All language subtitles for Dusty Springfield s Dusty in Me - Warren Zanes

Dusty in Memphis

Also available in this series:

Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans

Harvest by Sam Inglis

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh

Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli

Electric Ladyland by John Perry

Unknown Pleasures by Chris O tt

Sign’ O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard

Let It Be by Steve Matteo

Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk

Aqualung by Allan Moore

OK Computer by Dai Griffiths

Let It Be by Colin Meloy

Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno

Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz

Grace by Daphne Brooks

Murmur by J. Niimi

Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

Endtroducing... by Eliot Wilder

Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese

Low by Hugo Wilcken

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper

Music from Big Pink by John Niven

Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy

Doolittle by Ben Sisario

There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis

Stone Roses by Alex Green

Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworm

The Who Sell Out by John Dougan

Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

Loveless by Mike McGonigal

The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck

Court and Spark by Sean Nelson

69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol

Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy

Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

Daydream Nation by Matthew Steams

Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier

Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier

People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

Aja by Don Breithaupt

Rid of Me by Kate Schatz

Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite

Forthcoming in this series:

Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr

Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson and many more …

Dusty in Memphis

Warren Zanes

This is for Elinor and Lucian.

Contents

Introduction: Now That I Have Your Ear

Chapter 1: Memphis, Georgia

Chapter 2: Breakfast Was My Idea

Chapter 3: In The Land of Make-Believe

Chapter 4: American Music’s Costume Ball

Afterword: A Short Interview with Stanley Booth

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank my good friend Joe Pernice for bringing me into this project and David Barker, the editor of the series, for keeping me there. Two gentlemen. I hope to see more of them.

Introduction: Now that I Have Your Ear

WZ: You have one tattoo that says “Memphis” on it.

What were you thinking when you got it?

Chips Moman: I was a kid. I wasn’t thinking much of anything (laughs).

This is not a book about a record. Sorry. I hope no one has been misled. This is something else altogether. As I was writing it, I conceptualized my agenda in this way: as an attempt to understand why a particular long-playing phonograph, Dusty in Memphis, pulled me into its world and what I did there. Which is to say, this book is about an experience with a record more than it is about a record. It’s both a chronicle and an analysis of what happened when a particular person met up with a particular piece of vinyl at a particular time and the unfolding of that relationship.

I was a teenager playing guitar in a rock and roll band called the Del Fuegos. Without suitable preparation for any such possibility, we were getting a moderate taste of success, were out on the road promoting a record that would take us to some unexpected places. A babe born under the jurisdiction of a punk ethos, I had yet to learn how to play my instrument with any real skill, a fact that somehow added to the band’s credibility. On tour, with accumulated per diem warm in hand, I picked up a copy of Dusty in Memphis.

Thus a particular piece of vinyl was purchased by a particular person at a particular time. So, while there’s plenty in these pages about Dusty in Memphis, about the cast of characters responsible for its beauty, much of what is written here is refracted (remember, this is a distorting effect) through the lens of the personal. Records that last, those special few that refuse dust and return to the player again and again even as the world around them changes, finally become, in some odd way, collaborations between the listener and the listened to. One might say that to understand, to really understand, my Dusty in Memphis, I had to consult both parties.

As is abundantly clear to any record lover, certain albums come to be attached to distinct periods in one’s life, inadvertently becoming emblems of happy, desperate, or even notably dull life phases, in this way assuming a sometimes surprising associational power. They can take us back to a time and give us a strong whiff of whatever was in the air. How often have we seen another person disappear into memory’s deeper recesses when a particular long player comes on? That person has gone somewhere. If as humans we can access only a fraction of all that is stored in memory’s vaults, sometimes a single song will give us quick access to those vaults, and in a manner that could only be described as uncanny. Some albums can’t be listened to for just this reason. Others might recall a perfect day and be loved for just such an ability to transport us. For me, Richard Manuel’s haunting “In a Station” owns one such day.

But there is a class of recordings that belong to a still more elevated category. When, above, I refer to albums that “return to the player even as the world around them changes,” I am referring to just such a class. The relevance of these albums transcends the one-to-one correspondence whereby, for instance, the Gun Club’s Fire of Love, through some curious shape-shifting capacity, comes to embody the spring of 1982 (which, for me, it did). The recordings that go beyond that level of correspondence become emblems of more than just one passage in our lives, they become—and I hate to make it all too lofty, but here it can’t be helped—emblems of us, artifacts of self–definition. Such special albums rattle our cages again and again (and sometimes we use them, with limited success, to rattle the cages of others). It’s hard to say why. But that’s what they do. Dusty in Memphis has done this to me.

When I first bought Dusty in Memphis, in 1985 at a Berkeley, California used record store that would be going out of business in five days time, I didn’t know what awaited me and didn’t really care. I was distracted by the warm rush of greed and certainly preoccupied by the fact that among the many albums I’d found in the failing store’s sale was a very clean copy of Sticky Fingers, the original zipper cover, for two dollars. My mother taught me to love a bargain. I mean really love a bargain. And, as I was still a teenager who thought the validation of my good and powerful mother was the grail after which I must quest, I did what I could in that regard. My pile of deals was a tribute to her omnipotence. For a few days after that, I bragged about that copy of Sticky Fingers with little regard for my audience.

After returning home to my Boston apartment weeks later, however, and sorting through the detritus that had accumulated while on tour with my band, I put the album on and it happened: I discovered that Dusty in Memphis, initially just another disc in the stack under my arm, was a portal that looked onto a mad and beautiful world. And in a short time I caught myself at just what I describe above, which is to say, wanting to stay in that world. There was something there for me. If few records do what I’m describing here, fewer still keep doing it. I’ve got mine, as I imagine you’ve got yours. But the record that does this is, in my mind, the one to write about.

Before I heard Dusty in Memphis—let me admit this much—I had rather low expectations for that particular Atlantic album. When I was growing up I was lucky enough to know something about the legendary Atlantic label because, first, my mother had Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man, second, an uncle loaned us Otis Redding’s Dock of the Bay and never got it back, and, third, my brother had added Wilson Pickett’s Wicked Pickett and The Exciting Wilson Pickett to our burgeoning library. And, of course, more titles followed those first, magical few.

For how many hours I don’t know, but I had looked at these albums, or, as it should be said regarding the intense tactile experience of long players, looked into these albums, a thousand times. I knew the songs. I knew the musicians. Names like Muscle Shoals and Memphis had a mystical ring. But I didn’t think these were places where white people went to work as singers.

Dusty Springfield? I knew some of her songs from WROR, the oldies radio station that we had listened to when we were growing up in New Hampshire. On weekend nights WROR featured nostalgia shows with the great disc jockeys Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg and Wolfman Jack. Dusty Springfield songs like “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” which had very little muscle to my ears, and “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” which, though I thought inflated in its production, I liked a bit better, were certainly songs I knew. “The Look of Love,” though it wasn’t a regular rotation track on WROR, was more appealing but didn’t get enough spins to really leave an impression. But despite my recognition of Dusty’s material, such surface familiarity of the singer never became anything more. She was not a big favorite, more a marginal character whose songs I knew but who wouldn’t leave a mark on me in the way that someone like Wilson Pickett would. Wilson Pickett? That’s what I mean when I say muscle. You can listen to “Mustang Sally” today and, simply put, feel the excitement.

So, when I picked up Dusty in Memphis, I did this only because, first, it was without a scratch and one dollar, and, second, an allegiance to and trust in Atlantic albums of a certain vintage, learned from my elders, propelled me to do so. It’s worth remembering that at one time, a time that some of those elders actually lived through, there were big labels, labels with multiple smash hits to their credit, that could be trusted in this way. It was on Atlantic? Buy it! Thus the fact of a certain logo and, of course, the production team of Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, and Arif Mardin made me think that I should see what exactly happened to Dusty when she got to Memphis. I thought the story might have some interesting twists, maybe a redemptive turn. Maybe a curious hairdo. I didn’t know.

If I liked what I’m calling muscle, after jumping track to track on Dusty in Memphis I found what I was looking for. The hit “Son of a Preacher Man” had it. And I’d heard that song somewhere, maybe on the oldies radio station, but likely the track was from too late in the sixties for the WROR format of my childhood listening. Wherever I’d heard it, “Son of a Preacher Man” was just what I loved, lean, the sound of a band locking in, guitar answering horns, Aretha’s back-up singers, the Sweet Inspirations, driving the thing along. It was immediately infectious. The story it told was suggestive, subversive, and cunningly so. I’d looked down enough blouses in church to know just how the sacred and the profane can meet at prayer time. If I’d heard the song before, I was instantly grateful to have found it again. And that might have been where the album stopped. Might have.

Let me confess this: I had a shameful habit of listening to hits over and over, beating them to death before entering the depths of an album. Sometimes I never got beyond the hits. Because Dusty in Memphis was not filled out by ten sons of “Son of a Preacher Man,” I almost refused the totality of a great, cohesive full-length. Such blunders happen all the time. Please remember, I was only one of an army of distracted teenagers. But, acting out of character, I took another cursory look around the album. And it was then that the song “Breakfast in Bed” stood up and walked around my room.

E. M. Forster writes about “flat characters” and “round characters,” the latter being those heroes of any successful novel, the ones who take dents, which is to say, the characters who go through conflict and, in the process, change. Flat characters have some practical value in making a plot move forward, of course, but it’s the round characters with whom we identify, who, in undergoing change, become models for change, in this way getting under our skin. Put simply, round characters stand up and walk around the room.

“Breakfast in Bed” knocked me out. This was a round song. It got under my skin as soon as I let it. I listened to the cut a half a dozen times in a row. People walking by my basement level apartment on that warm Spring day (Boston does these like no place else) were getting a blast as they headed toward the Commonwealth Avenue “T” stop. Yes, the song had what I’m so insufficiently calling “muscle.” Gene Chrisman’s drumming can be as spare as drumming gets, but by the time he gets to the hi-hat in the second verse of “Breakfast in Bed,” he is showing you what people mean when they say a drummer has a deep pocket. What really hooked me was his combination of muscle and delicacy—the way he applies sounds, it’s almost like he’s painting. Chrisman shows that muscle is not a matter of force but of placement. Muscle really means groove. In some ways, it seems as you listen to the song that Gene Chrisman is playing directly to the lyrics; but really, when a great band approaches a song, as with the American Studio band on that record, the singer is not the only one telling the story. Everyone in the tracking room should be telling it—and in this case they do.

Why did the song make me think of The Last Picture Show? I kept seeing Cloris Leachman. “You’ve been crying, your face is a mess. Come in, baby, you can dry your tears on my dress.” My favorite lines on the album. Elvis Costello has recently described “Breakfast in Bed” as, “simply one of the most knowingly adult records ever made.” If I can appreciate that comment in hindsight, I didn’t cull any such truth from the song when it first grabbed me. The fact is, I was all over the map in my understanding of the song. Narrative is not what pop songs do best. But when a track manages to pull off narrative, suggesting a story without laying it all bare, leaving space for the listener to construct something within its rudimentary narrative frame, the effect is all the more striking. I was swept away without knowing exactly why or where to. I only knew that I saw Cloris Leachman there.

But what I grasped and what I didn’t grasp at that point didn’t matter. The album was happening. My Boston apartment had been visited. And it became clear that, because of those first Dusty in Memphis songs that wrapped themselves around me, I had to try them all on. I had to go track to track. This is a responsibility I tried to have toward albums, despite and against that awful obsession with hits. Of course, regarding Dusty in Memphis, whoever gets to such a stage has probably already noticed that among the collection of songs on the album there are two by Randy Newman, four Gerry Goffin–Carole King songs, a Burt Bacharach-Hal David number, and a Barry Mann-Cynthia Weil. This cast includes some of the finest writers of American popular song from the rock and roll era. But the one that pushed me into my next Dusty in Memphis discoveries was Randy Newman.

I loved Sail Away and Good Ole Boys, albums that were a part of my family’s collection. I also knew that Randy Newman had worked as a songwriter of the Brill Building variety, a fact I looked on more as an interesting detail than anything else—Randy Newman, I thought, is too individual, too idiosyncratic to be able to do what that kind of songwriter has to do, which is to say, hollow out a song, remove him or herself just enough so that another person can fit in there. But on Dusty in Memphis, he does just that, and to great effect, without sacrificing what in pop music is an unusual gift for narrative song-writing. In fact, the Randy Newman cuts, particularly “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore,” are crucial in reinforcing the backbone of story that gives Dusty in Memphis its special shape.

Of course, more songs followed the Randy Newman tracks, and pretty soon the whole album, even down to the numbers most removed from that rhythm and blues-inflected sound to which I was initially drawn, were working on me, collectively. Each song felt as though it was in the right place, the sequence something like a natural growth rather than a man-made structure. The more I listened, the more I felt that the stories generated by these songs accumulated into one, singular event. The strings, arranged by Arif Mardin and initially a bit of a rub for me—they struck me as being too big, too swooning and insistent—began to seem altogether appropriate. I stopped thinking of the album in terms of rhythm and blues. This was a beautiful and successful hybrid form, pop and rhythm and blues coming together in an organic form, as if it all made perfect sense. It was something of a thing unto itself.1

WZ: Did you at any point feel uncertain about bringing a pop artist like Dusty Springfield into a situation that was associated with R&B?

Jerry Wexler: I had my qualms, yes, but I finally decided, “Let me take the chance.”

