful for them bringing me over. I’ll tell you like I told a bunch of Jews out there. I don’t know whether you’re Jewish.”

I replied that I was Jewish.

“They talk about Jews and the niggers. They can say what they want about us, but we are the backbone of this country.”6

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