Unsung Heroes of Rock & Roll by Nick Tosches

Author:Nick Tosches [Tosches, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-07-07T11:28:37+00:00

Jackie Brenston

To the Package Store in Style

The exemplary Christian capitalist Sam C. Phillips, founding father of those great Memphis institutions of the 1950s, Sun Records and Holiday Inns, is said to have expressed the view that a certain 1951 recording (which, as co-incidence has it, was produced by him) was the first true rock-'n'-roll record ever made; and this notion from on high has been echoed by others. While it certainly is not the case - there being no first rock-'n'-roll record any more than there is any first modern novel - the fact remains that the record in question was possessed of a sound and a fury the sheer, utter newness of which set it apart from what had come before. In a way, it can be seen as a turning point, an embarking from the rock-'n'-roll of the 1940s towards a brave new world of pegged pants, filtered cigarettes, and Medalo Bops: "Rocket '88'" by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats.

Jackie Brenston was born on August 15, 1930, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the delta town where Highway 49 meets Highway 61. Since early in the century Clarksdale had been one of the most musically fertile places in the South. It was where Son House, Charley Patton, and Robert Johnson worked their wicked magic in jukejoints at the outskirts of town. (And where, according to House, Johnson literally sold his soul to the Devil one night, standing at the crossroad.) It was where Muddy Waters, who had grown up listening to and learning from those men, made some of his first recordings. It was where John Lee Hooker and Eddie Boyd were born.

Falsifying the date of his birth, Brenston enlisted in the Army in 1944. Returning to civilian life, and to Clarksdale (indeed, who, though he may travel the wide world over, can resist the allure of Fourth Street?), in 1947, he fell in with a local character named Jesse Flowers, who drank and played the saxophone. It was Flowers who aided Brenston in his quest to discover that instrument's most degraded possibilities. By the close of the decade Brenston, the proud owner of the shiniest secondhand saxophone in all of Coahoma County, had succeeded.

Entering at this point into the scheme of things was Isaiah Turner, an eighteen-year-old disc-jockey who had the shiniest suits in Clarksdale. He also had a band, in which he played piano and sometimes sang. He had seen Muddy Waters get out of Coahoma County and go on to make records - one of which, "Louisiana Blues," was now becoming a hit - for Chess. He saw no reason why he, a far sharper dresser than that former cotton picker, should not do the same. As 1950 became 1951, Ike Turner was ready to start making records. There was only one problem. His lead singer, Johnny O'Neal, had recently been signed by King Records, and he had run off, leaving the rest of the band to stand around picking lint from their suits on the corner of Fourth Street.

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