If this describes the early stages of my entry into the world of Dusty in Memphis, it doesn’t yet explain what set that world apart. I have already described the album’s landscape as mad and beautiful, one that compelled me to enter. But this says too little. The matter needs more space. Fortunately, I have the rest of the book to consider this. And the rest of this book is precisely where the American South, that great and writhing region of the popular imagination, will emerge as a central factor in explaining why Dusty in Memphis came to possess me. When I read about the great German artist George Grosz’s fascination with the American West, about the cowboy outfit that he’d wear to Dada soirees, I sensed in the painter’s play something that went well beyond irony. Early in his career, Grosz seemed to vacillate between a happy, to-be-expected irreverence and a deep, unexpected seriousness. When he embraced the mythic West that came to him through pulp magazines and movies, it was his seriousness that struck me. It seemed that mythic place gave him something inestimable, something underpinning his very sense of self. On some level, I’ve come to believe that we all need such places, that we go to these places to act out the possibilities within us that might otherwise lie dormant, untapped. The South and its people have provided just such a place for me—and Dusty provides an inroad to that place, a way for me to revisit the interior.

So here it is, what is on many levels an analytical piece of writing. The fan I’ve always been will work, and not always happily, alongside the academic I’ve become over the past dozen years of trudging about university campuses. They’ll collaborate. They’ll argue (at the moment, they’re not even talking—but they’re like an old, perfectly mismatched couple). This said, before I release you to the next phase of my story, I need to make one final introductory point: I emphasize that this is an analytical piece of writing primarily because what you’ll find is not music criticism, at least as music criticism is commonly conceived. I’m not assigning value. That Dusty in Memphis is an important, even crucial album is the premise that precedes even the first written word of this book. That the value of Dusty in Memphis is sizeable is a given. What follows is a consideration of what it has meant for me to have this crucial album as a longtime companion. I imagine that you, like every music lover I’ve ever met, have a few such longtime companions. Behind each of them, there’s a story, one that might be told but, just as easily, might not. Let’s hope that these stories get out whenever they can.

Chapter One:

Memphis, Georgia

In the North, young men dream about the South. The more discriminating among them slide down the darkness and go straight to Memphis.

—A Boys Book of Folklore

My first tangible experience of Memphis, Tennessee happened in Waycross, Georgia. There’s a man there named Stanley Booth. Though he actually grew up in Waycross, he gives the sense that he only recently washed ashore in that town, is neither resident nor visitor, more like an itinerant on pause. His house is provisional in feel, like it could be left behind at any moment—or perhaps it was left behind, and Stanley was the occupant who arrived soon thereafter, accepting the furniture and the mess of belongings for what they were.

Had my mother been the type to issue warnings, there might have been one in recognition of Stanley. Kind, generous, even sweet: he is all that. A Southern gentleman. Yet, when you walk away from him, something inspires the quick pat to make sure your wallet’s still there.

Like the Memphis that I came to know through him, Stanley is a man who gives the sense that he could, at any moment, become the contrary. He won’t hurt you, but he might get strange. He reminds one of the Memphis of his friend William Eggleston’s photographs: mundane, haunted by stillness, saturated with warm color, and pregnant with a vague sense of something impending, an incipient violence. In Eggleston’s Memphis it’s as though something, perhaps something grim, has just happened or, if not yet, will likely happen soon. Eggleston’s is the same Memphis to which Stanley introduced me, the Memphis that is so inside of Stanley that it followed him to Georgia.

I first met Stanley Booth through Jo Bergman, former assistant to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. She held that post during the early 70s, an astounding time, when the Stones were associated with the whiff of sulphur and a slippery sexuality. In the more cautious homes, daughters were locked in their bedrooms when the tour buses rolled into town. Of course, I only knew about it all from albums, pictures in LIFE, and rumor’s strength.

Years later, Jo was working at Warner Brothers when the Del Fuegos were signed to the label. Jo, very approachable, was accustomed to the steady flow of people asking what Keith was “really like,” whether Mick was an angel, an asshole, or, more likely, some wonderful hybrid of the two, or whether she could get a copy of Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues. Thus she was appreciative, even if surprised, when we asked her what Stanley Booth was “really like.” She responded, joyfully even, by getting on the nearest phone and calling Stanley. He didn’t answer. He never does.

To the thousands of bands apprenticing themselves to the Platonic ideal the Rolling Stones embodied, Stanley’s book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones was both a mystical text and a how-to manual. It was the best book on the subject, written by one who had all but sacrificed himself to its making. Or so the myth had it. There’s a story about Stanley finally getting off the road with the Stones, addicted to heroin, in debt one book to unamused publishers, and holed up in the Arkansas hills, where it was unclear whether he would get the message that most heroin users take a while to receive: Keith is the exception. When Stanley finally did shake his habit and finish the book, it was Keith himself who remarked that the book “took longer to write than the Bible.” That’s the story, at least.

Despite the fact that when Jo Bergman called Stanley Booth from her Warner Brothers office the phone rang and rang with no one answering on the other end, Stanley did finally appear in the Del Fuegos’ world—but only with a little tracking down. In the middle of a summer tour with Tom Petty and the Georgia Satellites, the band had a day off in Georgia. After a show in Tennessee, we showed our tour manager a map, insisting that Waycross, Georgia was, first, a real place and, second, not too far off our planned route. Then, advancing our argument, we convinced him to drop at the end of Stanley’s driveway in Waycross whoever in the band wanted dropping.

Not the middle of nowhere, Waycross is a little farther out, more like nowhere’s suburbs. In his book Rhythm Oil, Stanley quotes Jerry Wexler on the subject. Wexler, speaking of a songwriting session with Bert Berns in which the two men were attempting to write for Wilson Pickett a song about a down-home place, said this: “I figured there couldn’t be any more down-home place than that. Waycross, Georgia would have to be the asshole of the world.” For some, this might put Waycross right at the center of all important activity, but I don’t think that’s what Jerry Wexler meant.

Three of us—the brave ones, I like to think—watched as the tour bus drove off, leaving us in front of Stanley’s Waycross residence. It was 3am. We knocked on the door and, as if this all made sense, Stanley answered. He was up, writing. Almost as soon as we walked in the door, he counted heads, acknowledging that, all together, our number was four. Four. Running the figure through his mind, he “remembered” that he had exactly that number hits of acid in his freezer (there was plenty of room in there for them—I didn’t see any food). “We should probably eat it now,” he said, “before it goes bad.”

* * *

“Being good isn’t always easy.” One of pop music’s lasting if lesser-known truisms. The line comes from “Son of a Preacher Man,” the first single from Dusty Springfield’s 1969 album Dusty in Memphis. Yielding that one top ten single and selling 100,000 units, not what a label like Atlantic considered a big commercial success, Dusty in Memphis has nonetheless refused to go away, has outlasted the treacheries of the cut-out bin, and revealed itself to be an important addition to the canon of great American recordings. As a teenager I fell in love with that album because I was in love on a regular basis. And I was in love with Dusty in Memphis for some time before I noticed Stanley Booth’s name at the end of the album notes.

As far as I know, Stanley hasn’t written any other album notes. I recently called him up to ask if this is indeed the case, but he didn’t answer. I do know that when I first saw his name on the back of that album, it didn’t make all that much sense to me. As I’d come to know Stanley Booth, I associated him with, of course, the Stones, but also names like Dewey Phillips and Furry Lewis, with Gram Parsons, Al Green, and Elvis. Dusty Springfield, I thought, was something else altogether. But over time Dusty’s story about Memphis is the one, along with Stanley Booth’s, that, for me, tells it best.

Written in 1969, just before he was to join the Stones entourage for the first time, Stanley’s album notes for Dusty in Memphis make the point that prior to those Memphis recordings the singer was known for, in Dusty’s words, “big ballady things.” As she goes on to emphasize, in the earlier phase of her recording career, Dusty was accustomed to arriving at the studio to find a complete set of written arrangements. In Memphis, it would be different. With Jerry Wexler at the helm, the producers, artist, and band would together work up what is called “head arrangements.” There were no strings or horns at the tracking sessions; they would be overdubbed later, in New York.

Arif Mardin: With Dusty this is what happened: Jerry Wexler would play the demo. If we had lead sheets, fine. If not, they would write their own lead sheets, the five musicians. Then they would start to play, would start to get a groove. It’s a family affair, almost like a soup—it’s being made. And we are there, “Keep that lick!” “Add two beats here.” That kind of thing.

Dusty’s earlier work certainly demonstrated a significant range of song styles, the singer moving easily and authoritatively across them. Whether in lush Spector-esque productions such as “Stay Awhile” or in the more lean productions of Burt Bacharach/Hal David numbers like “The Look of Love” and “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” one hears a singer with notable breadth. But those recordings don’t begin to suggest the Dusty that would emerge in Memphis. If all accounts point to the fact that Dusty was intimidated by the informality of the “head arrangement” method, intimidated by the shadow’s of R&B greats like Wilson Pickett that hung over American Studios, and intimidated by the cast of musicians and producers known for their work with the likes of Aretha Franklin, one doesn’t hear that intimidation on record, unless of course it has been reborn as that moving vulnerability that is so affecting in Dusty’s voice.

When Dusty signed to Atlantic, the label that, through the person of Jerry Wexler, recognized in Memphis both a geographic center of American popular music and a breeding ground for hits, something more happened. With the Memphis project Dusty took on a collection of songs the lyrics of which alone caused her to exceed the possibilities of her previous work. If Dusty had always stuck close to the general territory of the teenage unrequited love saga, which, it seems, always had an audience, with the Memphis record she slipped out the back door and went wandering in the night of it all.

Which is to say, Dusty went into a world where Stanley Booth owns a house. I remember one time I was driving from new Orleans to North Carolina, chasing a reckless infatuation that would end in a fine pile-up, and I stopped at that house for the night. Stanley has never said no when his hospitality is requested, no matter the fact that, as I was in mid-infatuation at that point, I would be rather sorry company, my attention drifting when the conversation threatened to move beyond a certain girl. On some level I must have known that if I stopped idealizing the object of my infatuation, stopped inflating the romance that I had decided was my salvation, a lot of things would come back down to earth with the poor girl who was my hostage in all of this. Too many things, and me among them. So, on that particular night, I had a lot to say about love. I pulled up to Stanley’s house, and it was that same thing: the hour was late, and he was up, writing.

It was a quiet night. In fact, I remember being struck by the stillness, by the living room’s low light, more like a dwindling beach fire than anything for which electricity might be responsible. It all rounded the edges of my obsession. I almost relaxed. As was my habit in those days, I travelled with a bag of pot that was grossly out of proportion, the size of a small dog (and it was, on some level, a pet that I loved dearly). We sat up and listened to records—among other things, Stanley made me a tape of Donnie Fritts demos, co-writer of “Breakfast in Bed.” I don’t know how long that went on. Rather than leave me in the chair where I fell asleep, not a pleasing mold to wake up in, Stanley shook me awake and showed me a bed upstairs.

When I woke up early the next morning to the sound of voices downstairs, voices that were making a conscious effort at restraint but failing in this, I looked over at the clock, thinking I’d overslept. I wanted to get to where I was going that day, because, of course, so much seemed to hinge on it. But I hadn’t overslept. In fact, at that hour I should have been sleeping soundly. But there was no question that the jubilation from below wouldn’t allow any sweet return to the land of nod. There was a party going on.

Downstairs, I saw a woman wearing a red dress, seemingly on the cusp of not wearing one, and holding a bouquet of flowers. She was standing in front of a counter where the makings of a small but prosperous pharmacy were laid out. Stanley was in his bathrobe, across the counter from the woman and at the side of a man dressed in a coat and tie that could have been on for days. All were grinning, big and, frankly, carnivorous grins—but having just woken up, this may have been my own hazy vision. Stanley, seeing that the situation might need some explanation, was the first to address all that was before me. He put on his orator’s voice. “They just... got married.” He looked over at his friends, and they all broke into laughter. The woman looked back at me and, composing herself, straightening her dress, said, as if to clarify, “We just... got married.” They erupted, again.

The Gods were painting in bold strokes. What a vision I saw. Not simply for one who had just emerged from slumber but for one who told himself that he drove his small, Japanese station wagon from new Orleans in swift pursuit of Love. This comic and, at the same time, not-so-comic kitchen tableau was, to my eyes, the profane against which my sacred defined itself. Though I accepted an offering from the pharmacy, I somehow knew that the scene I saw before me as I came down the stairs would both last for days and go to places I might not want to know. In the next forty-eight hours, wild animals would be invented in Stanley Booth’s home.

Driving north, I was stranded in-between two kinds of love that I wanted to imagine were unrelated. A tape of Dusty in Memphis played over blown-out car speakers.

* * *

The love that is the subject of Dusty in Memphis is different from the love of her earlier songs: it is a love that is all at once diffuse, dark, unpredictable, ecstatic, and a terrible deal. It is a love too big for the lyrical (and for that matter musical) framework of Dusty’s earlier pop productions, no matter the breadth of that work. Like Memphis itself, the love that is the subject of Dusty in Memphis is indeed bursting with its contrary: it happens not simply when you yearn for it, as in some adolescent dream, but when you’re not prepared for it; it reveals itself not simply under the star-filled skies where a moon hangs low—in fact, as the first and last tracks on side one attest, it might be at its best when the sun’s just arriving at work.

