A Nickel And A Nail

"Oh I once had love
and plenty of money
But some way, somehow
You know I failed, yes I did
Now all, all I have
in my pocket, its a shame
All I can give account of
right now is a nickel and a nail..."

Born in Leno, Tennessee in 1939 Overten Vertis Wright was something of a musical prodigy, his professional gospel singing career began when he was just six years old at the Temple in Eads. Stints with other gospel acts such as The Jubilee Hummingbirds, The Spirit Of Memphis Quartet and the Harmony Echoes followed.

Possessed of a voice that Barney Hoskins memorably described as being like "Sam Cooke in terrible pain" O.V Wright was tempted from the path of gospel righteousness by Roosevelt Jamison.

Jamison was a remarkable man. Starting as a mere orderly in the City of Memphis hospital he managed to qualify as a medical technologist. To learn what he needed Roosevelt attended the lectures of Dr L.W. Diggs working as his slide projectionist since segregation at the University of Tennessee made it impossible for him, as a black man, to be a student there.

At one time Jamison had harboured ambitions as a singer but decided concentrated on songwriting and managing gospel acts instead as friends had told him his timing wasn't good.

One of the acts he was involved in was The Harmony Echoes which featured both James Carr and O.V. Wright as vocalists.

Jamison recalled in a 1988 copy of Soul Survivor magazine:"O.V. was very concentrative. He would think about a single note or phrase for a long time and note arrangements aloud... O.V. worked on perfection. He used to like spending hours at the piano hitting notes and trying to reproduce them with his voice."

Wright who in addition to gospel singing was working as a garbage man at this time and wanted to break into R&B field, where he saw an opportunity for commercial success.

In 1963 Jamison, who was married with a child, had fallen in love with a nurse who worked at the same hospital as him:

"One day we were sitting at a little drive-in place where we would all go and get sandwiches and things and the moon was shining bright, and I just started messing with this poem about how I roamed the prairies, searched the universe, trying to find ways to express just how strong my love is." (Sweet Soul Music Peter Guralnick)

This poem would form the basis of Wright's first hit on the tiny Goldwax label but not before Jamison had tried to pitching it to Memphis' big R&B label Stax.

"Well y'know, I had written this song and I wanted to find out if there was any interest in it, so I brought it to Stax. Steve Cropper was there when I walked in and I showed him the song I had written on paper. He asked me to sing it if I could, but I found it difficult without any musical accompaniment. So Steve began plunking on the piano while I sang onto a tape machine." Jamison recalled (Soul Survivor number 9 Summer 1988).

Jim Stewart, head of Stax apparently passed on the song believing it too gospel and so Jaminson turned up one night at Goldwax founders Quinton Claunch's place;

"I heard a knock on my door at about ten o'clock and found Roosevelt Jamison, James Carr and O.V. Wright standing there. They had this little portable recorder so we sat right down on the floor and listened to some tapes. Both of them just knocked me out, and I made moves to sign 'em on the spot" said Claunch. (Say It One Time For The Brokenhearted Barney Hoskins).

Claunch didn't much care for the That's How Strong My Love Is either:

" I brought a tape of that song to Quinton's house and played it for them but they didn't really care too much for it. The song that they were interested in was There Goes My Used To Be. When the single was released, That's How Strong My Love Is was the B-side and There Goes My Used To Be was on the A-side. When the D.J. 's got it they preferred the B-side and played it instead." recalled Jamison.(Soul Survivor)

At about the same time Stax ,despite their purported lack of interest in the song, decided to cut That's How Strong My Love Is with their biggest star, Otis Redding.

Jamison says "My understanding is that later, while they were working on an Otis Redding session, Steve brought out this song. Otis liked it and wanted to record it. When they went to cut the song, they found it wasn't long enough. They tried to get in touch with, me but couldn't reach me, so Steve came up with a little sketch at the end that went something like: "I'd be the ocean, so deep and wide / To catch all your tears whenever you cried." I had nothing at all to do with that particular verse. I wasn't even aware that Otis was cutting the song until after it was released. If I had known, I would've supplied them numerous other verses..."(Soul Survivor)

DJ A.C. Williams, known as "Moohaw" , at WDIA in Memphis suggested to Stax that Otis' single be flipped to plug Mr.Pitiful in order to give O.V.'Wright's version a chance to break.

A more serious problem came in the shape of Peacock Records owner Don Robey.

Robey, a Texan, owned the Memphis gospel label Duke to which The Sunset Travellers were signed when O.V. Wright had sang with them. Wright did not believe the contract included his work as a solo artist but Robey felt differently. Goldwax owners came to a deal whereby they retained the rights to the hit single That's How Strong My Love Is but surrendered any claims to the artist O.V. Wright.

