HIDDEN GEMS
Rufus Thomas
REMEMBER ME
East McLemore was a thoroughfare in an economically deteriorating neighborhood going from white to black. Here the straitlaced, enterprising white bank clerk and his sister gathered around them an unprecedented mix of musicians both black (Booker T. Jones, Lewis Steinberg, Curtis Green) and white (Chips Moman, Steve Cropper, Estelle Axton’s son Packy) to make records. Such a thing was unheard of in Memphis in 1960. Black blues and R & B had existed–and cross-pollinated–with white country music there for decades, but white and black musicians seldom appeared on the same stage; there was a fanatical underground of young white hipsters listening to R & B groups like the “5” Royales and the big bands of Ben Branch and Bowlegs Miller, but the club scene was strictly segregated and community leaders were issuing dire warnings to white parents about the “savage” influence “Negro records” were having on their children.
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Rufus Thomas was already a Memphis legend by the time he came to Satellite–soon to be Stax (for “Stewart” and “Axton”)–in 1960. A veteran of the southern minstrel-show circuit, he was an all-around entertainer–singer, comedian, dancer–as well as a popular local emcee and hip-talking deejay on WDAI; he’d cut “Bear Cat,” one of the great sides to come out of Sun Records, in 1953. He came to Satellite to cut a duet with his daughter, a jaunty little tune he’d written called “Cause I Love You.” It made some noise in the southern markets, and Carla soon returned to record “Gee Whiz,” her first solo effort, a musical adaptation of a poem she’d written while still a teenager. When “Gee Whiz” hit both the pop and R & B top-ten lists in early 1961, both Carla Thomas and the record company were on their way.
Aside from the chronological problems, this disk gives a fine portrait of Carla Thomas as both fledgling and mature soul artist. “I Wonder About Love” was one of several hits she wrote while still a teenager; the production is appropriately youthful and jaunty. Although Thomas was in college when she recorded this, it sounds for all the world as if a high school girl were singing it. “Little Boy,” also from the same early period, drips with prepubescent sentiment, yet “Goodbye My Love” (1961) is actually more forward-looking than some of her later sides (Packy Axton contributes a delightful yakkety-yak sax break in the middle).
Thomas, the old medicine-show trouper, could pull off the most outrageous clowning and never descend into Tom-ism. This is especially evident on “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” a paean to antebellum plantation life. Thomas (who’s quoted in the liner notes saying disingenuously “I just liked the song”) sings it in a nostalgic croon, complete with a churchy organ intro that eventually kicks into a funky groove. His stilted phrasing reveals the barbed irony underlying the entire project as he sings “There’s where I labor so hard for ol’ Master / Day after day in the fields of yellow corn / No other place on earth do I love so sincerely . . . ” Yeah, right.
