0:06 [SPEAKER_01]: Oh! 0:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Hello, yes sir, good to see you so full. 0:12 [SPEAKER_01]: I've said it by the one about, uh, got 10% of the size for the war, 24-8. 0:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Just flat fixing, bringing you the hottest scene in the country, real hot glue coming into W-H-B-Q. 0:21 [SPEAKER_01]: It's met between a scene and it's Friday night, tomorrow's paid in, bad day, that's a good scene. 0:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, sir, the first 50 minutes to real hot glue is coming into the currency of the best bear that might have been bought. 0:30 [SPEAKER_01]: We're talking about CV for me and CV for you. 0:33 [SPEAKER_01]: That champane velvet distributed by the mass security company right here, and they say, hey, hey, a Memphis. 0:38 [SPEAKER_01]: I don't forget. 0:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Fine, let's just flat wake up out there. 0:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Let's get ready. 0:42 [SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna start off first record here 0:47 [SPEAKER_02]: That's the voice of Doe Phillips, hosting his radio show called Red Hot and Blue on WHBQ, a Memphis Station. 0:56 [SPEAKER_02]: In the 1950s, more than 100,000 people listened to his prime time slot every day. 1:01 [SPEAKER_02]: If you couldn't make out what Doe was saying, don't feel bad, I had to listen to it a few times myself. 1:07 [SPEAKER_02]: But for Memphians of that era, Doe's frantic and crazed cadence was just part of the experience. 1:13 [SPEAKER_03]: Doe was a very popular radio DJ here in Memphis. 1:16 [SPEAKER_03]: He'd survived one of the worst battles of World War II, and he came back with an infetamine addiction and alcoholic and severe PTSD from this battle. 1:26 [SPEAKER_03]: And was another very eccentric Memphis character, as so many people that are on these walls were. 1:33 [SPEAKER_02]: That's the voice of Crocodile Hall, a tour guide and audio engineer at Sun Studio in Memphis. 1:39 [SPEAKER_02]: I visited Sun Studio recently, Crocodile and another tour guide Zoe Durian told me of stories about this building and its place in music history. 1:48 [SPEAKER_02]: Sun Studio was founded in 1950 by Sam Phillips, who is not related to Do We, by the way, in Marion Kaiser. 1:55 [SPEAKER_02]: It was the recording home of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, among others. 2:01 [SPEAKER_02]: Though doing never worked for Sun Studios, he was a relentless promoter of Sun Studio musicians. 2:07 [SPEAKER_02]: His energy and electric personality made him an icon in his field, and spite of the fact that he wasn't a trained radio DJ, in order to have a degree in broadcasting or communication. 2:17 [SPEAKER_03]: Dewey would go into a store called PopTunes and he would sit where they had these record players that you could test your record out and there was a microphone to call for assistance and you would play these records and then he would loudly just yell into the mic about which songs he liked and which ones he thought were trash. 2:32 [SPEAKER_03]: One day an ad guy walks in for WDIA and he says to he says to Dewey I think I have a show for you and he gets him 15 minutes and a show called Red Hotten Blue. 2:43 [SPEAKER_03]: And Dewey would have noisemakers in the studio. 2:46 [SPEAKER_03]: He would play two records at the same exact time of the same song, but they're playing wrong so they're out of phase. 2:53 [SPEAKER_03]: And that's just broadcasting over the airways. 2:56 [SPEAKER_03]: He was the man of almost a thousand voices. 2:58 [SPEAKER_03]: He's just constantly having an inner dialogue with himself, likely because of the impediments that he's on. 3:04 [SPEAKER_03]: And he was just a really incredible, also warmhearted person. 3:08 [SPEAKER_02]: Do we is the first person to ever play an Elvis song on the radio? 3:12 [SPEAKER_02]: He had a good relationship with Sam Phillips and Sam brought him a copy of Elvis, singing my happiness. 3:18 [SPEAKER_02]: That night, do we play that song over and over again? 3:21 [SPEAKER_02]: The biggest impact do we made though was connecting black musicians with son. 3:27 [SPEAKER_03]: Dewey is the missing link between why Sam was able to bring in a lot of the black musicians he was able to. 3:33 [SPEAKER_03]: At that moment in time, Bill Street was considered the black capital of the south. 3:36 [SPEAKER_03]: It was not a place like it is today where it's largely a tourist destination. 