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Authors: Alan Lightman
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we ate, because that would make her like a guest at the table. When my mother wanted something, she rang a small brass bell. Blanche would come hurrying through the swinging door, ready to serve another helping of mashed potatoes or fill up the glasses with more iced tea. Years later, after both Blanche and my mother had passed away, I inherited that brass bell. Its handle consists of the figure of an old woman sitting with her legs crossed, wearing a supplicant’s cloak and holding out her hand for alms. In my youth, the sound of that bell was pure music. Now it cuts like a knife.
“Sex Written All over Him”
When I was fourteen or fifteen, I would climb out of my dormer window at night, quietly creep down the sloping roof in the dark, leap to the pecan tree next to the house, and shimmy down to the ground. Then I would walk up Cherry to Poplar and catch a bus to a coffeehouse called the Bitter Lemon. There I would meet my friend Joel, who had also made a clandestine escape from his family.
The Bitter Lemon was a little storefront on Poplar, in Midtown just east of the viaduct, so small you could fly past it on your way downtown. But it had live music, and you could hear real good rhythm and blues. Furry Lewis used to play at the Bitter Lemon. And Gus Cannon. Gus, who was around eighty years old by that time, had once made a banjo out of a frying pan and a raccoon skin and had a group called the Cannon Jug Stompers. It smelled of rich coffee and pizza, but not alcohol because this was a teenage joint. However, some guests came in already stoned, encouraged by the psychedelic paint on the ceilings and walls. This was the early to mid-1960s, and Beale Street was deceased. But you could feel Beale Street in the Bitter Lemon, you could feel a black trumpet player named William Christopher Handy, who wrote the first blues song in 1909, and later Gus Cannon, Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong, Memphis Minnie, Rufus Thomas, Howlin’ Wolf, and B.B. King, all of whom played at Beale Street clubs like the Daisy, Mitchell’s Lounge,and the Hippodrome. The Hippodrome was a made-over roller-skating rink. People rolled in one end of the building and jived to live music in the other. Beale Street had been the best and the worst of Memphis. Black churches, liquor stores, whorehouses, pawnshops, cheap hotels, and smoky clubs shared the pavement on Beale Street. Heroin was delivered on bicycles. But Beale Street produced new music for the world.
The pizza at the Bitter Lemon was terrible, but you could eat it if you washed it down with a concoction they called a Suicide—a deadly mix of Pepsi, Teem, and grape juice. The owner of the Lemon, a guy named John who wore Hawaiian shirts and who was reputed to be a professor at the Memphis Art Academy, would walk around serving Suicides and asking his stoned customers if they were having a “fine time.” Of course we were having a fine time. What could be finer for a fifteen-year-old kid than to sneak out of his house at night and listen to live soulful music while drinking Suicides and eating slices of godawful onion pizza?
Between sets, some of the customers turned on WDIA radio, the first all-black radio station in the country. WDIA played rhythm and blues and rock and roll. The most famous host of WDIA was Nat D. Williams, reverently referred to as “Nat Dee,” who ruled in the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to his two radio shows,
Coffee Club
at 6:30 a.m. and
Tan Town Jamboree
at 4:00 p.m., Nat Dee taught history at Booker T. Washington High School and wrote for the influential black newspaper
Tri-State Defender
. Nat Dee was proud to be a black man. He once boasted on the air: “I’m black, Jack, black as a hundred midnights in a cypress swamp.”
B.B. King also worked for WDIA in the 1940s. King was born in Mississippi and given the name Riley B. King. When he began laboring as a disc jockey and singer for WDIA, he was nicknamed “Beale Street Blues Boy,” soon shortened to B.B.He
“Sex Written All over Him”
When I was fourteen or fifteen, I would climb out of my dormer window at night, quietly creep down the sloping roof in the dark, leap to the pecan tree next to the house, and shimmy down to the ground. Then I would walk up Cherry to Poplar and catch a bus to a coffeehouse called the Bitter Lemon. There I would meet my friend Joel, who had also made a clandestine escape from his family.
The Bitter Lemon was a little storefront on Poplar, in Midtown just east of the viaduct, so small you could fly past it on your way downtown. But it had live music, and you could hear real good rhythm and blues. Furry Lewis used to play at the Bitter Lemon. And Gus Cannon. Gus, who was around eighty years old by that time, had once made a banjo out of a frying pan and a raccoon skin and had a group called the Cannon Jug Stompers. It smelled of rich coffee and pizza, but not alcohol because this was a teenage joint. However, some guests came in already stoned, encouraged by the psychedelic paint on the ceilings and walls. This was the early to mid-1960s, and Beale Street was deceased. But you could feel Beale Street in the Bitter Lemon, you could feel a black trumpet player named William Christopher Handy, who wrote the first blues song in 1909, and later Gus Cannon, Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong, Memphis Minnie, Rufus Thomas, Howlin’ Wolf, and B.B. King, all of whom played at Beale Street clubs like the Daisy, Mitchell’s Lounge,and the Hippodrome. The Hippodrome was a made-over roller-skating rink. People rolled in one end of the building and jived to live music in the other. Beale Street had been the best and the worst of Memphis. Black churches, liquor stores, whorehouses, pawnshops, cheap hotels, and smoky clubs shared the pavement on Beale Street. Heroin was delivered on bicycles. But Beale Street produced new music for the world.
The pizza at the Bitter Lemon was terrible, but you could eat it if you washed it down with a concoction they called a Suicide—a deadly mix of Pepsi, Teem, and grape juice. The owner of the Lemon, a guy named John who wore Hawaiian shirts and who was reputed to be a professor at the Memphis Art Academy, would walk around serving Suicides and asking his stoned customers if they were having a “fine time.” Of course we were having a fine time. What could be finer for a fifteen-year-old kid than to sneak out of his house at night and listen to live soulful music while drinking Suicides and eating slices of godawful onion pizza?
Between sets, some of the customers turned on WDIA radio, the first all-black radio station in the country. WDIA played rhythm and blues and rock and roll. The most famous host of WDIA was Nat D. Williams, reverently referred to as “Nat Dee,” who ruled in the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to his two radio shows,
Coffee Club
at 6:30 a.m. and
Tan Town Jamboree
at 4:00 p.m., Nat Dee taught history at Booker T. Washington High School and wrote for the influential black newspaper
Tri-State Defender
. Nat Dee was proud to be a black man. He once boasted on the air: “I’m black, Jack, black as a hundred midnights in a cypress swamp.”
B.B. King also worked for WDIA in the 1940s. King was born in Mississippi and given the name Riley B. King. When he began laboring as a disc jockey and singer for WDIA, he was nicknamed “Beale Street Blues Boy,” soon shortened to B.B.He
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