As one listens to Dusty in Memphis, there is a sense that love could happen anywhere, with anyone, and, quite possibly, leave without a note or, worse yet, stay a bit too long. In “Breakfast in Bed,” Dusty delivers the opening lines (again, my favorites) with an unnervingly intimate, breathy vocal and an erotic charge (the two are bound in Dusty’s case) that will bring a chill to any one who as a boy thought once or twice about a school friend’s mother—and I believe that’s all of them: “You’ve been crying, your face is a mess. Come in, baby, you can dry your tears on my dress.” Cloris Leachman, every time. As it is with the best of Flannery O’Connor’s writing, the sexual is everywhere possible in Dusty in Memphis. The prayer meeting will do. The sexual becomes an anywhere, anytime matter—love, the bigger issue, is just the trouble that sneaks along behind it, tangled and disturbed but always potentially capable of allowing another transcendent moment, another glimmer of the sublime. If love has those two sides, the characters of Dusty in Memphis are themselves stranded between them. “Just one smile would make my life worth living, a little dream to build my world upon.”

There is no uncomplicated love lurking about the corners of Dusty in Memphis. The complexity of love is, in fact, the album’s fundamental and guiding truth. The bride in the kitchen and the idealized girl-angel of infatuation’s making are both creatures roaming the landscapes of Dusty in Memphis. But to understand those characters requires an understanding of their landscapes. And to understand the landscapes of that album, to really understand them—and I guess that’s what I’m out to do—whether its erotic, musical, or, in the more all-encompassing sense, cultural landscapes, one must finally grasp just how the American South serves as backdrop to it all. And I don’t mean the South that is—how else to say it?—the South that is, simply, there. For the South that functions as backdrop to Dusty in Memphis is not that South. Rather, the American South of Dusty in Memphis is the one born and nurtured in the popular imagination.

Sweating, carnal, obsessed with the past, violent, agrarian despite the times, natural, authentic, certainly unpredictable, in conflict between doing the right thing and following instinct’s persistent admonitions: the South of the popular imagination is excessive. Perhaps because there is no getting to the other South, the South that is “simply there,” without crawling through the tangles of lore that cling to the region—it sometimes seems that Kudzu is simply the plant form of a mythology that has already covered the region—the one South is sometimes mistaken for the other. Or, more accurately, the one South, the real South, is almost always mistaken for the other, the mythic. But they are not the same thing, no matter that they frequently parade in one another’s costumes. Consider it this way: you can see the fantastic South if you go there, but you don’t have to go there to see it.

To be sure, I fell in love with Dusty in Memphis because I was in love on a regular basis. And one of things I was in love with was the American South. And I was only one of the many who went there long before crossing the Mason-Dixon from the north for the first time. And I ran amuck. For me, the epigraph above, taken from a book for boys that had once proved an intoxicant to my imagination, was not an insight, and neither was it some stray bit of wisdom: it was an imperative. “In the North, young men dream about the South. The more discriminating among them slide down the darkness and go straight to Memphis.” Go. That was the word that took the emphasis.

Dusty in Memphis is an album about that twisted place. Stanley Booth knows it well, just as he knows the real South. But Stanley is in the business of wrapping the two together, of making sure that he’s doing his part to make indiscernible that point at which the imagined South and the real South intersect. He makes myth, which, in the South, is the reporter’s job. Here’s how Stanley speaks to his predicament at the end of Rhythm Oil, that collection of essays, mentioned above, on the South and its music:

Of Beale Street, Thomas Pinkerton said, “I seen things come up down there that you be surprised at.” So had I, having been in Memphis more than once when it was on fire, but I knew that Georgia held an ignorance, a depth of depravity, an excess of evil—a wildness—to be surpassed nowhere. If Stendhal was correct in describing the novel as “a mirror dawdling down a lane,” there existed around the Okefinokee Swamp lanes the likes of which civilized people knew nothing about. As a child I had watched the fleshy, sparkling sundew plants devour blue-bottle flies, looked on as shapely pitcher plants swallowed honeybees. Once again, I drew near, became still, silent, and settled down to observe.

With an eye for the uncivilized, Stanley took his skills as an observer to Memphis and made that city his base for a number of years. Eventually returning to Georgia, where I would meet him for the first time, Stanley still spoke mainly of Memphis and its people. And, sometimes, he’d return to Memphis, just as he describes in the introduction to an essay about Al Green: “I went to Memphis, checked into the Peabody, and discovered what a pleasant place my vicious old hometown could be to visit.”

Chapter Two:

Breakfast Was My Idea

When I first met Stanley Booth, and every time thereafter, he mentioned his friend, the pioneering producer and record man, Jerry Wexler, the guiding conscience of Dusty in Memphis. But for some reason, the lasting image Stanley left me with as regards Jerry Wexler is of a boat, Jerry’s, in which Sam the Sham and Stanley are mixing cocktails in the stern. The drinks in question, as I remember being told, are called life preservers. (Of course, I have yet to meet a bartender who can make such a drink or, for that matter, has heard of such a concoction—it has become clear enough that the name served the sole purpose of affording the sea-bound participants the opportunity to shout, “Help! Throw me a life preserver!”) And perhaps because Stanley seems to regard Jerry as one of the true masters of anecdote—which is saying something, because Stanley’s mind is itself an archive of situations—in this image I also see Jerry Wexler standing at the helm of the boat, in mid tale, gesticulating, and wearing a deep blue cravat, which, perhaps not arbitrarily, matches the ocean that surrounds him. His audience is a little narrow in the eyes but nonetheless all ears.

Of course, I seriously doubt the validity of this memory fragment. I suspect it’s a Frankenstein of my own making, comprised of available parts and not all of them reliable. But the fact is, many of Stanley’s stories are peopled by giants, and the minute a name like that of Sam the Sham enters the scene, I am fully capable of losing my sense of order and scale. Which is to say, I can embellish and construct, add and subtract without realizing just what I’m up to. And if I can do this with Sam the Sham, there’s little doubt that I can arrive at still more flamboyant distortions in relation to any anecdotes housing not just a name like Sam the Sham but, more profound and far-reaching, that of Jerry Wexler. The latter is a name—I can instantly see it in my mind, in that black type-face of early Atlantic albums—that appears on albums by Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Solomon Burke, Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, and many, many others.

It was no surprise to me that several people, Stanley included, responded to news of my little book about Dusty in Memphis by saying, “It would be great if you could talk to Jerry Wexler.” I agreed entirely, of course. Of all the parties involved in that album’s creation, if anyone stood “at the helm” with Dusty it was Jerry. But a few significant issues stood in my way. First, I wasn’t entirely sure that Jerry Wexler was still alive. And for one writing a book about Dusty in Memphis, it was shameful to come right out and say that I didn’t know this rather crucial piece of information. Any sense of authority that I might be hoping to project would diminish significantly if I was caught speaking of Jerry as someone I planned to call with a few questions when, in truth, “It would be great if you could talk to Jerry” meant that it would be great but not possible.2 My lack of assurance regarding Jerry’s status was based on the simple fact that I couldn’t believe someone with his deep history could still be around to comment on it. Jerry Wexler is, after all, the man who changed the Billboard category of “Race” records to the new heading of “Rhythm and Blues.”

In relation to handling my conundrum, Andy Paley came to mind. Andy is a fine resource for information of all kinds. When my wife and I couldn’t get rid of the smell of cat urine in the back hallway of our house, Andy introduced us to Nature’s Miracle, an effective, natural product that has served us well since that time. My wife, often quicker to move toward solutions than I am myself, suggested I call Andy to find out if Jerry Wexler was available for interview. Having seen, from a number of angles, the massive cogs of the music business turn, Andy was indeed the man for the job. And as it turned out, and to no one’s surprise, Andy had information. He knew Jerry from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee on which both men sit. Immediately launching into story, Andy described one committee meeting at which he and Jerry Wexler had shared the view that Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band was perhaps a premature candidate for induction in the band category when New Orleans’ Meters had not yet been discussed as a possibility. Which is to say, I quickly found out that Jerry Wexler was indeed alive and well and, gloriously so, had a few opinions on it all.

Through a gentleman in the U.K., responsible for the re-issue of some great Eddie Hinton recordings, I got Jerry’s two addresses, one on Long Island and the other in Florida. Perhaps my mind is that of the fan, but I’d seen Jerry Wexler’s name on too many great records to think he lived in a world resembling my own. Where could a Jerry Wexler live? Whoever made up the name Ahmet Ertegun likely contrived Wexler’s, too. I imagined wonderful places for them both, nothing along the lines of Long Island. But the two addresses were promptly emailed to me. So I sent letters, obsequious letters of the kind that young PhDs facing a grim job market write on a fairly regular basis. And was I wrong, or did I actually get a call back from Jerry Wexler three hours after I put those letters in the mailbox? This is a man whose books are in order. If I had thought Jerry Wexler would be the most difficult person to contact, because such a looming figure in my mind, I was wrong.

When he called I was in the midst of what was, at least for me, an unnervingly adult phone call. It was the Bank of New York on the other end. I was refinancing. Call waiting. A gravel voice, thick New York accent: “This is Jerry Wexler calling for Warren Zanes.” I’m not even sure they can make voices like that any more. I simply left the Bank of New York on the other line—I could call them anytime—and my relationship with Jerry Wexler was underway.

* * *

“Who else do you want?” It was fifteen minutes into our conversation and he’d already given me Chips Moman’s home phone number, Tom Dowd’s cell phone number, Arif Mardin’s Manhattan apartment number, Donnie Fritts’ number in Florence, Alabama, Vicki Wickham’s number in New York. “I’m a famous Judas. I’ll give you any number you want.” I took them all. And he said it was fine if I told them Jerry sent me.

Of the people who answered their phones or called me back, exactly one hundred percent of them said, “I love Jerry.” Chips Moman, himself the man behind a hundred hits, twice referred to Jerry as his “hero.” Perhaps Jerry wouldn’t have given me the phone numbers of people with unfavorable commentaries, perhaps he would have, but, still, this was a very good batting average in the friendship game. Part of this, I assume, stems from the fact that Jerry is a conversationalist of the old school. He has an informed take on just about everything and the grace to listen when others offer their own views. In my handful of phone calls with Jerry, we discussed fiction as much as we did music. He knows his cinema. He can traverse the world of fine art better than most of the young art historians I have taught. And he understands that literature does not live in the library alone, that literature knows many forms. Our first phone call ended thus: “I want to tell you a joke. Do you have a minute?”

A postman is retiring. It’s his last time on his old route. At one of the houses, a woman invites him in for a special breakfast, a real gourmand affair: poached eggs florentine, the cheeses of France, fresh-squeezed juice, you know. He’s overwhelmed—a fantastic meal. Then, when he’s done eating, she tells him to follow her upstairs, and—he can’t believe it—she balls his ass off. When it’s over, he puts on his postman’s uniform and, just as he’s leaving, the woman stops him and gives him a five dollar bill. This he just doesn’t understand, so he asks her why she’s giving him the money. “Well,” she says, “I told my husband you were retiring, and when I asked him what he thought we should get you, he said, ‘Fuck him—give him five bucks.’ Breakfast was my idea!”

I got more comfortable talking with Jerry Wexler. The gap between my first, certainly formal, letter to him and the second was considerable, and I include it below because it suggests just that. The occasion of this second correspondence, however, was that I’d just heard of Tom Dowd’s death. Of course, Tom Dowd along with Arif Mardin and Jerry formed the three-man production team responsible for Dusty in Memphis. Though Jerry had given me Tom Dowd’s cell phone number, when I called it Tom’s daughter answered, letting me know that just that morning her father had been taken to the hospital. He would pass on only a few days later.

Dear Jerry,

The chores of early fatherhood took me away from my work for a bit. Happily, I’m back into the book project. My reason for writing, however, is to let you know that I was thinking about you when I heard the news of Tom Dowd’s death. Someone in my position can only guess at the level of intimacy shared by the two of you, but I imagine it was considerable and the loss is deeply felt. My condolences go out to you as the friend and collaborator of a great talent.

I’m sending this to Florida because, if I recall, you drift South at some point in late October. I wouldn’t mind doing that myself. When snow and cold happen, I have a difficult time thinking of them as necessary to my existence—though, using my favorite literary form, the complaint, I say the same thing about heat in the summer. I might have to learn a thing or two from Jerry Wexler’s migratory patterns.

My son grows at a frightening rate. For a while there, he was referred to as The Milk Pig. In fact, my wife and I thought he was making every effort to eat her whole, that, like many chicken eaters, he merely preferred to start with the breast. Fortunately for her, he’s calmed down a bit in his vigor. He’s even managed to sleep through the night several times in the past week! For a while there, I would have felt the fool to even dream of such a possibility. So, the changes are all happening in good time, if too fast. Next thing I know, I’ll be counseling him on the merits and methods of birth control. God forbid!

If you have a phone number down there, I’d love to have it. I’m looking forward to more conversations with you. Not every young man is afforded the chance to make actual contact with one who has imprinted his imagination as you have mine through music. My questions about Dusty’s Memphis record now revolve around the studio situation, cutting tracks, the room itself and production methods. Chips Moman has never been reachable, but I’ll keep trying. In the meantime, however, I hope you and your family are well. All the best to you.

Warren Zanes

The only trouble with talking to Jerry Wexler is that, again, he is a conversationalist of the old school. Which is to say, if as a professor I’m well-versed in digression, Jerry is fully capable of following me wherever I so digress. The topic of Dusty in Memphis could have taken us anywhere, and it did. But we’d return to the subject when my own sense of responsibility, sometimes dormant, was awakened—or when Jerry helped me to remember why I’d called in the first place. He did, after all, have other things to do.