Speaking to Tim Perlich for Soul Survivor magazine in 1988 Roosevelt Jamison said:

“Y'know, personally, I doubt that any such contract between O.V. and Don Robey ever existed. If there was, I never saw it. That was only part of the reason why O.V. left Goldwax though. O.V. had an engagement to do a show in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for some local D.J. named Dickie Doo, but Quinton Claunch refused to give us the money for gas to get there. Ricky Sanders, Earl Forrest and I went with O.V. and did the show anyway, but after that incident O.V. went straight to Texas.”

Jamison stayed with Goldwax and he and Wright never worked together again:

"Me and O.V. shook hands, and O.V. told me if I ever wanted to go with him, and leave all this other stuff alone, I could have fifty percent of his salary. But I never did do that" (Sweet Soul Music Peter Guralnick).

So in 1966 Robey put O.V.Wright on his new R&B label, Back Beat, and, in a stroke of genius, assigned Willie Mitchell to produce him.

From Ashland Mississippi, Willie Mitchell was a music man through and through. Whilst at school Mitchell had become a trumpet player and played on early B.B. King sides.When drafted into the army, in 1950, he had a job DJing for Special Services and subsequently worked with Vic Damone's 18 piece road band.

From the middle of the fifties he had settled in Memphis and his band ,which had a residency at The Plantation Inn, was the acme of cool. Mitchell was also a face on the recording scene A&Ring, producing and arranging for a variety of Memphis' independant labels including most famously for Hi Records.

Mitchell had a vision which he articulated thus:

"I wanted to cut a record that would sell black and white, combine the two, you know in a pleasant kind of music. With O.V. Wright and Bobby Bland (who Robey had also brought to Mitchell to work his production magic on), their style was too strong in one direction, it was too rough. I wanted to add more class to it. O.V.'s music was a little more laid back; Bobbys had a little more spark to it. But I was trying to get a combination of the two" (Sweet Soul Music Peter Guralnick)

In his autobiography Take Me To The River Al Green, with whom Mitchell would most profitably realise this vision says of Mitchell :

"He was by inclination, a jazzman, given to a smooth uptown instrumental sound that made the most out of every note. By trade however he had become familiar with the stompin', shoutin' dance floor rattlin' style of cut loose R&B"

This is not to say that the records Mitchell cut with Wright were not a success. Commercially the sides Mitchell cut with Wright at Back Beat, such as Eight Men and Four Women and You're Gonna Make Me Cry, were hits. Artistically they and others like, say, Lets Straighten It Out or A Nickel and a Nail represent something of a high water mark in Southern Soul.

Wright recorded with Mitchell at Hi records for much of the seventies but drug abuse took its toll and in November 1980 aged just 41 Wright died of a heart attack.

Wright had never been careful with money as his brother Eddie Lewis said: "O.V. went to the top, he had some of the greater things. I thought he would settle down and take some of the money where it would keep coming back to him. He didn't. He just wanted diamonds and fast cars." (Sweet Soul Music Peter Guralnick)

Willie Mitchell paid for a funeral and the gravestone was supposed to be covered by insurance, but somehow it just never came through so O.V. Wright lay in an unmarked grave at New Park Cemetery.

On the 9th March this year Preston Lauterbach of the excellent Back Roads Of American Music blog posted to the Southern Soul Group that anonymous soul fans had placed a marker on James Carr's grave at the same cemetery.

Preston's comment: "Hopefully the same group has some love and a little more dough for O.V. Wright who still lies in an unmarked grave nearly 30 years after his premature death." spurred the group into action with people asking how they can help mark the resting place of this great artist.

So Preston, Red Kelly (of the awesome B -Side blog ) and Southern Soul Group member Ricky Stevens joined forces to make this dream a reality by establishing The O.V. Wright Memorial Fund.

You can donate to this fund via PayPal (or any credit card) by visiting either The B- side, Backroads or clicking the image in the sidebar here.

UPDATE (from Red Kelly and the O.V. Wright Memorial Fund)
Just a note to let you know that we have set up a home page for The O.V. Wright Memorial Fund: http://www.ovwright.org/
Hopefully it will provide all of us with a central location for news and updates on our joint project, as well as an easier URL
to direct potential contributors to in the future.
We would also like to acknowledge thodse who have donated already (that would be you) on the site, however we didn't want
to do it without your permission. If you'd rather we didn't print your name, please let us know.
Those of you with 'blogs' and websites, we will be linking to you as well... so if you have any cool sidebar images or anything to send us, we'll definitely use them...
Together we can do anything.
Thanks again!

