Blog Posts - Charles Farley

Someday We'll Be Together

2/11/2021

Mary Wilson, one of the founders of the supremely popular Supremes, died on Monday, February 8, this week at the age of 76.
I never got a chance to see the Motown trio, but I certainly did hear a lot from them, especially during the 1960s when they were Motown's most successful act, scoring hit after hit, with 12 No. 1 singles during the decade.
My connection, oblique as it is, to the group was when I was teaching school in Battle Creek, Michigan. There, I met another first year teacher, Michael Noverr, who moonlighted as a disk jockey, as Mark West, at a rock station in town. Michael introduced my wife and me to Harvey Reese, who was a radio engineer at a station in nearby Kalamazoo. And Harvey, who had turned the radio station's studio into a recording studio after hours, recorded or knew most every aspiring music group in West Michigan, including a locally popular R&B band called Jackey Beavers & the Continentals.
Beavers had grown up in Cartersville, Georgia. And, after high school, had joined the Air Force and soon found himself stationed at Fort Custer in Battle Creek. There, he entered and consistently won weekly talent competitions at the base. After the Air Force, Beavers hung around in Battle Creek and became the vocalist for the house band at the El Grotto Lounge, Jr. Walker and the All-Stars. And I knew Jr. Walker, not only because of his huge hits, "Shotgun" and "What Does It Take," but also because I had a couple of his kids in my classes at Battle Creek Central High School.
But it was Harvey's friendship with Jackey Beavers that led to our invitation to Jackey's new club in Kalamazoo, where Beavers and the Continentals held court most weekends sometime around 1968-1970. Jackey was an excellent host, seeing that we were seated at a good table not far from the stage and the dance floor. We had a great time that night, but probably would have not given the talented, young performer much more thought, if it hadn't been for the fact that his 1962 song, co-written with Johnny Bristol and Harvey Fuqua, turned out to be the last song ever recorded by Diana Ross and the Supremes in 1969, the No. 1 hit: "Someday We'll Be Together."
Beavers went on to record a few regional hits with his Air Force buddy Johnny Bristol and continued writing songs. And still later, he became a minister and focused on gospel, like the song below, until his death in 2008.

The Second Hardest Working Man in Show Business

2/5/2021

I have been fortunate in my lifetime to witness some of the world's best performers: Count Basie, Bobby "Blue" Bland, the Drifters, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones, Bobby Rush, and Southside Johnny. But the best by far was James Brown, whose shows were much more than shows. They were truly spectaculars!
"The Hardest Working Man in Show Business" did not mess around. His bands, often with two drummers, were always tight and professional. The backup singers and dancers, superb. And James Brown himself a true knockout every single time!
I was reminded of all those wonderful James Brown shows this week when I heard about the death, at 85, of Danny Ray, Brown's personal valet, emcee, and cape man for more than 45 years.
Brown met Ray at the famed Apollo Theater in 1960 where Ray was often in attendance, along way from his birthplace in Birmingham, Alabama. From there, Ray attended Brown until Brown's death on Christmas Day in 2006. Keeping track of Brown's many costume changes and their matching capes. Introducing each show, after the crowd had been revved up by the band: "Right about now, it's star time. Are you ready for star time?" And most importantly, gently draping the cape over the star's shoulders when he collapsed with feigned grief during his signature song "Please, Please, Please."
The shows all flowed so seamlessly and joyfully. Owing, in no small part, to Danny Ray's total commitment and caring.
The Rev. Al Sharpton wrote on social media: "He was like an Uncle to me as I traveled the world years ago w/ The Godfather of Soul. Danny will never be forgotten. Rest in Peace and Power, family."

Don Bryant

1/28/2021

I had the pleasure of seeing Don Bryant and the Bo-Keys close out the 2018 Crescent City Blues & BBQ Festival in New Orleans. It was a fitting conclusion to a great, pre-pandemic festival. Bryant, at the ripe young age of 76, and the Bo-Keys, a neo-soul group out of Memphis brought down the house with a batch of new tunes and several soul classics originally written by Bryant for Hi Records artists like his wife, Ann Peebles ("I Can't Stand the Rain"), Al Green, Otis Clay, O.V. Wright, and others.
Originally, Bryant was hired by Hi Records' impresario Willie Mitchell to front Mitchell's own band that was popular in and around Memphis in the 1960s and 70s, playing in clubs and at parties for the likes of Elvis Presley and other Memphis luminaries.
But when Mitchell signed smooth singers like A Green, Syl Johnson, and Charlie Rich, Bryant was relegated to song writing for them and other Hi vocalists.
The only album Bryant cut back then was called "Precious Soul," released by Hi in 1969. And then he spent most of the 1980s and 90s singing gospel music.
Fast-forward to 2016 when producer and Bo-Keys leader Scott Bomar and original Hi rhythm section drummer Howard Grimes talked Bryant into recording his second album, "Don't Give Up on Love," a tribute to his wife of 46 years, Ann Peebles.
Now, Bryant and Bomar, along with members of Alabama's own St. Paul and the Broken Bones, as well as Grimes and other Hi veterans, keyboardist Archie "Hubbie" Turner and organist Charles Hodges, have released another fine album entitled "You Make Me Feel" that has been nominated for a 2021 Grammy Award in the Best Traditional Blues Album category. I've been listening to it a lot lately--like dancing down Beale Street in sweet-soul 1970!