As Jerry tells it, the story of Dusty in Memphis started when a lawyer working for Dusty contacted him in New York. Already an outspoken advocate of Dusty, her voice and what she did with it, he was quick to sign Dusty to a contract. Written into the contract was what is called a “key man clause.” In this case, the “key man clause” stated that Dusty’s contract was contingent on Jerry Wexler’s involvement as producer. Were Jerry to be off the project, Dusty could walk, freely and without strings. This in itself says much about Dusty’s attraction to Atlantic Records: a lover of the black music of the 1950s and 1960s, the best of which was often associated with Atlantic, Dusty wanted to draw herself closer to that musical environment and its legacy, which had been Jerry Wexler’s obsession for decades already. Given Jerry’s place in that world, Dusty made the strategic decision to name Jerry her “key man” in order to insure that the music she loved would be the reference point for her latest project.

WZ: It’s no secret that Dusty loved the black music of the South—do you think part of your kinship with her had to do with a shared love for the music of the South?

Jerry Wexler: She was looking at this one step removed, as a worshiper of this kind of music. I was a promulgator of this music. I was in it.

If it all began in mutual admiration, the scene would grow complicated almost immediately. Jerry describes it thus in an article written for The Oxford American:

And so it was arranged for Dusty to come to New York to begin preparing for the session. I began an intense hunt for songs that I could believe in—and that I prayed would please her. With the help of my assistants, Jerry Greenberg and Mark Myerson, we spent several months amassing a cornucopia of lead sheets, lyric sheets, and acetate demos (cassettes had yet to appear). In my zeal to provide her with the widest possible choice of material, we wound up with seventy or eighty songs.

I thought it would be comfortable for her to come out to Great Neck, where we could work without the distractions of a frantic record office. Dusty showed up at my door, and we went into my living room. We soon found ourselves ass-deep in acetates—on tables, chairs, shelves, the floor. As I played her song after song, I was hoping for a response—would she like this one? If not, how about the next one?

Most of the day, and well into the night, I became first fatigued, and then spastic, as I moved from floor to player, then back to the shelves, the chairs, and the tables, in what turned eventually into a ballet of despair.

After going through my entire inventory, the box score was Wexler 80, Springfield 0. Out of my meticulously assembled treasure trove, the fair lady liked exactly none.

Dusty returned a few months later to hear a new batch of tracks. Jerry, with no fresh material to show her, selected twenty from the original eighty he had played that day in Great Neck. And Dusty loved them unequivocally.

If Dusty in Memphis has the cohesive structure that distinguishes great albums, the lore attached to the project suggests that the actual making of the album sometimes lacked such structure. No matter how one views it, Dusty was a classic high maintenance pop star, as insecure as any in the history of the pop star phenomenon. After Dusty rejected the original batch of eighty songs, the Muscle Shoals studio sessions that Jerry booked would have to be cancelled. Eventually Chips Moman’s American Studios in Memphis would be home to the tracking sessions. But even then, settled in with an astounding band, Dusty would not sing. The band played without even a scratch vocal to guide them. Which is to say, while in Memphis to record Dusty in Memphis, Dusty recorded nothing.3

Arif Mardin: You got the story from Wexler that Dusty was extremely intimidated, right?

The band tracks that were recorded at American Studios, however, were more of what Atlantic had been associated for years: riveting, in-the-pocket ensemble performances that had both ecomomy and a distinct emotional center. Of course, American, under the supervision of Chips Moman, was known for just this. On some level, the Dusty project was just another day in the mines for the folks at American. And Atlantic looked for just this kind of workaday consistency when they went hunting for production sites in the South.

From some perspectives, Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertugen’s Atlantic Records was in the business of taking advantage, cashing in on the Southern scene and bringing the booty back north. And, indeed, there is no doubt that the label made enormous profits from its associations with Stax, Fame, and the Muscle Shoals scene, among others. In Robert Gordon’s It Came from Memphis, Jim Dickinson, Memphis musician and producer, offers a wry perspective on the subject:

I resented the exploitation aspect of the music business very deeply for a long time, until I started to understand it. A couple of years after I’d worked for Jerry Wexler at Atlantic in 1970, he came to Memphis for some event, and we ended up at this party, quite a party. Wexler, Sam Phillips, Betty Hayes—who’d booked bands with Ray Brown—my wife and I and Stanley Booth. Wexler had just produced an Aretha Franklin gospel record, and he was real proud of it. He had also, not that recently, done a Tony Joe White record. Well, after dinner everybody was kinda laid-back and Wexler kept trying to play this Aretha Franklin record, but every time he’d start it, Sam would take it off and put on the Tony Joe White record. Sam kept playing the same cut over and over, “Got a Thing About Ya, Baby,” which was a hit. And finally Wexler says, “Sam! Baby! You know, I’m really hurt that you’re not listening to my Aretha record, baby!” Jerry plays it again and so one more time Sam gets up and takes the record off, puts on ‘Thing About Ya, Baby’ and says, “Goddamn, Jerry, that’s so good it don’t sound paid for.”

I thought, by God, that’s it. They can hear the difference. To somebody at the level of Sam Phillips and Jerry Wexler, that’s what they get off on. Not paying for it! … I had always taken it real personally when they didn’t pay me. I’d say, Oh, the bastards didn’t pay me again. Now I understand this sense of larceny as an element of production.

At times Jim Dickinson’s commentary, in the above case and, for that matter, in many of his entertaining, anecdotal accounts, comes off as what might be called self-consciously quotable, as though he’s just waiting for the next clown with a tape recorder. The recurring figure in Dickinson’s accounts is, of course, Dickinson himself, emerging as either the carefree iconoclast or the somewhat gruff, certainly cynical underdog in (and against) the barbarities of the music business, the underdog who identifies more with the black man’s position than with that of the cold-blooded money men sitting against a background of platinum records in their posh offices. Of course, the rhetorical structure at the heart of such self-portrayals, is among the oldest in popular music culture: the record men, here reduced to caricature, represent commerce, and Dickinson, by default and by suggestion, assumes the other pole, that of Art. Herein is a story about authenticity that is as old as popular music culture itself—the real of Art is opposed to the false of commerce. But, however old, it’s a story that makes great copy. Everybody loves to hear how the guy with the fattest wallet is the one who can’t dance, is the one who has a six-figure abstract painting hanging upside down in his living room. Good copy, yes, but it’s too simple. And there’s no reason to tell the story of Atlantic’s Southern sojourn in terms too simple, even if, as regards the matter of exploitation, there are certain fundamental historical truths that reinforce Dickinson’s basic point.

WZ: In the 1950s and 1960s, the music industry was clearly a different beast than it is today. What freedoms did a record man have at that time that were eventually lost?

Jerry Wexler: We’d go on the road with an acetate of a new Ruth Brown record. We’d see a transmitter, we’d walk in. The disc jockey would say, “Hey! Sure, what can I do for you?” He’d put the acetate right on! In other words, there was no music director, there were no committees. You had something new? “Here, here you go.” And so we’d leave the guy a bottle of Jack or a sports shirt.

Among the record company personnel that came from the north to cut tracks, there is no doubt that many (most? all, of course!) had potential earnings on their minds in booking studio time down South. There was big money to be made, little of which would return to the South. And Jerry Wexler was certainly no exception. As he insisted in conversation, “The word commercial is not a bad word.” But in reducing that which Wexler “got off on” when cutting tracks down South to “not paying for it,” Dickinson is hardly what would be referred to as a “reliable narrator.” Of course, that’s just what makes Dickinson interesting. Rarely are the great storytellers Truth’s ambassadors. My point is, however, that any story of Southern music that conveys only a narrative of the exploiter and exploited will reduce history to the one-dimensionality of the polemic. Was exploitation a part of the story? Yes, and arguably a very big part. But there is no doubt that Jerry Wexler, while earning a dreamy wage cutting hit records in the South, was “getting off” on a complicated amalgam of things, among which was the sound of a crack band playing that mixture of country and blues that came up out of the American South.

In fact, had Jerry Wexler not fallen in love with the music of the South, he might have followed a career trajectory more like that of his Atlantic partner Ahmet Ertegun, who knew when it was time to move on, to shift his focus from the raw sound of a hot band playing in the studio to—let’s just say it—Foreigner. As a biography of Ertugen attests, Ahmet shed tears during a playback of “I Want to Know What Love Is” (if Jerry had done the same, likely it would have been for different reasons). If both men came to the record business as fans of the most obsessive variety, it’s nonetheless hard to resist assessing their points of divergence. Risking oversimplification, it seems that Ahmet was perhaps the more brilliant record man, as fully capable of adapting to a fickle industry when necessary as he was of determining its course when such adaptation wasn’t demanded of him. Jerry, if a brilliant record man for multiple decades, had at some point lost himself in something that happened down South.

Depending on your angle, Jerry Wexler’s inability to go in the direction that Atlantic had to go in order to remain viable in the market is perhaps what makes him less the great record executive; but his commitment to a certain sound, his unabashed affection for it, also committed him to a certain standard, in effect kept him from being able to follow popular music down the road that it was at least temporarily going. Returning to Jim Dickinson’s remarks, yes, Jerry Wexler knew how to exploit—taken in a broad sense, the word could be used to describe just what a producer does—but at the end of the day the fan inside of Jerry Wexler was perhaps master to the executive. So, when the music Jerry loved went on the back shelf, he went with it. But, before that, what a run he had.

Jerry Wexler: We signed people whose music we liked. There were two requisites: we had to really like it, and we had to imagine it could sell. I call that column A. Later on a column B came in: music which we didn’t necessarily like but had to deal with to stay alive. And although I was instrumental in signing much of this other kind of act which we thought would sell, I never produced it. I never went into the studio unless the music spoke directly to me. As a result, if you look at my dossier, you’ll see I dealt with very, very few rock and roll artists.

A romanticization of Jerry Wexler? Perhaps. But lesser men have been romanticized for lesser reasons. And there is no wrapping your brain around Dusty in Memphis without considering Jerry Wexler’s role in the album’s genesis. To Dusty’s credit, she knew who she wanted. The “key man” clause is more than a clue to the whole situation—it’s a statement of purpose on Dusty’s part. Likely she had her own epiphanies while listening to Atlantic records and reading over and over the black typeface on the back. For a certain generation of music fans, that typeface is today capable of an effect Proustian in kind. And Jerry’s was a name that appeared in all the right places. But there is more to be said about her choice.

* * *

Jerry Wexler was no different from Dusty in the sense that he, too, had grown up in a culture drawn to the myth of the South. The South was, like the American West, a fantastic elsewhere. But because it was also the place of incubation for the most crucial American music, the South was, for many who were drawn to its sounds, the ultimate fantastic elsewhere. The place had the best soundtrack. All the lore surrounding the region was as available and as enticing to Dusty as it was to Jerry. Furthering their common bond, there is no question that Jerry first arrived in Memphis as a creature out of his element, an alien, just as Dusty would years later. And, logically, her best guide to the South, her Virgil, would not be an insider but an outsider who had gotten in, a breed with no better representative than Jerry Wexler. The outsider-getting-in thing is, after all, one of the key sounds of Dusty in Memphis. The album’s unique hybridity depends on just this. Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music, without a doubt the best historical work on the subject of rhythm and blues in the Atlantic heyday, is rich in passages that describe Jerry’s involvement in Memphis, Muscle Shoals, and elsewhere. Take, for instance, this description of Jerry Wexler’s first contact with Stax records:

At a time when Stax records was acquiring an aura and a legend all its own, no one at Stax—including Jim Stewart, Memphis bank manager who joined his sister, Estelle, to run Stax—had the slightest idea what was going on in the outside world. To them it was not Wilson Pickett who was the star; Wilson Pickett was just another rhythm and blues singer. It was Jerry Wexler and the Atlantic label, after which they patterned their whole sound, who were the stars. Jerry Wexler was an exotic presence; his very speech (a “Jewish brogue”) was like a foreign tongue to Memphians who had never even seen New York City. This was the ultimate validation.

The category of the exotic is, of course, notably open-ended, fluid. The exotic can be idealized but, just as easily, cast into the shadows of deep suspicion. As Guralnick goes on to describe, “when Jerry Wexler, venerated by Jim and perceived by all as the benevolent godfather who had beamed approvingly on all of Stax’s successes to date, left in somewhat high dudgeon after the third Wilson Pickett session in December 1965, the entire Stax family rallied round and cast Wexler in a new light, as an exploiter or ‘outside agitator’ perhaps.” Likely it is somewhere between the peaks of idealization and the valleys of suspicion that Jerry lived at that time and in those circumstances. The biggest trouble in sticking to the valleys when assessing Jerry’s involvement down South comes in failing to recognize his deep devotion to both the region’s music and the region itself.

As is suggested in his memoir, Rhythm and the Blues, throughout his teens and well into his twenties Jerry Wexler was a young man who, as the saying goes, had trouble applying himself. Distracted by the allure of jazz culture and all that went with it, he went about things in the classic style of the underachiever. He was, in his own words and sidestepping euphemism, a “cosmic fuck-up.” Helping him along in this, it seems, was a doting mother. If labels are to be handed out, Elsa Wexler was what the language of self-help describes as a co-dependent. She managed to hold out hope against hope, giving her son repeated chances to prove himself in the world and fully believing that her golden boy was only temporarily under wraps, would soon shine for more than maternal eyes alone. But she’d be in for a wait. If the Wexler memoir is to be believed, Jerry’s prolonged adolescence was perhaps his mother’s greatest production. In that same volume Elsa responds to the suggestion that her bond with Jerry was so powerful as to be Oedipal in nature: “Freud, shmeud. I loved Gerald, but I never wanted to fuck him.”

