Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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Songs:
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- Carey Bell
M E MPH IS
Like its namesake in ancient Egypt, Memphis is the gateway to a great river delta.
Memphis, Tennessee, is where people from all over the Mississippi Delta gathered in the
early-mid 1900s before heading south to find work in the ports of New Orleans or north
to the stockyards and factories of Chicago and Detroit. In Memphis they heard each
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Memphis Beat. 283
his
seductive soul of Bobby Bland, and the jazz of Phineas Newborn.
Memphis was also where people first realized that black music could be packaged and
sold to white audiences. In 1909, a young African American professor and minstrel
musician named W.C. Handy moved to Memphis as the musical director of a band called
the Knights of Pythias. His first blues-
song for E.H. Crump, who was a mayoral candidate running on a reform platform.
music, polished it up, and sold it to black and white audiences nationwide.
While the Delta blues musicians who moved north to Chicago kept their rough edges,
even when they went electric, a smoother style developed in Memphis around the singing
of Johnny Ace, Gatemouth Moore, Roscoe Gor
eventually B.B. Johnny Ace joined up with B.B. King and the Beale Street Boys when he
returned from serving in the navy during World War II and then took over their show
when King and Bland moved on to pursue recording careers.
Ace had a string of hits on the Duke label and became a hard-partying teen idol to both
black and white kids. He blew his head off Christmas Eve 1954 while indulging in one of
his favorite games- scaring onlookers by playing Russian Roulette with an empty
revolver. Unfortunately, he had neglected to remove all the bullets from the gun. Dead at
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