3:40 [SPEAKER_03]: You see people down there that are still playing their craft and playing incredible blues music. 3:45 [SPEAKER_03]: But it's a little bit different sort of vibe than it would have been in the fifties. 3:48 [SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't a place that white people went on now. 3:50 [SPEAKER_03]: Dewey was one of the few white people who would walk up and down Bill Street and go into these bars and see these bands. 3:55 [SPEAKER_03]: Sam knew and understood, given the time period, that if he wanted to record these artists, he needed an end so that they knew they were walking into a safe space, where they could also do their recording. 4:08 [SPEAKER_03]: So he, before he opens the studio, right around that same time, meets with Dui, and the lobby bar of the Peabody Hotel, an expressist to hand that he'd like to start recording these blues artists that Dui's playing on his show. 4:20 [SPEAKER_03]: and that he wants to help him with playing it on the airwaves as well as also if you've got bands you want to send my way, I'm open to record them. 4:34 [SPEAKER_02]: Sam was inspired by another recording studio I'm Memphis called Stax Records. 4:38 [SPEAKER_02]: Stax was an integrated studio that mainly produced soul and blues music. 4:43 [SPEAKER_02]: Otis writing the massively 4:50 [SPEAKER_03]: you also end up getting to see in places like Stack sort of the vision that Sam originally had for a place like this where now it's not a roster of white artists playing together and then black artists playing together, but you see the integration that they had over there with the bands like The Marquis and a number of the session players Steve Kropper who's an incredible guitarist that was playing on those records that he was written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter 5:18 [SPEAKER_02]: with Dewey's help, several black musicians got their started son. 5:23 [SPEAKER_04]: These people in a way kind of laid the foundation for that, because they provided the foot in the door when there wasn't during segregation. 5:33 [SPEAKER_04]: In regards to recording and putting music out on the radio, because back then radio was everything. 5:39 [SPEAKER_04]: Everybody had access to radio. 5:42 [SPEAKER_04]: Only wealthy people had access to TVs at that time. 5:45 [SPEAKER_04]: So when you think of radio, that was our Instagram, our Twitter, our Facebook, our news on the TV. 5:53 [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, my God. 5:53 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it was everything. 5:55 [SPEAKER_04]: So radio was so important at that time. 5:58 [SPEAKER_04]: So what they did really did kind of lay the foundation to kind of get people's 6:03 [SPEAKER_04]: foot in the door for things like y'all further learned about today with the 60s. 6:07 [SPEAKER_04]: They laid the foundation for the 60s to happen here in terms of like the civil rights and the rest of the country in many ways too. 6:14 [SPEAKER_03]: I mean that's happening in other places as well of course. 6:17 [SPEAKER_04]: Oh yeah. 6:17 [SPEAKER_04]: Because I mean you think Roscoe Gordon Jr. 6:19 [SPEAKER_04]: He recorded here. 6:20 [SPEAKER_04]: He's one of the founding godfathers of Reggae and Scott music. 6:24 [SPEAKER_04]: They would play his music on the radio in New Orleans and when the weather was just right, those airwaves would reach Jamaica. 6:31 [SPEAKER_04]: And he inspired the wailers, Lee Scratch Perry, Bob Marley, imagine a world without those people. 6:37 [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, Roscoe is another very interesting character. 6:40 [SPEAKER_03]: He had a pet rooster butch that he would take with him as the show finale. 6:44 [SPEAKER_03]: He would set a couple whiskey that butch would drink out of and he wouldn't end the show until butch fell over drunk. 6:49 [SPEAKER_03]: You said that he required here as well? 6:51 [SPEAKER_04]: He did. 6:52 [SPEAKER_04]: He's photographed with Sam right over there in that corner that's. 6:55 [SPEAKER_03]: And that's Rooster. 6:56 [SPEAKER_03]: That's Rooster. 6:57 [SPEAKER_03]: That's Rooster. 6:58 [SPEAKER_03]: Of which they were probably several. 7:00 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. 7:02 [SPEAKER_04]: Sam's very first hit that he got too. 7:04 [SPEAKER_04]: That was with Rooster Fist Thomas. 7:06 [SPEAKER_03]: That really... Joe Hill Lewis is playing guitar on Bearcat, which was an answer to Big Mama Thornton's Hound Dog, and Rufus didn't want to sing it. 7:13 [SPEAKER_03]: He said to Sam, what's a Bearcat? 