There was, of course, a period there, before the glory days of Atlantic, when it seemed that Elsa’s faith would be redeemed. That was when Jerry applied himself to something other than music, showing promise not simply as a student of journalism but as a writer of short fiction. And while this story-within-the-story is nothing that needs full elaboration here—I recommend you get a copy of the memoir, which is a page-turner in the best sense—there is a point in considering this pre-Atlantic period. The Jerry Wexler that would be drawn to the South for its music was, in many ways, already gestating within Jerry Wexler the writer, as the fiction from that period suggests.

When I asked him if I could get my hands on any of his short fiction, Jerry was quick to send a few pieces to me, pieces we later discussed over the phone. In introducing Jerry Wexler as “extravagantly verbal,” “his lexicon a mixture of the mean streets and the graduate library,” co-author of Rhythm and the Blues David Ritz begins to describe the seeming pleasure with which Jerry approaches the plasticity of language. Words that are decidedly archaic and often esoteric will emerge in Jerry’s everyday speech, uncanny fragments, displaced and capable of producing the striking contrast upon which Ritz comments. The young Jerry Wexler’s fiction, however, is more often marked by the stylistic economy one associates with American modernism, particularly Hemingway’s short fiction.

In the story “Lost Summer,” published in 1947 by The Kansas Magazine, a first-person narrator reflects on a season past, “the summer of Elaine and me and George the elevator boy of the building across the street.” Weighing the awkward yet epiphanic passage from boyhood to manhood and the characters with whom he made that passage, this narrator quickly reminds one of William Styron’s protagonist in Sophie’s Choice, both in terms of the latter’s entrance into adulthood and the complicated sexual/emotional triangle that serves to insure such an entrance. If the story follows the basic pattern of much coming-of-age writing and risks the sentimentality germane to any such retrospective narration, it still works. The author might tell you otherwise, of course. Though he published work in Story and The New York Post, among other publications, Jerry remains circumspect if not downright self-effacing about his then burgeoning career as a writer—“The truth is that I wasn’t much of a worker or much of a writer.” But while one gets from these stories the feeling that behind them stands a green author, stricken by the romanticism that so often plagues young people with quills and inkpots, there is evidence enough that Jerry learned his craft. The characters stand up, and conflict makes them move. Anyone who has taken a creative writing class knows that this isn’t an everyday occurrence among the legions of people who hope to one day call themselves fiction writers.

That little bit of literary criticism aside, “Lost Summer” speaks directly to Jerry Wexler’s interest in the South. The obsession that would indeed lead to a career permeates the story’s content. Particularly in the character of George the elevator boy, one finds traces of the future Atlantic Records executive’s fascination with the American South and its music. Not surprisingly, George the elevator boy is a musician from Memphis. The narrator speaks of him thus:

I know now that what he played was the blues, the real old blues. I have never heard another white man play and sing the blues like George. That was before everyone knew about jazz, and George didn’t know he was playing native American art, and of course I didn’t either. He just played simple harmonies and sang in his rich Southern voice about the people who were flooded out and didn’t have no place to go, or about the young man lonesome in a strange northern city and with no money to pay the landlord.

On some level, George, the man who didn’t even know that what he did was Art, is exactly the kind of person Jerry Wexler would go looking for when he cut tracks down South. An artist not conscious of his works as art, an art made with no market in mind, an art so close to the fact of nature that it doesn’t yet know to parade as Culture: this is the sound with which the South has long been associated, the sound that has been described in a number of ways, many if not most of them hinging on the sanctified concept of “authenticity.” Such a sound is, in fact, that to which Sam Phillips was referring when he described a Tony Joe White track as “so good it don’t sound paid for.”

If a gulf exists between what Jerry did at Atlantic and what a song collector like Alan Lomax did for the Library of Congress, both men were affected by what in American culture has been a longstanding fascination with the South as a land more directly tied to our agrarian past, as an almost pre-modern entity, certain pockets of which know a life that is raw, without effect. If in the early twentieth century European artists expressed a fascination with the “primitive,” a fascination with Africa, with the West Indies or Tahiti, for instance, in the United States a related primitivism, perhaps more subtle because not born of colonialism, fixed on the South, a place where, it seemed, life was lived with instinct as guide. The collective vision of the South as a place of authenticity had it that in this place artists did what they did not because they thought they were artists making art but because their deepest impulses and needs lead them to do so. Such is one common primitivist myth that has left a deep mark on music culture.

In his memoir, Jerry includes a passage in which Ahmet Ertegun speaks, with an unabashed and almost surprising self-reflexivity, directly to the matter of American primitivism and the Southern romance that is so often at its heart. Ahmet describes an early Atlantic Records A&R trip to New Orleans taken with then-partner Herb Abramson, a trip during which they “discover” the legendary Professor Longhair:

We asked around and finally found ourselves taking a ferry boat to the other side of the Mississippi, to Algiers, where a white taxi driver would deliver us only as far as an open field. “You’re on your own,” he said, pointing to the lights of a distant village. “I ain’t going into that niggertown.” Abandoned, we trudged across the field, lit only by the light of a crescent moon. The closer we came, the more distinct the sound of distant music—some big rocking band, the rhythm exciting us and pushing us on. Finally we came upon a nightclub—or, rather, a shack—which, like an animated cartoon, appeared to be expanding and deflating with the pulsation of the beat. The man at the door was skeptical. What did these two white men want? “We’re from LIFE magazine,” I lied. Inside, people scattered, thinking we were police. And instead of a full band, I saw only a single musician—Professor Longhair—playing these weird, wide harmonies, using the piano as both keyboard and bass drum, pounding a kick plate to keep time and singing in the open-throated style of the blues shouters of old.

“My God,” I said to Herb, “We’ve discovered a primitive genius.”

Afterwards I introduced myself. “You won’t believe this,” I said to the Professor, “but I want to record you.”

“You won’t believe this,” he answered, “but I just signed with Mercury.”

The anecdote itself, laced with irony, plays on the conventions of both ethnographic writing and the colonial-adventure-gone-weird one associates with Joseph Conrad. That open field, “lit only by the light of a crescent moon” and leading toward “the sound of distant music,” all but requires a pith helmet.

Of course, in the modern West this is a crucial story genre. And without a doubt, it is also a story that has been grafted to the value systems at the heart of American music culture. If “authenticity” is a term commonly used to organize value in popular music culture, the South has long been mythologized as the place where authenticity lingers in the form of a people and a sound. The South, across that open field that Ertegun describes, is many things, among them America’s garden. A statement made by bluesman Bukka White suggests that the Southern place of authenticity can very nearly be pointed to: “That’s where the blues start from, back across them fields.... It started right behind one of them mules or one of them log houses, one of them log camps or the levee camp.” The potency of the mythology that associates some place down South with authenticity has made that mythology a lasting one, as indicated by high-profile symptoms such as last year’s article, “White Man at the Door: Searching for the Last of the Bluesmen,” published in The New Yorker and written by Jay Mclnerney.

There are, of course, all kinds of ways to tell the tale of authenticity. Bruce Springsteen’s early street persona, for instance, developed with Asbury Park as the center of a rather self-consciously constructed mythscape, is structured with the streets of lower-middle class new Jersey as a place of both alienation and, subsequently, authenticity. Springsteen’s credibility hinges on the fact that he speaks from the margins, from the wastelands of the American dream. Woody Guthrie’s itinerant persona, itself a rather heavily worked-over construction, hinges on Guthrie’s identification with dustbowl refugees, with the disenfranchised in general. Such stories tell us that there’s a place, a place beyond or perhaps below where something more real is happening, something that transcends the commercial world’s house of signs and mirrors, a house in which most of us, the stories insist, are living, living but lost.

Fans, when they’ve found a music maker who comes from that place of authenticity, will protect what they’ve found, declare his or her worth with an adamance, seemingly all out of proportion, that betrays how high the stakes are in this authenticity game. And of course they’re very high; for finding that thing of authenticity which exists just beyond yet is approachable by those special enough to recognize its true value, is, of course, an act that becomes the finder. Which is to say, when one makes a statement regarding some trace of authenticity found, the moment of declaration—“Look what I’ve found!”—is as much about the speaker as it is about the authentic object discovered. Authenticity is conferred by association. Ahmet Ertugen makes good comedy of this exchange system but, at the same time, draws attention to the deep collective desire to find the “real thing.”

Put simply, finding the real thing, the authentic, is one way of participating in it, of, in effect, being the real thing. And this search for authenticity becomes all the more crucial in a world that is terrified of its own artifice, which is to say a world like the modern world, unmoored from tradition and watching, numb, commerce’s ever changing landscape of flashing signs and latest models. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that modern man, dreading the artifice of his own surroundings, has always been game for a little ethnography. Elsewhere, he insists, slipping into his safari clothes, real life is being lived. It’s there, across that field. Of course, when his finger points out at some more authentic plot of ground, he is making his implicit commentary on the diminished character of the place from which he comes. If the authentic is over there, across that field, the over here is, by contrast, a place of flimsy sets and actors working from scripts. Gauguin’s idealization of Tahitian, “primitive” life, for instance, was finally his way of speaking his criticisms of European culture, his two judgments intrinsically bound as one tightly-woven fabric of argument.

* * *

There is no avoiding psychobiography when writing about Dusty Springfield. She was troubled, out of place in her world. The authorized Dusty Springfield biography portrays Dusty’s life as one long, often sad if occasionally and curiously joyous, car crash of a life, a redemptive turn coming late in the game but almost too late. If one is to believe the biography—and why not?—Dusty was a good but deeply conflicted soul, more often settling for diversions from her torments rather than solutions to them. The vulnerability we hear in her voice, it seems, is not some fluke but the sound that pain makes when it comes out of a certain body. If both simplistic and romantic, this art-born-of-pain interpretation of the Dusty Springfield story remains the most viable version. Why banish such a reading simply because the story has been told too many times of too many people? In Dusty’s case, it fits. It’s hard to avoid the reasonable enough idea that singing was perhaps Dusty’s one valve to let off a little of the pressure building inside. Well, singing and, as the biography seems to insist, throwing food.

Given all of this, her tangled, chaotic life story and her alienation from a public that at different times embraced her and forgot her, one can well imagine that the notion of an elsewhere, a more real other place, a place where something vaguely related to freedom could be experienced, would prove a potent concept to Dusty. If children are forever off in some land of their own making, those adults who believe they have left some crucial part of themselves in childhood—and Dusty was unequivocal in thinking this—will often return to those landscapes of childhood for a lost object, will often become involved in transport as a way of life. And, indeed, it seems that the South, that imagined region of authenticity sitting just beyond that field, was one of the elsewheres to which Dusty often returned. She found something in the music and the magic of the South that gave her, if only in the imagination, a more satisfying home. The music she loved was merely the sound, the raw expression of a sense of freedom, that came out of that home. The South was her elsewhere. And Dusty in Memphis, whether consciously produced as such or not, is her tribute to just that place.

Chapter Three:

In the Land of Make-Believe

I had my own madness, my own recklessness when I was young. And I had my elsewheres to make it all more bearable. Without the imagination and the landscapes the imagination allowed, navigating adolescence and pre-adolescence would certainly have been a more hopeless, messy affair. My initial attraction to Dusty in Memphis surely hinged on the fact that upon listening to the album I felt like I was hearing from someone who shared my favorite elsewhere. The singer sounded like she had just returned from there.

* * *

If it all goes back to youth, I should say this much: where I grew up, looking into the neighbors’ windows was simply a part of the game. With time to kill on weekend nights and only a single road extending for miles in either direction, boredom closing in on us, it was inevitable that my friends and I would get around to peeping. And at one point, fixed on a window’s grid, something happened that left a mark on my imagination, something that applies here.

We were pre-teens in rural new Hampshire. It was a matter of being too young to drive and not quite ready for drugs, which weren’t easily found even if you were prepared for their transport, which, when it came, was something like a trial run for actually getting out of that town. Sex, if a matter of constant discussion, was still just something to lie about to keep your standing.

All of which meant that we sat in a lot of bushes and kneeled in a lot of dirt, waiting for something to happen on the other side of the glass. Mostly we saw neighbors watching TV. And when that got to us, my friends and I would give up and watch a little ourselves. That or we’d slide back into playing with the few things from childhood that still pertained as we waited for adolescence to offer us something better, the BB guns and the firecrackers, both of which could be made new so long as there were new ways to relate to our targets (it wasn’t a good time in the local animal kingdom).

For the most part, despite our commitment, all we could boast for our long hours of peeping was that we saw a few middle-aged women slipping into Lanz nightgowns. And while this wasn’t the stuff of anyone’s most bold erotic fantasies, it was a lot when one considers the no-man’s-land in which we were stranded for the time being. Making use of the narrative structure that we learned from Penthouse letters, which both confounded us and left our imaginations infused with possibility, we made these nightgowned ladies matter.

The Penthouse letters of which I speak, crucial in forming my view of the world and its machinations, were kept in a neighbor’s barn. As many of my generation know well, these letters were the literary offshoot of popular pornography and implicitly suggested that sex could—and quite possibly would—happen anywhere, anytime, with anyone. Presented as though they were actually written by the magazine’s readers, the letters were all about unexpected sexual encounters. They had a generic form to them. Each one began with a short set-up, typically something like, “I never thought I’d be writing this letter to you, but the other day I was at the grocery store, minding my own business, when...” By roughly the third paragraph, clothes would be everywhere and the instigator, whether male or female, would be growling out his or her various commands. “Fuck me!”