Ain't Am Clean?

A moment from the Wattstax festival:

As Larry Shaw, vice president of advertising and publicity at Stax Records and assistant director of the movie version of Wattstax, gazes out across the Los Angeles Coliseum his face is etched with anxiety. To protect the Los Angeles Rams’ pitch the grass is off limits to the reported 112,000, largely African American, crowd packed into the stadium. Yet, despite security being provided by three black organisations (The Watts festival, The Sons Of Watts and the Watts Rangers) people are flooding onto the pitch.

Seven years earlier, in August 1965, Watts had seen an African American uprising during which the L.A. district had been engulfed by flames for five days. That day, in 1972, as the August sun once more beat down, Shaw must have wondered if this “rare opportunity that lets you do something corporately valuable without being guilty of exploitation” that he had written of in the press release was about to turn ugly.

The difference between triumph and disaster is a small fifty-five year old showbiz veteran in a fuchsia pink safari jacket and short pants … The Prince of Dance, the funkiest man alive, the world’s oldest teenager: Mr Rufus Thomas!

Since 1965 all Stax notepaper had borne the legend The Memphis Sound. Thomas, as much as anyone, had helped conceive the sound of Memphis providing the first sizable hit not only for Stax records but also, in 1953, for Sam Phillips fledgling Sun label.

Billing himself as Rufus ‘Hound Dog’ Thomas Jr, Sam Phillips' legendary label enjoyed its first chart success with Bear Cat – a fun answer record to Big Mama Thornton’s classic Hound Dog.

“Me and Sam Phillips? We were tighter than the nuts on Brooklyn Bridge – then.” Thomas told Peter Guralnick in Lost Highway.

Fun though it was Bear Cat prompted a lawsuit from Don Robey owner of Peacock Records which had released Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog a month earlier and Sam Phillips was obliged to part with a substantial sum of money to appease Robey.

The following year Presley hit his stride and it marked the end of Thomas’ recording career at Sun:

“When Presley and Carl Perkins and Cash came along just like he (Phillips) catered to black, he just cut it off and went to white.” Thomas remembered (Lost Highway: Peter Guralnick)

Thomas’ roots in Memphis show business ran deep though. He had worked tent shows with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels in 1936:

“I started actually as a tap dancer. That’s how my good timing came about. I was a tap dancer and I used to do some scat singing like Louis (Armstrong), you know all those kind of things. Really I did it all. If it came under the heading of show business I did it.”(Lost Highway: Peter Guralnick).

In the 1940s Thomas hosted the now legendary Amateur Show at the Palace Theatre on Beale Street. Tenor Sax player Herman Green of the Palace Theatre house band recalls:

“Rufus had a partner called ‘Bones’ and they would warm up the audience with an act called ‘Rufus and Bones’. They were kind of a black Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, with Rufus doing the straight lines and ‘Bones’ doing all kinds of crazy things.” (Waking Up In Memphis: Andria Lisle and Mike Evans)

After eleven years, and having witnessed most of the major players in black music at that time take the stage, Thomas left Amateur Hour in a dispute over money:

“I wanted more but I couldn’t get Bones to go ask for it with me. So the man got with Bones and asked him would he work with someone else…he said yes and I got fired.”(Lost Highway: Peter Guralnick).

Still Thomas had other irons in the fire including hosting another amateur show at the Handy Theatre, still with Bones, and perhaps more significantly broadcasting on WDIA The Mother Station of the Negroes.

In 1948 WDIA had introduced a policy of all black announcers playing mostly black music. A 1952 survey showed “that radios, once beyond the means of the average black family had become a standard appliance- in Memphis alone 93 per cent of black households owned a radio and 30 per cent owned two.” (Almost Grown: The Rise Of Rock James Miller).

It was in an attempt to reach that audience that Jim Stewart, head of Satellite (soon to be Stax) records first met Thomas in 1959 whilst pitching The Veltones Feel I’m In Love/ Someday at that point Satellites sole foray into R&B in a catalogue that included You Drive Me Crazy/Say Anything But Not Goodbye by Ray Scott who had authored Billy Lee Riley’s Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll.

In 1960 Jim Stewart leased the old Capitol Theatre on the corner of College and McLemore Ave in Memphis and set about converting it into a recording studio.

Rufus was amongst the first people to arrive at the new studio and brought with him a tape of Cause I Love You, a song that he had written and that he and his daughter Carla performed as a duet. Stewart liked it enough to record it with Booker T Jones on baritone sax and Marvell Thomas, Rufus' son, on piano.

Cause I Love You/Deep Down Inside was issued in 1960 and it forever changed the direction of Jim Stewart’s label and life.