Inauguration 2021

1/22/2021

Vaccine Hero

1/11/2021

There's a long, illuminating article about our country's response to the COVID-19 virus by Lawrence Wright that takes up much of the January 4 & 11, 2021 issue of The New Yorker, much as John Hershey's story, "Hiroshima," filled the entire August 31, 1946 issue of the same magazine--and maybe just as impactful.
Wright's article not only answers many questions about what went wrong with our response, but also what went right. How, for instance, did we develop a vaccine to combat the virus so rapidly. The answer is that a two-man team of Jason McLellan and Barney S. Graham (pictured above) at N.I.H. had developed a design as far back as 2013 that established "clinical proof of concept for structure-based vaccine design," portending "an era of precision vaccinology." The very same design now being shot into the arms of people around the world.
Back then, with recently-developed, high-powered microscopes, Graham and McLellan modified the MERS coronavirus spike protein, creating an entirely new vaccine. It worked well in mice, but then the MERS virus died out naturally and so did the funding for further research and human testing. So there it sat...until COVID-19 hit.
Graham called McLellan and asked if he and his team would like to get "back in the saddle" and help him create a vaccine?
As Wright tells it, "'Of course,' McLellan said.
"'We got the sequences Friday night, the tenth of January,' Graham told me. They had been posted online by the Chinese. 'We woke up on the eleventh and started designing proteins.' Nine days later, the coronavirus officially arrived in America."
Now, what brought this all home to me was the fact that Dr. Barney S. Graham grew up in Paola, Kansas, about 20 miles down the road from where I grew up in Olathe, and he had earned his medical degree at the University of Kansas, where I was born (some years earlier), and where he had met his wife, Cynthia Turner-Graham, now a well-respected psychiatrist.
An important, personal aside here, again as told by author Lawrence Wright:
"First, he and Cynthia had to complete residencies. They wanted to be in the same town, a problem many couples face, but additionally complicated in their case because Cynthia is Black. She suggested Nashville: he could apply to Vanderbilt School of Medicine and she to Meharry Medical College, a historically Black institution. Tennessee had only recently repealed a ban on interracial marriage.
"Driving back to Kansas from Maryland on Christmas Eve, Graham stopped in at Vanderbilt. To his surprise, the director of the residency program, Thomas Brittingham, was in his office and willing to meet with him immediately. When the interview was over, Graham told Brittingham, 'I know this is the South. I'm going to marry a Black woman, and if that makes a difference I can't come here.' Brittingham said, 'Close the door.' He welcomed Graham on the spot. Cynthia was accepted at Meharry, and so they moved to Nashville."
I'll leave the rest of the story for you to read yourself. You won't be sorry.

Happy New Year

12/29/2020

Rollins in Holland

12/16/2020

I've always been a big fan of jazz giant Sonny Rollins, now 90, so I was glad to find out that some long-lost recordings of his brief tour of the Netherlands in May, 1967, when Rollins was just 36, had been discovered, packaged, and recently released as "Rollins in Holland" by the Resonance label. It's a wild, live recording with Rollins playing straight-ahead, no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners improvisation, ably accompanied by two of Holland's greatest jazz musicians: bassist Ruud Jacobs and drummer Han Bennink. The package presents more than two hours of playful, energetic, freewheeling Rollins at the height of his prodigious talent.
Listening to the album took me back to the one Rollins concert that I attended, not in Holland, but in Boston, some years later, in the 80s, I believe. I was there on business and checking in one afternoon at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. Registering at the same time was a very cool-looking, urbane couple who looked vaguely familiar. Then I spotted the horn case the gentleman was carrying and realized who it was.
"Excuse me," I said, "but are you, by any chance, Sonny Rollins?'
"Yes," the man answered, "and who might you be?"
"Uh...well, uh...I'm Charles Farley."
"Good to meet you," he said, extending his hand, "and this is my wife and business manager Lucille. What brings you to Boston?"
"I'm here on business," I said. "I sell computer systems to libraries. How about you?"
"We're here for a concert," Rollins informed me. "Upstairs someplace in the ballroom, tonight."
"No kidding! What luck!" I exclaimed. "I'm definitely going."
"No you're not," the desk clerk said, rather rudely, I thought. "It's sold out."
"Oh no," was all I could muster. "I guess I'm not." I must have looked like I felt: disappointed and forlorn.
"Well, wait a minute," Rollins said. "Lucille, you got any tickets?"
"Just a few I've held back for the press," Mrs. Rollins answered.
"How about we give one up for Mr. Farley here?" Rollins said.
"What about the press?" his wife asked.
"Fuck the press," Sonny Rollins pronounced. "I play for the people, not the press."
And that's how I ended up in an aisle seat, center, row 4. Great concert!