7:14 [SPEAKER_03]: That's something that this isn't anything, but if Sam wrote the song, he got co-songwriter credit. 7:19 [SPEAKER_03]: Rufus is also an interesting character. 7:21 [SPEAKER_03]: He's one of the few people you hear with a negative... 7:24 [SPEAKER_03]: attitude towards Sam. 7:26 [SPEAKER_03]: He was very candid. 7:27 [SPEAKER_03]: He would come here and he knew the latter part of his life is known as the Mayor of Beale Street, if I remember correctly, and he was also called the world's oldest teenager. 7:35 [SPEAKER_03]: Rufus Thomas was, but he was critical of Sam. 7:38 [SPEAKER_03]: He felt as though after Sam made it big with Elvis that he neglected to focus on the blues artist that he had really made his way with. 7:46 [SPEAKER_03]: And it's a fairly justifiable criticism if you look at where his money was being spent, but he did continue to record these blues artists. 7:56 [SPEAKER_03]: I don't think he understood in his own way how to market them. 8:00 [SPEAKER_03]: He would, of course, Bobby Bluebland also was recording here. 8:03 [SPEAKER_04]: Hi, here. 8:04 [SPEAKER_04]: Hi, little Walter Horton. 8:06 [SPEAKER_04]: Little junior parker, also Memphis, Mulraney recorded here too. 8:11 [SPEAKER_03]: Take Memphis, Mulraney. 8:12 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, big Memphis, Mulraney. 8:13 [SPEAKER_04]: And a lot of people don't realize either Sam only signed one woman to any label at all. 8:18 [SPEAKER_04]: And it was Barbara Pittman. 8:19 [SPEAKER_04]: That's right. 8:20 [SPEAKER_04]: Behind you. 8:21 [SPEAKER_04]: And he actually gave her the option of whether or not she wanted to sign with the son record company or Sam Phillips International. 8:26 [SPEAKER_04]: Because that was his new label that he had started up when he was kind of moving out of here. 8:31 [SPEAKER_04]: But big Memphis, Mulraney. 8:33 [SPEAKER_04]: He had actually paid and promoted her the second most out of any woman in the studio. 8:39 [SPEAKER_04]: He just never signed her to a label. 8:41 [SPEAKER_03]: There's a really strange story surrounding that photograph. 8:45 [SPEAKER_03]: When I first started working here, there were no photos out of any of the women who had recorded here, which there are not many that you would really know. 8:51 [SPEAKER_03]: So I understand why. 8:53 [SPEAKER_03]: But it seemed important to make sure that she's one of my favorite artists that cut here. 8:56 [SPEAKER_03]: I don't think we should just be focusing on the big picture guys, but also it's really important to know Barbara was a childhood friend of Elvis's. 9:04 [SPEAKER_03]: She would often come up here and hang out with him once he'd been signed at the label before she was signed. 9:08 [SPEAKER_03]: There's also a great story of when the place reopened the owners reaching out and saying hey if you haven't anything to send us please Please send us any sort of memorabilia. 9:17 [SPEAKER_03]: We'll display it for you in Barbara sent a box of junk that included a pair of her panties or any panties Which is which is funny. 9:25 [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know. 9:25 [SPEAKER_03]: I was like why are they not hanging in the cafe? 9:27 [SPEAKER_03]: That'd be hilarious to just like I know But Barbara when I got that picture to put up in here 9:32 [SPEAKER_03]: My friend Clara went to pick it up and she has me my change and she looks at me really not disturbed but kind of bewildered and says the change was 706 I was like cool thanks and she says no the chain was 706 and I still I'm not getting it she's like the address of the studio is 706 and I was like well that's kind of strange and then I go to Hernandez Highway which is a bar that opened here a few years ago that Dale Watson runs 9:59 [SPEAKER_03]: That was an old bar in the fifties here and as soon as I walk in the door who's play and but Barbara Pippman the same day It was very this there's a weirdness that surrounds this space that I've always been a skeptic about that sort of thing I come from a preacher's kid background and I left that so I don't believe in that stuff anymore And I started working here and there is just a weird little magic that you can I compare it sometimes to a radio Let's see when someone comes in and they get on that wavelength 10:25 [SPEAKER_03]: the room kind of starts to work with them, which sounds it crazy to say, but when you are in here night and day and you really see how people kind of come into the space and some people get, they're just too in awe and they forget this is your garage tonight. 