The letters are based on the simple idea that, no matter what people lead you to believe, everyone is ready for intercourse at all times. The mundane, they imply, is thick with opportunity. Teachers, a recurring favorite, might throw you down on their desks after geography class, laundromats and airports almost guarantee some activity, and, most intriguingly, that woman you do yardwork for twice a month in the summer is just waiting for the right moment and right place: the tool shed where the mower is stored being as likely spot as any. The message was this: just be ready—just be ready and stay in the mood. And we did, we couldn’t get out of the mood. All of which is to say, the little we saw in the windows was easily made into something more, much more, when molded in relation to the world of possibility these letters described.

But if stranded and straining in some middle ground of youth, we’d soon be out of it, the material for our variously plodding bildungsromans available to us at last. Things would happen. Formative events would take place, for even the most unlikely among us. Those who were on the slow boat, however, with hope as their only companion, might continue to believe the Penthouse mythology of sexual possibility. Despite the lack of material evidence reinforcing that mythology, they’d waste a few years preparing for something along the lines of that mildly attractive UPS delivery woman who came by on Tuesdays. Others would discard the Penthouse narrative structure for a story more conventional and less classically pornographic, a romantic tale of finding the right girl at the right time. And most of us, if still waiting for life to increase its pace, would combine the two stories, which meant that, after making mad love in the kitchen, we’d enjoy all the fruits of both romance and commitment with that same UPS delivery woman.

But before all that, there in our no-man’s-land, something happened that distracted us from any such eventualities, some movement on the other side of the glass. From almost no activity and a hundred dull rural nights, we entered another world. It happened when a new family moved into the neighborhood, itself something rare in that setting. They had one station wagon, no kids our age, and, from what we heard, no father. A single mother with two infants. And they came from Tennessee.

Our usual routine of moving through the night from one house to the next, occasionally pushing over a fence post or leaving a dirt clod in a mailbox, was modified in response to the new situation. The four of us concentrated our efforts on the home of the new family and the single lady from Tennessee that we knew was in there.

We sat, first on one side of the house, then on another. In an effort to raise the excitement, the oldest one of us kept talking about the South, about what a “nuthouse” it was. Because he was in the potentially embarrassing position of hanging out with kids one and two years younger, there was pressure to possess a certain authority on matters of weight and consequence. And, in this case, he made every effort to address the mysteries of the South. I had images in my mind, yes, but he animated them in new ways.

In the South, he said—actually he whispered, not simply because we were in the bushes looking in on our new neighbors but because the ghost story style somehow fit the subject matter—the heat makes people crazy. Of course, I knew that, and it seemed that the others did also. No, he said, really crazy, like they sleep with their cousins crazy—they can’t help it. We knew that, too. A few of us were ourselves pretty taken with cousins, so the awkward subject was passed over. And people drink whiskey all day long, like water, he insisted. And then he said something about Lynyrd Skynyrd and how many women they’d get when they’re on the road, because, he insisted, they’re Southern. That we didn’t know.

He had more to offer, most of it sordid. But I knew, on some level, that his South wasn’t his own creation. He brought us to a place that already existed in my imagination. I knew Hee Haw, that bastard child of the Grand Ole Opry, its alien and awful humor and endless cleavage, had seen Deliverance and knew what the banjo signified, knew Daisy Duke from The Dukes of Hazzard, had been unsettled at the end of Easy Rider, and, because raised in a house of books, knew enough of Tennessee Williams to understand that sex was on a lot of minds down there. The South was irrational, violent, untamed, sexy. I’d heard it before. But I could hear it all again.

Sitting in our dirty bushes, the madness of life below the Mason-Dixon line filling our heads, we got so distracted by our journey into the mythology of the South that we very nearly missed her in the window, wearing nothing at all, walking around her room, the lights on, nude. And in that moment, every one of us stunned, as though we had never really expected to see the thing we’d gone looking for, none of it seemed like mythology.

I learned how little evidence it takes to alchemically change myth into fact. One fragment of information, in this case one nude body, can be used to support a legion of unruly hypotheses. Of course, there is no doubt that, in our case, our minds were primed both by regional lore we’d absorbed and our limited encounter with pornography, and in that moment there in the bushes, looking into our new neighbor’s home, the two modes of knowledge somehow fused. From our aged and worn copies of Penthouse we knew that everyone was always already ready for sex. From regional mythology we knew that in the South impulse held sway over reason, that the heat bred a primal sensibility. Disregarding how it might have happened that the wires of knowledge crossed, in hindsight it’s clear enough that they did. That simple act on our neighbor’s part, of not shutting the blinds and being there in the window, her body entirely visible to us, this seemed evidence enough that in the South they lived in nature, with no restraint to guide them. Our dreams, it seems, had come true.

Our new neighbor, from that night forward a shared obsession amongst the four of us, made it a practice to leave the curtains just where they were. What happened that first night was not a one-time event. Were we not sworn amongst ourselves to keep the secret of our Tennessee neighbor, we could have printed schedules of her disrobement. With seventy-five watt bulbs lighting up her second story bedroom and the adjoining bathroom, she moved between three windows, her shadow thrown on the walls behind her and seemingly in no rush to slip into bed and leave us in our stunned, grateful silence. It was so regular that we willfully let ourselves forget that she was likely oblivious to us out there in the dark surrounds of the house. Which is to say, we allowed ourselves to think that the show was for us, was in fact a show, flattered ourselves into believing that, yes, she knew we were out there, that her own appetite led her to this exhibitionism. This was what we wanted. So we used her punctuality to reinforce our fantasy. What she did she did for us, when she knew we were out there.

Of course, consumed by our fantasy, each one of us privately wished the others away, into some temporary oblivion that would allow room for individual action. How else could all that circulated in our heads unfold as realities? Understood this way, our allies were rivals, our brotherhood a flimsy front for divisive ambitions. But no one, it seemed, was going anywhere. And, really, even if the others did suddenly disappear, did leave me alone to act, could I, or any one of us for that matter, have mustered the courage to step from the shadows and go knock on that door, breaking down the thick wall between the world of our imaginations and the world beyond?

The last question was settled in time. There was indeed one among our number willing to distinguish himself from the inaction that marked the others of us as adolescents.

Our scopic practices had gone on for sometime. Without knowing that our adventure would soon come to a close, we were taking our positions in the foliage one evening when the oldest, brooding and silent until that moment, refused to join us. While it was characteristic, he told us that he was sick of our child’s play. The edge in his voice we were familiar with. The two years between him and the rest of us would sicken him at times. And on that occasion his dissatisfaction came out as a stark gesture, pushing us away from him. He told us—I’ll use his words as they’re quite well fashioned— that we were little boys with our peckers in our hands, that he was going up there to the house.

It was another blast of the usual chatter that colored our conversations. The boast and the put-down, though we handled them awkwardly, were tools we all hoped to use with proficiency, perhaps even grace, at some point soon. But I’ll assume that I wasn’t alone in feeling a tickle of dread, as if he might, just might, have meant what he said. What did it say about us if he had what it took to follow through? So we said nothing.

And, then, it was just a matter of watching him walk across her yard, into the glow cast by a streetlight at the front of the house. The door was on the other side, enclosed by a screened-in porch. If we hoped he was bluffing, those hopes were lost when we saw lights going on one by one in the downstairs of the house, the woman passing in front of a dining room window, her bathrobe on, and presumably toward the door on the other side.

Given that we couldn’t see the door, we really had no sense of what was happening. None of us thought to move from the bushes. As we pieced it together after the fact, it was difficult to say how much time passed before we realized what was happening. Probably just a few minutes. What we soon saw was the woman, back in her bedroom, the lights left on in the house below, and a second figure behind her. Then she pulled the curtains shut. And they were always shut after that.

For those of us left in the shrubs outside, this was our consensus: it was true what they say about the South and its people. Unrestrained, promiscuous, driven by impulse, deep in nature. We’d fantasized about it. But, again, we almost couldn’t believe that we were right. We waited for him to come out, finally went around the other side of the house to see him walk back out through her door. In fact, we waited for quite awhile. Nothing. Then it was time for us to get back to our homes.

There was no sense that this was a victory for all. Nothing like that. I imagine the others felt as I did, curiously betrayed. By him and by her. They must have felt this, because without even needing to agree on breaking our vow of secrecy, we leaked the news. More than leaked it, really. We told everyone. And, as it happened, word got back to some of the parents, who, it seems, told other parents. And pretty soon everyone knew. Some adults were overheard talking about the South, about what “they” do down there. And children repeated what was overheard, some flourishes added. It was a topic there for a while.

It’s hard to say how it happens, but in rural areas, maybe better than anywhere else, people know how to ostracize their neighbors, without, of course, ever making it official. And that’s just what happened. Within the year, the family from Tennessee moved again. Maybe there was no connection between the two events. Who knows?

I hadn’t thought about that particular Southern story in quite a while when I saw the “older boy,” now a little thick around the middle, both of us home for the holidays and attending a dreary Christmas party. As I’d allowed myself to get a little twisted on punch, I figured I’d just put it to him and get some details. Details, he asked me? The details, he said, are this: there are no details. As he explained it, we’d been had, beautifully had.

He’d gone up to the house, knocked on the door, and when the surprised woman opened it, he told her that she should know that he’d seen some local boys peeping in her window, that, if she’d like, he’d show her where. That was when she brought him up to her bedroom where they could see down into the bushes. He discreetly showed her the bushes where we were sitting, and she promptly pulled the curtains closed. He was back out the front door and home well before we came around to wait for his exit. He would have come clean earlier, he explained, but his social standing had been so profoundly and positively affected by his purported conquest that he didn’t dare take the risk of telling the truth. Too bad about the lady, he added.

* * *

If the American imagination has long been thick with cowboys, it’s no secret the breed has pulled up stakes and left town. The Wild West was won and, almost as soon, became a tourist destination. New prosperities emerged. In came the Las Vegases, the Hollywoods, and eventually the Silicon Valleys: another West altogether. Ansel Adams did his part to transform the fantastic West-to-be-discovered-and-divided of survey photographers Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson into a commodified and domesticated sublime (which is to say, a thing not sublime at all), ready for bank calendars and poster art. But, quite differently from the West, the South never went anywhere. Walker Evans saw it, Robert Frank saw some of it, and it just sat there. Not that it was posing—it just couldn’t move. The South was too poor and too hot to make any changes. Down there, it seems, the past just stuck around. In this way the South became another kind of sublime.

If a reasonable enough idea, the concept of the New South didn’t really affect the workings of the popular imagination. The old South served too many purposes. One of those purposes? Sometimes in the North, we knew, for instance, that we weren’t racists because we also knew, of course, that we’d never do to blacks what they did to blacks in the South. Which is to say—and here I think of those extreme cases, like myself, living in a place like New Hampshire—if we did one day live in a place that wasn’t all-white, we felt sure we’d be on our best behaviour. But this use of the South, for the purposes of deflecting attention from our own governing antagonisms, merely marked a beginning to the ways in which the region could be used.

There is a book, published in 1938, that bears the title A Southerner Discovers the South. My copy is a first edition, but if there are any other copies out there, likely they are, too. This was not a volume that left a big footprint in the soil of the literary world. Despite this, the first chapter, entitled “We Go Fo’th,” begins with a few incisive remarks:

We Southerners are, of course, a mythological people. Supposed to dwell in moonlight or incandescence, we are in part to blame for our legendary character. Lost by choice in dreaming of high days gone and big house burned, now we cannot even wish to escape. We may not even be found. Certainly, the land called South is no realm for geographers. I know.

The writer, rather artfully, offers the very insight that is this book’s point of departure: “the land called South is no realm for geographers.” To be sure, the gaze of science, and by extension that of ethnography or anthropology, will never really see the region. Or, if one is to use the tools of observation to see the South of which Jonathan Daniels, author of A Southerner Discovers the South, writes, those tools might find out more about that South, the imagined South, by using them in Northern bushes, observing a band of young voyeurs as they watch a lady from Tennessee move from room to room, throwing her shadows around, oblivious to the stories she invites.

Chapter Four:

American Music’s Costume Ball

WZ: Was there any fundamental difference between an early Aretha session in New York and an Aretha session in the South?

Arif Mardin: In the first session, “I Never Loved a Man,” I was not there. In fact, when I saw the same musicians come and play for the rest of the album [in New York], I see these nice white people playing. And I thought it was this great R&B band or something.

WZ: So you’d heard what was recorded in Muscle Shoals and …

AM: And I loved it.

WZ: But you thought it was a black group.

AM: Right! (laughs)

The first song Dusty Springfield recorded (at the age of twelve, and years before she was to shed the somewhat matronly name of Mary O’Brien for the more evocative if cartoonish Dusty Springfield) took her straight into the landscapes of the imagined American South. Recording the 1912 Irving Berlin song “When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam’,” Dusty affected an accent and took on the guise of the Southerner, splashing around in the mythic backwater that would remain meaningful to her throughout her life. And she wasn’t alone in it. The South was already an object of fascination among many British teenagers, future members of the Rolling Stones, the Animals, and Led Zeppelin among them, who for a short window would be Dusty’s musical peers and, along the way, shape pop music for at least the next decade or so. The cross-cultural and cross-race exchanges informing the music of that generation would be nothing less than the next step in a process widely understood to have been initiated by Elvis Presley.

If, for Dusty, delivering final recordings would become a more complex, if not explicitly fraught process as her star rose and fell and rose again in the heavens of the music business, that day things were relatively simple: Dusty made her recording at the local record shop and brought the results home to her mum and dad.