Stewart recalled “Prior to that I had no knowledge of what black music was about. Never heard black music and never even had an inkling of what it was all about. It was like a blind man who suddenly gained his sight. You don’t want to go back, you don’t even look back.” (Soulsville USA Rob Bowman).

Previous Satellite releases had met with indifference but this one actually sold. Indeed it sold well enough to bring Satellite to the attention of Jerry Wexler who leased the track for Atlantic records pop subsidiary Atco and led to a deal whereby Atlantic acquired first refusal on distribution rights for ALL Satellite, and later Stax, recordings.

In 1963 Thomas delivered the track that would set the template for the rest of his career. The Dog was a dance craze record and was quickly followed by Walking The Dog and Somebody Stole My Dog. Although these had all been reasonable sized hits, by 1969 Thomas could have been forgiven for feeling a little neglected at Stax. As Rob Bowman notes in Soulsville USA: “ He had not been invited to go on the Stax /Volt tour of Europe in 1967, he was not asked to perform on the labels 1969 television special and his album, May I Have Your Ticket Please was not finished for the big LP push of spring 1969. He felt that many in the company did not take him seriously as an artist.”

In December of 1969, however, Thomas was put together with the producer Tom Nixon, whom Stax had recently recruited, and immediately the partnership hit with Funky Chicken. This was another dance craze record and the first in a series of records that saw the Nixon/ Thomas partnership chart six times. As Dean Rudland points out in his sleeve notes to The Funkiest Man, at fifty-three, Thomas was ”on the hottest streak of his career”.

It was this recent career revival that ensured Thomas’ presence at Wattstax . . .

When the crowd first start trailing onto the pitch at the end of Breakdown, Thomas lightly remonstrates with them:

“I don’t want nobody on the field – not yet. When I tell you to get on the field then you get on the field and I just might get on the field with you.”

Thomas then goes into the aforementioned Funky Chicken beginning:

“Y'all come on in now
Come right on down front
I got something I want to show you”

Maybe people take this to be the invitation that Thomas had teased them with because what had been a trickle of people turns into flood.

Al Bell, who by 1972 was effectively running Stax records and was the most senior label executive present at Wattstax, recalls:

“The only time I became concerned was when they started coming over the fences and coming out on the field because I didn’t know what that could possibly result in. And Shaw was concerned. I expressed it to Shaw, I said ‘Shaw I’m concerned right here, but the only way were going to get these people off this field is Rufus Thomas. Because Rufus Thomas can control the crowd so you (Larry Shaw) gotta go out there and tell Rufus to talk these people back off this field ‘cause he can do that or we’re gonna have to close the show down.”(Wattstax DVD commentary)

This is exactly what Shaw does, then tensely watchs, as Thomas begins. The music stops and a little hesitantly at first Thomas starts rapping: “Power to the people, let's go to the stands…” some in the stands echo him but it seems distant and half hearted. Nevertheless, the crowd on the pitch is starting to thin. Thomas spots a man waving an inside-out umbrella, more an act of high spirits than a threat, and spotlights him “He don’t mean to be mean he just wants to be seen” he mocks. It turns into a routine “Yeah that’s a brother alright, but I be damned if he be my brother”. Umbrella Man is now alone on the grass mugging trying to extend his moment, but it’s gone and only he doesn’t know it. Thomas has won the crowd, “Now y’all get him off” he orders and once more people flood the pitch but only to jostle Thomas’ anonymous stooge off the grass so the show can go on.

It’s the work of a master and, I suspect, a glimpse of Thomas the tent show minstrel. Only somebody drawing from a deep well of experience could have played a crowd so effectively.

As Al Bell says in his commentary to the DVD edition of Wattstax

“We could always be certain that when Rufus Thomas hit the stage as they say, quote, that he was gonna get the house and he got the house at Wattstax. I mean did he ever get the house at Wattstax! Get the house and control the crowd.”

After Wattstax things were never the same at Stax and the company collapsed in 1975.

Thomas recorded irregularly after the demise of Stax.

1996 saw a sort of bringing together of his two great dance craze songs when he recorded Chicken Dog with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Its hard to believe, when listening to this track, that the former Rabbits Foot Minstral and oldest living teenager was 79 at the time of recording particularly when you hear, right at the start of the track, Thomas leering “I know where I’m going now”.

On 15^th December 2001 at St Francis Hospital, Memphis, Rufus Thomas died of heart failure and with him a whole tradition of entertainment.

Further reading here.

In deference to the season you can listen to Rufus Thomas' I'll Be Your Santa, Baby here.

Happy Christmas.