10:42 [SPEAKER_03]: This isn't these faces on the wall or what was yesterday, it's your time now. 10:47 [SPEAKER_03]: And then other times people come in and they just immediately you can feel that the juju of the place just grabs them. 10:56 [SPEAKER_04]: Another thing too like I turn her he was a talent scout for Sam that's right. 11:00 [SPEAKER_04]: So like he brought in a lot of the incredible artists that came in here and recorded And a lot of people don't realize that that's what BB King came here. 11:09 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, like without without Ike there won't have been a BB King to come through here initially So that's also important to Ike he had his own issues 11:19 [SPEAKER_03]: But Bibi actually came in because of the Bahari brothers who were producing him, and he was recording at several different studios. 11:25 [SPEAKER_03]: This was a stop on his, he also recorded and I believe it gymnasium here in Memphis or that might have been a Turner, but he was coming with the Bahari brothers who were producing him. 11:32 [SPEAKER_03]: So originally Sam's kind of a studio for hire, and anybody can come in and record, and he makes a connection with Leonard Chess, and that's how he starts sending a lot of these 11:47 [SPEAKER_02]: Dui wore out his welcome at the radio station in 1958 when they transitioned to a more straight-laced format. 11:55 [SPEAKER_02]: He spent the rest of his life bouncing around smaller radio stations, trying to recapture the magic of the 50s. 12:02 [SPEAKER_02]: Regardless of where he ended up, the veteran who struggled with substance abuse was a link in a long chain of social change dating back to the silver war. 12:11 [SPEAKER_03]: What's interesting about that, too, is to your point that almost dates back to civil war reconstruction era. 12:17 [SPEAKER_03]: And Memphis was one of the first towns that the Union took in the civil war. 12:21 [SPEAKER_03]: And so, for a period of time, outside of... 12:25 [SPEAKER_03]: The rest of kind of this part of the country here was a town where black people were being afforded way more freedoms than they had been given from the moment they were brought into America and it created a sort of place where white and black people dating almost back to that time were now working alongside each other. 12:44 [SPEAKER_03]: instead of black people working for in as in slaves for white people. 12:50 [SPEAKER_03]: So it always created something in Memphis where once you put people next to each other like that what we often find is oh we're the same it takes such a level of ignorance to miss that and that sort of ignorance propagates when we're keeping ourselves away from each other or when white supremacy is doing that. 13:09 [SPEAKER_04]: I just think it's really important because Memphis used music and art as honestly and away as a tool and a way to tell their own experience and story, but as a tool ultimately to push these ideas through culture so that they could eventually pass through policy. 13:27 [SPEAKER_04]: And that's something that is very important for us to remember. 13:31 [SPEAKER_04]: Like, these people weren't just doing this because they love to make art. 13:34 [SPEAKER_04]: These people were doing this because it was life or death. 13:38 [SPEAKER_03]: Inside of all of that ugliness, there is a thread and a theme of togetherness that I feel like always ultimately rises to the top. 13:47 [SPEAKER_00]: You know what I'm gonna do, right, Nagar Pied Passport to Red Island, please brought you food curse to the best meat products when I'm back. 13:51 [SPEAKER_00]: It all started and started and not at all, as a member of the bag at all, starting because they're the finest of the mode, okay? 13:56 [SPEAKER_00]: So right, right now, it's all thought to be a Red Island blook. 13:59 [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's the WHOHBQ and hotel Tesco on the magazine floor, right? 14:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe lane floor or it's not to change lane maybe lane floor right in good old Memphis Tennessee Don't forget we got all these good records on the Papa tuned it's real six popular 50 South main right now the whole next portion Right now the whole next portion right now is coming through the curse people's first coming down in three ten side main Well, you always welcome to buy yes Nothing but the best it's laid it out of a car grandmothers been driving me crazy. 14:23 [SPEAKER_00]: I said I was to get a picture of the others and get you all
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