By the time she would arrive in Memphis to make her greatest album (or begin to make it), Dusty’s first musical foray into the imagined South would be met by many other such visits. In fact, the South was really Dusty’s birthplace—one might say that the South was the sine qua non of the very idea of that singular species the Dusty Springfield. She was herself a mythological creature, who, like the region that produced her, could not really be found. If the South was “no realm for geographers,” neither was Dusty Springfield anything they would find in their travels. Dusty was something like a fusion of ideas, most of which were related in some way to the music of the South.

Former Dusty Springfield manager Vicki Wickham (who also co-wrote the Dusty hit “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me”) told me that Dusty’s first love among the musics of the South was country music. Forming her first group, The Springfields, with her brother Tom, Dusty aped some of the conventions associated with country and scored chart success. As Wick-ham describes it, the second Springfields single, “Say I Won’t Be There,” “was a bizarre straw-and-dungarees country song that was almost a parody of its genre.” As early as that, Dusty mixed her love for Southern music with what could only be called theater. Dusty Spring field, an invention that would eventually possess its inventor, was a theatrical event. Dusty and costume are inextricably bound.

WZ: You knew Dusty as well as anyone did, do you feel that the business of pop music was attractive to her in part because it allowed the play of costume, of masks and theater?

Vicki Wickham: Definitely. That was a large part of it for Dusty. Because she was an actress, and she was most successful when she was playing that other part, her alter ego of Dusty. She didn’t do very well as Mary O’Brien. She was a shy, retiring person who would rather sit around the kitchen table than go out in public.

WZ: What are your thoughts on the origin of the name Dusty Springfield?

VW: I’m quite sure Dusty and Tom sat around thinking of these stupid names, came up with Dusty Springfield, giggled themselves silly, and thought it doesn’t really matter. What I’m saying is that I don’t think there was any great philosophical thought to it or anything. It was just something that sounded silly and fun at the time.

Notorious as a practitioner of the makeup arts, Dusty would not emerge into the light of the world without her trademark mask of cosmetics. As songwriter and musician Chuck Prophet writes in his recent liner notes to the vinyl re-issue of Dusty in Memphis, “Legend has it Dusty never washed off her old mascara, she simply applied more everyday.” Reinforcing the legend, Jerry Wexler describes the Memphis recording sessions: “We learned not to wait for Dusty to show up before we started. Dusty was preoccupied for hours every morning in a makeup procedure that was virtually an exercise in lamination.” Rare is the description of Dusty Springfield that fails to mention her almost painterly use of mascara. And rare, too, is the profile of Dusty that fails to understand this cosmetic over-indulgence as an act of masquerade, as an obsession with costume that, finally, all but buried the character beneath the character, that less spectacular Mary O’Brien of whom Dusty would come to speak in the third person and with an unabashed, even swooning melancholy.

If the matters of masquerade and costume are often made central to the Dusty Springfield story—and for good reason—far less attention has been given to the stage sets that served as backdrop to the Dusty theater event. Dusty’s retreat behind a mask was simultaneously a retreat to an elsewhere. And Dusty was not alone in making the American South her elsewhere. Like the British groups mentioned above or the Band, a primarily Canadian collective, Dusty was drawn not simply to the music of the South but the images attached to the place, to the South’s radical otherness.

In his book Invisible Republic, Greil Marcus cites musicologist Peter van der Merve’s point regarding the region and its people: “I still believe that the biggest danger lies in underestimating the strangeness of these cultures. It takes constant effort of the imagination to realize … their lives.” Perhaps inadvertently, van der Merve hints at the crucial idea that the South, to be grasped, requires the work of the imagination. Likely van der Merve does not intend for his reader to cull from such a statement what I do here, but he brings us to the notion of the South’s inseparability from the work of the imagination. For this reason, I speak of the imagined South. Symbolically loaded, the South is impossibly tangled in its own mythologies, made strange from the pressure of meanings overloading the place.

Thus I go to the “in Memphis” of Dusty in Memphis. There is, after all, no doubt that, for me, part of the allure of the album was the allure of the South itself, which I’d been imagining since I was a kid. And I wasn’t alone in this—not then, not now. The South, still associated with the agrarian roots of our culture, with life in nature, is often imagined as the place of some greater and lasting authenticity. One might say that in the face of an encroaching artifice that threatens to reduce the greater landscape to sameness, the South maintains some link to the past, exists as a primal trace that proves our own authenticity. In this sense it matters more than ever. But the region has long functioned in just this way. The South is the place we use to prove that we are more real than we feel. Its madness, whether projected or not, is our culture’s sign of life.

WZ: Having grown up in New Hampshire, I know that it’s common in the North to mythologize the South. Whether learned from The Andy Griffith Show or from Deliverance, there’s a sense that the South is more natural, more traditional, more simple, and maybe a bit scarier. Did you ever feel that people who came to Memphis from the North or overseas had preconceptions about the South?

Chips Moman: They all did. When they’d come down, they all thought we had straw in our hair. But after a few hours of working …

An article about Lucinda Williams, written by Bill Buford and published in The New Yorker in 2000, is infected by a fascination with the South, particularly with the South as a lasting trace of an authentic American past. Buford maintains that “it’s impossible not to be impressed by that profoundly unmodern, unreconstructed feeling that you still get from the South.” Driving around Mississippi, he sees “an unchanged, unchanging picture that could have been taken any time in the last hundred years.” A picture of what? A Southernness, he suggests, “which finds its aesthetic not in what is pleasing or symmetrical or obvious but in the miserable thing that—indirect and out of focus—is distinguished by its own authenticity.”

The article’s recurring theme of authenticity (a term that is, of course, relentlessly vague but profoundly meaningful in use) as an element of the Southern essence is hardly new to music writing. But in a moment of keen self-awareness, Buford describes a kind of willful seeing that informs his encounter with the South, a seeing that takes in only the details which support a previously established, romantic image of the region.

In a juke joint, Buford sees a black man with a “Little Richard bouffant hairdo,” but not the tourists with elaborate photographic equipment milling around the floor adjusting lighting. Around the ramshackle stage he sees New Years decorations that, long after the year’s turn, “still hadn’t been taken down,” but not the banner that reads “Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.” In, again, describing the South as a “picture that could have been taken any time in the last hundred years,” Buford illustrates the fact that seeing the South is a particularly photographic kind of seeing, involving a mental framing based on leaving some things in and some things out. More than this, he begins to reveal the effect on the popular imagination of a documentary tradition leading back to Walker Evans, a tradition that took a mythology of region and helped to secure a new place for it under the banner of a realist aesthetic.

That said, one can hardly give photography credit for creating the South of the popular imagination—the point is simply that American photography, particularly that strand associated with early documentary and its offshoots, made it all the more difficult to understand the mythology of the South as mythology. Photography’s status as evidence, contestable but seldom contested, has helped to create a situation in which the absurdities of, say, Erskine Caldwell’s South have been grafted to Walker Evans’ and other documentary photographers’ images and made less absurd, photography destabilizing the fictional status of Caldwell’s South.4 Given such promiscuity between the mediums, it is no surprise that in twentieth century popular culture’s representations of region, the South has become both an object of collective obsession and a thing to go looking for.

Caldwell’s South is conveyed through a literary form that sometimes borders on a softcore pornography—the clownish characters of God’s Little Acre are all tits, ass, and low IQs. A tantalizing place in a number of respects. If Caldwell proves an extreme example—his work hovers between “pulp” and the hallowed realm of “literature,” part of what makes it interesting—the notion of a region refusing change, grasping its past with an exaggerated, even desperate passion, underpins a whole Southern Gothic literary tradition associated with the more celebrated Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, among others. And it was through such an esteemed national literature that the South of the popular imagination became evermore crowded by that notorious cast of characters: the religious zealot, the violent bigot, the inbred hillbilly, the slow-witted black man, the exceptional black man whose integrity is bound to the soil, the white aristocrat frozen in tradition. Faulkner’s “little postage stamp of native soil,” a seemingly unchanging breeding ground for both the quirky and the obsessive character, puts a reluctance to step into the modern at the heart of the Southern essence. John R. Stilgoe insists that these writers did not invent such a South so much as they openly recognized an essential regional character overlooked by others:

Cable, Faulkner, and other Southern writers know what so many east- and west-coast Anglo intellectuals try to hide: the landscapes of Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, even Florida … still reflect a richer, more shadowed past than that reflected by the rural landscapes of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania …

But the South of extremes is nothing for which fiction alone can be blamed. In a 1923 essay, sociological in nature, that would become a part of The Nation’s “These United States” series, Clement Wood argues that “What is true of Alabama is largely true of Georgia and Mississippi, of Tennessee, the Carolinas, Florida, northern Louisiana, and Arkansas.” These Southern states, he writes, possess a “static sterility,” are possessed by a “stubborn medievalism.” This notion of a “stubborn medievalism” and a “more shadowed past,” so long associated with what W. J. Cash describes as the “backward South,” has remained at the center of the imagined South. Of course, the persistence of this vision of region does not mean that the value given such representations remains static—one might say that the “backward South” can be resignified. Particularly in periods of anxious change, backwardness offers a certain comfort. Out of the raw material that stresses the failure of Southerners to let go of the past comes pleasing visions of traditionalism.

Robert Dorman’s study of 1920s and 1930s regionalism makes the point that in that period the idea of region was both opposed to the more threatening aspects of industrial growth and urban expansion and used to suggest “a richer, freer, and more humane way of life.” Thus, even in its day, something like Clement Wood’s condemnation of the South, his talk of the South’s “stubborn medievalism,” was met and matched by an idealization of the place, an idealization that finally served as a kind of symbolic buoy in the face of modernity’s relentless change. And it was the South that proved the steadiest buoy. Donald Davidson, one of John Crowe Ransom’s fellow Agrarians, made explicit the need to imagine/recall a Southern past in order to manage upheaval: “… in America, the South, past and present, furnishes a living example of an agrarian society, the preservation of which is worth the most heroic effort that men can give in a time of crisis.” If the lifestyle Davidson hoped to preserve has today gone from being threatened to being little more than a collective memory, this idea of a place where the past and all of its traditions lives on remains a potent idea.

WZ: What do you think it is that the South provides that has enlivened American music?

Chips Moman: I think it’s a different outlook about the music itself. Because none of these boys [from the American Studio house band that played on Dusty in Memphis] were from the city. These boys were all from the country. Reggie grew up in Arkansas in farmland. Bobby Emmons lived down in Mississippi in farmland. All the boys were country boys and had great sense of humors. And if there’s anything different—it’s something I can’t describe—’cause I’ll tell you, some wonderful music came out of New York and L.A. and Chicago and Detroit. But one of the things we do, we never worried about what anyone else is doing. We only worried about what we was doing. And I think that made a difference that we wasn’t trying to copy anybody’s music or anything. We just went at it in our own way.

Alternately a utopia and a dystopia, the South is subject to powerful representational tides, pulling it both ways. As with exoticism of any kind, the exoticism of region is open-ended, fluid. The land of violence, inbreeding, and race hatred can become the bucolic garden of nation. There is a stunning ambivalence to the imagined South—the place inverts, always potentially its own opposite. In remarking on such representational extremes as they’ve been prevalent in recent pop culture, Peter Applebome describes a movement between “views of the South as a hellhole of poverty, torment, and depravity and [views of the South] as an American Eden of tradition, strength, and grace”: “Look one way, the South is the heart of darkness in Mississippi Burning. Look the other, it’s the embarrassingly stereotypical but oddly redeemed drama of family values, roots, racial peace, and national healing of Forrest Gump.” The South is the screen onto which any number of things can be, and have been, projected.

If any song is indeed the master key to Dusty in Memphis, it is the Burt Bacharach / Hal David song “In the Land of Make-Believe.” While “Son of a Preacher Man” (originally brought to Aretha Franklin, who, after initially rejecting it, did eventually record the song5), “Breakfast in Bed,” and “No Easy Way Down” are songs that suggest the classic Atlantic soul sound of, say, the Aretha recordings, “In the Land of Make-Believe” goes somewhere else altogether.

WZ: What track on Dusty in Memphis do you find to be the most successful?

Arif Mardin: For me, I like “In the Land of Make-Believe” because I fashioned the string arrangement after Ravel. And we had the sitar. “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore”: I love the vocal and the backgrounds, which were very interesting, almost like a Greek chorus.

Arif Mardin’s arrangements, in no way limited by any single musical frame of reference, court the fantastic. In fact, rather than adopt a musical version of the realist aesthetic, Dusty in Memphis generally manages to show that any journey to the South is a journey of the imagination. This is no Farm Security Administration or Library of Congress journey of documentation. And, because it isn’t, Dusty in Memphis tells a truth about the South that is seldom told. Rather than forgiving “In the Land of Make-Believe” and “The Windmills of Your Mind” for departing so flagrantly from the R&B base of the album, as I initially did, I now find myself celebrating them as the songs that explain this deep record. The psychedelia of “The Windmills of Your Mind” is finally no different from the psychedelia of “Son of a Preacher Man.” Which is to say, yes, “Son of a Preacher Man,” so full of Southern sound and image, is psychedelia at its purest, a foray into the maddest reaches of the imagination. Because that’s where the South can be found.

Dusty Springfield, an artist associated with masquerade, costume and theater, is finally the artist who, even if inadvertently, best demonstrates the manner in which the South is a stage set, in which popular music culture is thick with theater. Alan Lomax, Norman Mailer, and Pete Seeger: I draw these names from among the many who have, differently from Dusty, obscured the fact of what Robert Cantwell calls American culture’s “social theater.” They have all gone into the land of make-believe, but have tended not to talk about it as such.