Holiday Book Signing

12/2/2020

I'll be signing all my books at historic Harrison Brothers Hardware, 124 Southside Square, in beautiful Downtown Huntsville, this Saturday, December 5, 2020, noon--3:00pm. Come by and see me!

Cyber Monday Deal

11/24/2020

The University Press of Mississippi is having a big Cyber Monday sale on every book on its website, including mine:

Buy it in hardcover or paperback for just $20.21 (a better price than on Amazon) beginning Monday, November 30 until December 15. Free shipping on orders of $50.00 or more. So start your Christmas shopping here: www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Soul-of-the-Man2

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Hill Country Blues

11/21/2020

Last weekend when we were camping in southern Mississippi, one of the campers was complaining about his grown kids and now their kids descending on his house and devouring his food like a plague of hungry locusts. Which put me in mind of a 2002 story in the New Yorker by Jay McInerney about Fat Possum Records and its star blues singer R. L. Burnside, who, when faced with a similar dilemma--compounded by R. L.'s dozen children and their ever-expanding broods--forced Big Daddy, as the paternal Burnside was affectionately called, to take the rather extreme measure of chaining and padlocking his refrigerator's door.
Which, as these campfire tales tend to turn, put Clem, the youngest camper in mind of a blues singer named Cedric Burnside (R. L.'s grandson) who he had recently heard at the University of Southern Mississippi in nearby Hattiesburg.
Which, of course, put me in mind of the long lineage of so-called "hill country" bluesmen who have hailed from the rolling hills of northeast Mississippi, around and near Oxford and Holly Springs. There have been a bunch over the years, starting with slaves from West Africa, whose songs are reinterpreted by African guitarists Ali Farka and Ali Magassa, and percussionist Souleyman Kane on Corey Harris's 2003 "Mississippi to Mali" CD, as well as historic tunes by Sharde Thomas (granddaughter of legendary fife player Otha Turner) & the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, who, by the way, still sponsor one of the many hill country family picnics where a goat or two are roasted and music and dancing are enjoyed all day and all night.

Then, of course, came Mississippi Fred McDowell, who was a big star back during the folk music revival in the 1960s, and who taught R. L. to play the guitar. Listen to R. L.'s last album "A Bothered Mind" where R. L. sings and plays the guitar in rhythmic hill country style (otherwise known as the Burnside Style), accompanied by Cedric on drums and R. L.'s adopted son Kenny Brown, the best of the next generation of classic country blues guitarists.

Which puts me in mind of Junior Kimbrough, a buddy of R. L. and Otha, who operated and performed on Sunday nights at a legendary juke joint in Chulahoma, Mississippi.
Then, of course, that puts me in mind of one of my favorite Mississippi bluesman, Robert Belfour, who is famous for playing all night until the last dancer drops, without a break or repeating a song, in jukes all over the South. Try his 2003 "Pushin My Luck" album.

Well, there must be something in the water up in them thar hills, because the music just keeps on coming. If you like gospel, and who doesn't, then listen to "Como Now: The Voices of Panola Co., Mississippi"--beautiful acapella songs from the voices of the Como Mamas and other righteous singers live at the Mt. Marian Church on July 22, 2006

Finally, let's not forget the latest generation of hill country stars, who, along with Cedric Burnside and the North Mississippi Allstars, folks like Luther Dickinson, Lightnin' Malcolm, Jimbo Mathus, are carrying on the rollicking tradition, as exemplified on the latest album, "Belle of the West," from Samantha Fish, who is not from Mississippi, but Kansas City, but nevertheless pays tribute to "the Burnside Style," that continues, thank the Lord, to have a toe-tapping, foot-stomping, mesmerizing life of its own.