Sam Myers, The Blues is my Story Page 9

  Orleans in 1984 during the World’s Fair, doing some work for the

  state of Mississippi as one of the representatives of the entertainment department. Since I had to get a leave of absence from my job to go do these gigs, I’d have someone from the head office to contact the people at the plant and give me a letter of recommendation to go do these

  things, and everything would work out fine. Whenever I got ready to

  leave, I always was able to just go into what I wanted to do. The manager told me, “You can just go when you want to,” but I told him it’s always best to get permission before you do anything.

  The last time I was there at the factory, I was making nine hun-

  dred dollars a week from the World’s Fair, cash money, and I wasn’t

  working as long or as hard. When I came back to work, there was a

  big write-up in the paper about me with a picture of the work that I did at the World’s Fair. Then I made a commercial on TV about the

  Mississippi travel ticket, as to when you go to the World’s Fair you should always travel through Mississippi. From the way it was set up, regardless to where you were coming from, going to New Orleans

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  J A C K S O N , M I S S I S S I P P I

  from the east, you would have to come through Mississippi. After

  I made that TV thing, people got to seeing it. The little kids on the street, I’d be walking, and they’d say, “Oh, we saw you on TV!” I’d say,

  “Oh, really?” and they’d say, “Yeah, ‘It’s a Treat to Even Sleep in the Mississippi Sun,’ ha ha ha!” and they’d be laughing like I did on the commercial. And I’d say, “Oh, yeah!” That made me feel good, that

  people who didn’t even know me would always come up doing that. I

  had felt like I had done something for somebody.

  During the World’s Fair, I had a week’s break and fl ew out to

  Dallas to do a recording session with Anson Funderburgh. That

  album, My Love Is Here to Stay, on the Black Top record label, was my first one with Anson. So after I did that, I went back to New Orleans and worked some more for the Mississippi Expo at the World’s Fair. I got to thinking, since I had finished up that Sunday and it had been a while since I rode a train, I took the train back home to Jackson and went to work that Monday morning. People were looking at all this

  stuff in the paper about me. And you know how people will be talking on the job, “Well, this guy is traveling more than the people that work in the offices here, he’s doing this, he’s doing that, he’s doing better than the rest of us.” And they got to talking that around the area where I worked at. I didn’t want to hear stuff like that, so what I did, and it was the wrong thing to do, but I did it anyway. I quit. I didn’t even let the people in the office know I was leaving.

  I caught the Greyhound bus that night and went back to New

  Orleans and then worked the whole season of the World’s Fair out

  down there. My supervisor at that time said, “Man, if you’re gonna

  leave, you should tell somebody something.” I said, “I’m not letting anybody know a damn thing,” just like that. Course, I was making

  more money doing what I was doing at the World’s Fair, but when

  that ran out, that wasn’t what I was thinking about. The idea was

  just making that money. So I got paid for this recording session with

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  J A C K S O N , M I S S I S S I P P I

  Anson, and then I came back to Jackson and started doing some of the same stuff I usually did around there, playing in different clubs and doing more stuff musically.

  Anson had heard of my work from a long time back, in 1982. They

  were playing a club in Jackson called the George Street Grocery. It

  was a grocery store at one time, and then it was converted into a club.

  The upstairs part used to be a warehouse for the store. They built a restaurant and bar downstairs and just a bar upstairs. That’s where the music would be. When Anson and the boys came through to play, I

  happened to be in town, and I went out and sat in with them, and we

  hit it off from that. He asked me about joining the group in April 1986, and that’s where I’ve been since.

  I didn’t look for it to last as long as it has. But I look at it like, hey, you know, at age seventy, if a man don’t know what he wants to do in this time, there’s no need of him being here. I’d like for my opinion or my ideas to be heard whether there’s anything did about them or

  not. I always believe in doing things that makes me happy. My motto

  that I live by, if you don’t do the things that makes you happy, you’re not doing a thing except making yourself miserable and the people

  around you miserable. That’s a sad gathering there, I think.

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  C H A P T E R 8

  JACKSON RADIO

  AND RECORDING

  In the mid-1950s the music scene in Jackson, Mississippi, was thriving.

  Black culture was centered on what is now known as the Farish Street Historical District. It took its name from a former slave, Walter Farish, who had settled at the corner of what became Farish and Davis streets.

  Blues music had long been an important part of Jackson’s history, beginning with furniture store owner H. C. Speir, who moved his business onto Farish Street in 1925. Speir was interested in music and scouted for local talent. In those days, furniture stores sold record players, and their owners sometimes promoted local artists as an inducement for people to buy the record players. Speir ran a sideline business making test recordings; he made several of some now famous blues artists such as Ishmon Bracey, Tommy Johnson, Charley Patton, and Skip James. He provided the means and connections to have their songs recorded by Victor and Paramount after they auditioned for him in his furniture store. He similarly assisted with the early careers of Willie Brown, Son House, and Robert Johnson by recommending them to labels like Vocalion. Speir closed down his music business in 1944 during the musician union’s strike against the major record companies.

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  J A C K S O N R A D I O A N D R E C O R D I N G

  Speir was soon followed by Willard and Lillian McMurry. The young couple started the Trumpet record label in 1949, recording mostly gospel music until Sonny Boy Williamson II (Rice Miller) joined the label. His great popularity paved the way for other blues artists of the day to record at Trumpet. Also on the label was Elmore James, who later would sometimes be backed by a young drummer named Sammy Myers (Sam did

  not play on any of James’s Trumpet sides).

  Another person of stature in the Jackson music world was Johnny

  Vincent. He would also influence Sam’s career, though not in the way that Sam would have preferred. Vincent did engineering work for

  Trumpet and started his own label, Ace Records, in 1955. He leased masters of recordings by Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson II from Trumpet and rereleased them on the Ace label. Vincent went on to discover and record a number of other popular blues, R&B, and country and western artists of the era. Sam recorded his most famous single,

  “Sleeping in the Ground,” for Ace in December 1956.

  Jackson also boasted the oldest black radio station in the state, WOKJ. Sam resumed his radio career there in 1956.

  In Jackson, Mississippi, I was a disc jockey at WOKJ radio. We would play from record players, and a guy would set up a mic so you would

  have a speaker that you could hear as you went along. That’s why it

  was so easy for me to be as active as I was in radio. I never did do any news or stuff like that; that was the hardest part, back during that time, to read the news. There were a whole lot of guys who were top

  disc jockeys that didn’t do the news. They always had somebody else

  to do it, on the hour or five minutes before the hour. Nine times out of ten, the person who did
the news would be the person whose next

  show was coming up, unless the next person’s show lasted past the

  hour. Course, they could have a person from the newsroom to do it,

  and sometimes the engineerman would do it. Most of the radio back

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  J A C K S O N R A D I O A N D R E C O R D I N G

  then was just like working on a job where you did your work manu-

  ally. You were your own engineerman, you’d spin your records, and

  you operated everything yourself. Now, the commercials that I did, a lot of them were in Braille. I did most of my reading from Braille, but I still had the same time period to do certain things like anybody else would, like stopping to make an announcement between songs.

  The guy that owned the station where I worked at, John

  McLendon, he had about four radio stations. The one I worked at was

  WOKJ in Jackson, Mississippi, the first black radio station in the state.

  It started off in 1947 with five thousand watts of power, and then it went to fifty thousand. It was on the dial at 1590 when they started, then in 1965 it moved to 1550 when they went to fifty thousand watts. Amongst the DJs that they had at that time that I worked real close with was a gentleman from Vicksburg, Mississippi, named Bruce Payne. He had

  been working in Birmingham, Alabama, at one of their sister stations, the main one, WENN. It’s called “WIN Radio.” All these stations were connected with what was called the “Ebony Network.” They also had

  KOKY in Little Rock, Arkansas, and KOKA in Shreveport, Louisiana.

  Later on, they opened a station in Tampa, Florida, WYOU.

  That all happened from 1954 to 1955, along back during the time

  when I was still in Chicago. I came to work there at WOKJ in April ’56, after I moved back to Jackson. I was hired on as a DJ, but by me being a musician, they knew that I would have gigs that I’d be doing on the Chittlin’ Circuit. So they gave me a time slot for my show where on

  the weekends, if I wanted to be off, I could be off. My regular thing was from Monday through Friday if I was in town. If they had a special event going on, like if it was football season, they’d have someone to do my show for me up until game time if I was away.

  At this time, I was working with King Mose and the Royal Rockers.

  I would come down to the station, and the guys would already be there.

  I played some songs with them on the air and did the announcing for

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  J A C K S O N R A D I O A N D R E C O R D I N G

  the band like when and where we would be performing. We didn’t have

  a sponsor at first. Then the show got so good that a supermarket sponsored us. It came to be a chain, but at first it was just one grocery store called the New Deal Supermarket. It was on the corner of Church and

  Farish streets in Jackson. They moved from that store years later into a bigger one. Down south of Jackson at Crystal Springs, on the way to New Orleans, they opened a new store. They built it from the ground

  up, a great big one. They were our sponsors for a long time.

  On Saturdays, the department of parks and recreation would put

  on a show from noon to about five in the evening. The whole Jackson

  scene of musicians, if they wanted to play on the radio, they came

  out to the College Park Auditorium. It was located in College Park

  off of Lynch Street, about three or four blocks west of Jackson State University. They would follow my portion of the show, which was

  on from nine-thirty until noon. They had another disc jockey, Jody

  Martin, who was called “the Tall Man.” He would be at the audito-

  rium getting ready to bring on the show from there. King Mose and

  the Royal Rockers didn’t come on until whenever I got there from the station, which was right down the street. When I’d sign off my show

  at twelve o’clock on Saturdays I would say, “Now through the remote

  facilities of WOKJ, we take you to the College Park Auditorium, where your announcer for the extravaganza for the next three hours will be your host, Jody Martin.” Then I’d switch the remote on, and he’d cut in and start talking and then bring up the first band.

  It was a great thing, being in radio. I enjoyed it just as much as I did playing music, simply because I learned one thing: as far as working equipment, you could be the greatest person out there to do that.

  You could tear down a transmitter and you could put it back together.

  You could be that good, but until you learned one thing that has to do with common courtesy and common knowledge, until you learn to

  talk to who you’re performing to, radio or musically, you haven’t done

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  nothing. Music can be played from now on, but if you’re the host at

  any function, a DJ or whatever, you haven’t done nothing until you’ve learned how to talk to your fellow man. That rode with me in a lot

  of ways. Even right today, when I’m on a stage with my band or with

  anybody else’s band that I’m working with, I feel that it’s important to involve whoever your audience is into what you’re doing. It makes them feel better, which a lot of musicians today you don’t find doing that.

  I did the DJ thing for about four or five years. About thirty-five or maybe forty years later, when I went back to Jackson after being with Anson for a long stretch, they gave me an honorary stone celebration thing. It’s a stone plaque with my likeness on it that they’re going to put in what’s called the “Walk of Fame” on Farish Street in Jackson. I was overwhelmed; it really made me feel good about having that happen. I was proud to see a couple of people that had gone into retirement, but they came out just for that day. These were people that I

  hardly even said anything to when I was in radio. You know, you do

  your show, “Hey, man, I’m outta here!” “All right, how ya doin’, we’ll see you around some, uh-huh.” People who you never just sat with and had a really long conversation. A lot of these people said even though they were all full-time professional DJs, they learned a lot from Sam Myers. It really made me feel good to know that. I don’t think they’ve put the plaque in the street yet, but that is a project that’s in the making. They even gave me a small copy of the plaque to hang on my wall.

  One guy who was honored that day is not alive. His name was

  Rice Miller, who a lot of people call Sonny Boy Williamson II. It was almost like they reopened the doors of the Trumpet record company,

  Miss Lillian McMurry’s company, where Sonny Boy had recorded a lot.

  They honored him on that day and then Dorothy Moore and myself.

  Miss Lillian’s daughter accepted the award for Sonny Boy. It really

  surprised me. She is a young woman now and probably has a family of

  her own. After the awards ceremony, I walked her out in front of the

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  theater and they were all taking pictures. She said, “You know, it seems like a dream, but I remember you.” I said, “It don’t seem that it was that long ago, I remember when you was a little girl, being up to the studio with your mother.” She said she could kind of remember that. I said,

  “I understand how over the years, things can stay with you.”

  It wasn’t all that unusual for a white woman to be running a stu-

  dio recording black musicians in Mississippi. There were a lot of guys that had studios and they had women working for them, but she had

  her own company and studio. Miss Lillian really did something for

  the music in Mississippi during that time. Even though she was the

  head person there, she had blacks and whites working for her. The

  late Johnny Vincent was one of her engineer
men. He had his own

  record store called Johnny’s Records. Even after he got his own label, Ace Records, he used to record a lot of his artists there at her studio.

  Musicians like Willie Love, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and a group

  called the Seven Sons, which was a gospel group, and a guy from over in Meridian, Sherman “Blues” Johnson. Most everybody in Mississippi

  recorded there. Little Milton didn’t record under his name there, but he was on a lot of the recording sessions that she did.

  In December of 1956, at 309 North Farish Street at the Trumpet

  recording company studio in Jackson, Mississippi, I did “Sleeping in the Ground” and “My Love Is Here to Stay.” Johnny Vincent was the

  engineerman of that session, and it went on his label, Ace Records.

  The number of that particular song was 536. I recorded it, and he paid me and the rest of the band twenty-five dollars apiece. That was the only money I ever got out of that song. No royalties, just the session fee. This is how the song went:

  I would rather see you

  Sleeping in the ground,

  I would rather see you

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  Sleeping in the ground

  Than to stay around here

  If you’re gonna put me down.

  Well, I give you all my money,

  Everything I own.

  Well, I give you all my money,

  Everything I own.

  Well, some day I’m gonna get lucky,

  And down the road you know I’m goin’.

  Well, I would rather see you

  Sleeping in the ground,

  Well, I would rather see you

  Sleeping in the ground

  Than to stay around here

  If you’re gonna put me down.

  You know I give you all my money,

  Yeah little girl, everything I own.

  Well, I give you all my money,

  Everything I own.

  Well, today I’m gonna get lucky,

  And down the road you know I’m goin’.

  [ 1956, words and music by Sam Myers]

  The people who played on it was King Mose Taylor on drums,

  Walter Berry was on piano. He later became a doctor and retired from the University Medical Center in Jackson. Walter Crowley, a brick