Pete Seeger, the son of a man who worked for Roosevelt’s Resettlement Administration, experienced what in Cantwell’s words was the “embarrassment of privilege,” “despising the class and education that made him but filled with the romance that only class and education can impart.” Describing his folkie persona as “an attempt to shed my Harvard upbringing,” Seeger embodied the folk revival’s primary paradox: it was the privileged classes to whom the romance/fantasy of poverty was most meaningful, but those same classes had to deny their own privilege in order to affiliate themselves with the experience of poverty. The denial of privilege involved, of course, a practice of masquerade; yet since authenticity was, for the folk revivalists, based not on costume but on the truth of experience, young men like Seeger sought the freight cars, attempting to accrue the experience that Mark Twain’s Huck Finn got out of necessity. More significantly still, for many among the “folkies,” such “real” experience then became the basis for a certain moralism, a moralism suggesting that the vagabond experience had allowed a confrontation with life’s “truth”: as a recruiting document of Seeger’s People’s Songs organization claimed, that organization was there to “talk about life as it really is.” On an important level, the realist ethos left no room to talk about the masquerade that lay at the heart of the folk movement. Beneath the realist veneer, however, was the fact of theater, disavowed but impossibly present.

Eclipsing Seeger, Alan Lomax was even more rigorously bound to the realist code, and certainly more bound to a particular story about the black South.

WZ: Is there a kinship, even if distant, between what you did with Atlantic in the South and what someone like Alan Lomax did as a song collector in the South?

Jerry Wexler: I don’t think so, because we had different agendas. We were looking for singers and musicians who could make saleable phonograph records in quantities. Alan Lomax was looking to document the purest elements in American folk music.

Lomax was one of the many who took to the South moved by an anthropological spirit and a sense of mission inherited from his father, the folklorist John Lomax. In The Land Where the Blues Began, the younger Lomax recalls his adventures traveling in the deep South as he collected songs for the Library of Congress. An anecdotal affair, in an odd way the volume recalls certain aspects of the analytical style informing Joseph Campbell’s 1949 The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell charts cross-cultural affinities among the folklores of the world, insistently seeking to demonstrate that recurring motifs connect the folk literatures of the globe one to the next—in fact, by the book’s end, one is struck by the profound sameness of it all, making the book’s argument a success, I suppose.

Of course, this fascination with cross-cultural affinities cannot be understood as Campbell’s alone. Something was in the air in early to mid-2 Oth century Western thought, of which Campbell’s work was only a symptom. Photographer and former Museum of Modern Art curator Edward Steichen’s enormously successful 1955 group exhibition The Family of Man, its catologue an international bestseller, promotes an idea related to Campbell’s, though in this case through photographs. The visual argument of The Family of Man is this: beneath our surface differences, the people of the earth are bound by a shared human experience, which is finally irreduceable. Sameness. Again.

Lomax borrows certain aspects of this affinity-making approach, insistently noting parallels between the cultural practices of the black South and the cultural practices found in what he calls, rather vaguely, “world data.” The anthropological hubris of Joseph Campbell’s almost manic and seemingly encyclopedic cultural romps (his approach suggests that he’s everywhere at once, nothing escaping his intellectual grip) is echoed in this much too tidy concept of “world data.” The complexity of the world is nothing to the anthropological spirit of these men. The primary ambition in Lo-max’s affinity-making, however, is to make explicit the connection between African traditions and those of the deep South’s black population; across many miles and over time, common cultural threads are shown to tie black traditions together. Lomax discovers in the South what he calls a “basic African aesthetic at work.” He comes back to this notion many times and in many ways.

There is little doubt that Lomax, in reducing the cultural practices of the African continent, a sizable piece of land, to a singular aesthetic, has made a sweeping analysis and cut many corners to do so—how else could one? But, while Lomax’s book is born of the same spirit and certainly the same popular-anthropological ethos that produced Campbell’s volume and also The Family of Man, Lomax’s ultimate quest is not for some comforting vision of human universality. In The Land Where the Blues Began, the warm we-are-all-in-this-to-gether universalism is cast aside. Indeed, within a few pages Lomax lets us know that we are not all in it together. Perhaps surprisingly, it is Richard Wright, the well-known black author of Native Son and Black Boy, who Lomax attacks early in his book, demonstrating the divide of which I speak.

It seems that Wright’s misdeed, for which Lomax has no tolerance, is to look down upon the poor black population about which Lomax writes. What Lomax fails to consider, however, is whether Wright is actually looking down on the poor blacks of the South. Wright does sometimes see in that population little or no will to refuse the situation of white power and all its brutal effects. But Lomax misses the fact that what Wright hates is the predicament of his race, not the people themselves. Missing this, Lomax simply condemns Wright for black-against-black prejudice. It is one moment, and not singular by any means, when Lomax uses his authority to unfortunate effect. The folklorist speaks of the “Mississippi working class whom Wright so despised,” finally doing more than just blasting Wright—in the end, Lomax establishes himself as the white man who understands black culture better than those misguided blacks who, as Lomax suggests, refuse their own heritage.

In drawing a rigorous line of inheritance from what he calls that “basic African aesthetic” to the African-American cultural practices of the deep South, Lomax’s argument suggests that, no matter the facts of diaspora, “real” black culture is directly and visibly/aurally related to African roots. Having arrived at what “real” black culture is, Lomax then uses his measure to judge both those black intellectuals who do not (uncritically) embrace his celebration of Southern black culture and those blacks who have adopted new forms of, for instance, church singing, new forms that are evermore removed from a “basic African aesthetic.”

It is an unfortunate track that Lomax goes down. Put simply, Lomax equates the “real” of black culture with those artifacts most unchanged from their African roots. On some level, that might be fine in and of itself, but Lomax too often sees the black Southern culture that has evolved, has taken new forms, as degraded. Here he fails to see that new cultural forms are the very ones that will be a part of the process as the black population discovers a new, hopefully better situation for itself in a white-dominated society. Change is what such an oppressed people need the most. But Lomax celebrates the unchanging, without recognizing the catch.

Lomax’s search for purity, the real sound of an American folk, has without question turned up a rich storehouse of music. But just as there is room to sing the praises of that storehouse and its guardian, there must be room to consider how Lomax was himself touched by in a fantasy about Southern blackness that has long roots in American culture.

WZ: Dusty loved the music of black America. Certainly she wasn’t alone in this. In fact, a lot of people have been drawn by a kind of fantasy about blackness …

Jerry Wexler: A lot of white people have a racial identification. It’s what I call—and I don’t like to use the term—their “window on the jungle.”

Lomax is deeply involved in a quest for the unchanging trace. If a fascination with the static, with cultures living in what is called an “ethnographic present,” marks the anthropology of his day, there’s little doubt regarding the origins of that fascination. Andreas Huyssen addresses it thus:

One of modernity’s permanent laments concerns the loss of a better past, the memory of living in a securely circumscribed place, with a sense of stable boundaries and a place-bound culture with its regular flow of time and a core of permanent relations. Perhaps such days have always been a dream rather than a reality, a phantasmagoria of loss generated by modernity itself rather than by its prehistory. But the dream does have staying power, and what I have called the culture of memory may well be, at least in part, its contemporary incarnation.

In the case of Alan Lomax, the song-collector projects onto black culture what many who live amidst modernity’s upheaval want for themselves, an unchanging world. As Rey Chow points out, behind such projections as Lomax’s stand strong desires—if something of a game, primitivism is not a capricious one: “Our fascination with the native, the oppressed, the savage, and all such figures is therefore a desire to hold on to an unchanging certainty somewhere outside our own ‘fake’ experience. It is a desire for being ‘non-duped,’ which is a not-too-innocent desire to seize control.” Thus does the Lomax dream of a primitive land and people function just as it has in earlier historical periods (and today for that matter) which is to say, as a symbolic way of undoing the rush and uncertainty intrinsic to the modern / postmodern experience.

Of course, the popular fascination with static societies does not inform representations of blackness alone, which is why the South, taken more generally, is the topic at hand. By way of example, Richard Peterson presents a case wherein race is not the immediate factor in a story of a static culture but, nonetheless, region and its unchanging inhabitants are: at the radio station KMPC in Los Angeles, 1930, deejay Glen Rice, missing for several days, returned from a hiking trip into the Santa Monica hills to report that he had come upon a group of Ozarks transplants who had been “out of contact with civilization for perhaps a hundred years.” Within days, the transplants were star performers on KMPC. Here is a case in which “social theater,” clearly born of vaudevillian practices, is playfully passed off as pseudo-anthropological findings. Years later, Lomax will admit to no such play.

But if it’s the South of which I write, blackness is almost always the factor in how the region has been idealized in music culture. As Cantwell describes, black culture has long been made to embody a story about freedom. “From minstrelsy through ragtime and jazz, black music, and the people whose lives it evoked,” Cantwell explains, have become a kind of “imaginary reservoir” into which conceptions of democracy and freedom are poured. What he calls the “expressive freedom associated with the primitive” informs an abundance of fantasies of blackness that are generated perhaps nowhere more consistently and conspicuously than in music culture.

In his book Sound Effects, sociologist Simon Frith perpetuates a common conception in this regard, insisting that, “Black music is immediate and democratic,” and that black musicians are “judged for their directness, their passion.” He goes on to make a point of distinguishing between the sexual freedom expressed in black music and the sexual shame expressed in mainstream country music (which, of course, is a primarily white Southern music). He very quickly reproduces the dichotomy under which much of Alan Lomax’s writing operates: the prudishness of Western culture is opposed to the erotic openness of African-American blacks.

In much the same way as the painters Paul Gauguin, Emil Nolde, and others envisioned their idealized “primitive” peoples, so too does Lomax understand the people of his Deep South. And, in so adding to primitivism’s long story, Lomax enriches the mythology of the Deep South. Yet as he works on what he refers to as his “world anthropology of folk and primitive music,” Lomax—just as adamantly as he finds fault in university-trained black intellectuals who do not recognize the “nonprint, nonverbal heritage” as the heritage most crucial to any study of black culture—repeatedly celebrates his own anthropological work in unabashedly elevated terms: “Never before had the black people, kept almost incommunicado in the Deep South, had the chance to tell their story in their own way.”

In the many statements of this kind that Lomax makes, the song collector is active in making his own enterprise heroic, thus revealing one of the purposes of primitivism: to speak of oneself, romantically. Whether in the case of Nolde or Gauguin or Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Alan Lomax, it is clear that he who spots the authenticity of a place and bellows its name shares in that authenticity. To locate authenticity is, to be sure, to bestow upon oneself the very aura that authenticity conjures—there is always a finder’s fee.

Of course, this rhetorical maneuver, this setting up of a fantasy (like Lomax’s of the South) in order to identify with the content of the fantasy and, in turn, get something that is desired, is itself nothing new. It is in the nature of identification to function thus. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen insists that behind identification is wish-fulfillment. Borch-Jacobsen describes identification as a kind of “detour”: “To achieve its own pleasure, the ego has to take a detour, one that causes its own pleasure to pass through that of another. And this detour is identification …” Put simply, he suggests that a desire for something can be satisfied by an identification with one already positioned to enjoy that something: identification thus affords a satisfaction that does “not so much consist in having the object as in being the one who possesses it.” However, this is not to say that the “one who possesses it” possesses it in fact. Identification as wish-fulfillment often involves a fantasy regarding what the other enjoys. Perhaps it is already clear that identifications with blackness, with blackness as a kind of authentic freedom outside of social repressions and regulations, often follow exactly this model. Perhaps the most striking detail that shows identification to be a process based in fantasy, is that blackness comes to be associated with freedom. If such an association seems far-fetched, though, it is certainly worth considering the degree to which this association is a key to the primitivism that is alive and well in music culture and beyond.

In establishing himself as one who “gets” authentic black culture, Lomax sets the stage for much of the later interaction between whites, particularly privileged whites, and black culture. From Lomax’s doorstep it is but a short step to Norman Mailer’s “White Negro.” And Mailer cuts quickly to the heart of the matter, insisting on the idea, neither surprising nor new, that “the source of the Hip is the Negro.” The Negro, he writes,

could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream, and despair of his orgasm.

One might finally say that if anthropology arrived under the banner of the Enlightenment, a soft science meant to catalogue the world’s human variety, it often presumed for itself a philanthropic spirit. But beneath anthropology’s pith helmet was a head swirling, full of distorted preconceptions and fantasies. For if the Gauguins, the Lomaxes, and the Mailers of the world have at various times identified with blackness, it has been with a blackness constructed in relation to their particular needs—if the oppressed by definition possess limited power, the white man’s capacity to project onto black culture the fantasy of his choice is merely the most profound display of power that distances him from the oppressed of whom he sings. If Alan Lomax has been celebrated as a man who preserved for American culture certain invaluable materials, there is, again, no reason that this celebration cannot pause long enough to recognize also certain fantasies that propelled Lomax, fantasies he himself never inventoried, fantasies that—no matter that the song collector might have moved with philanthropy as his engine—served their inventor.

Isn’t it worth remembering that in 1934 John and Alan Lomax described the desire at the heart of their then-current project as a desire to “find the Negro who had had the least contact with jazz, the radio, and with the white man”? And remember, too, that that same year, after facilitating singer Leadbelly’s release from Angola State prison, John Lomax secured for Leadbelly a singing engagement at the Modern Language Association’s New York meeting, initiating a series of performances in which the blues singer would arrive in either convict or sharecropper’s clothes? This Lomax family approach to public presentation is reminiscent of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century World’s Fairs that provided a forum in which, among other things, the “fruits” of anthropology and colonialism (sometimes human, as with the Hottentot Venus) could commingle, there on view for a ready European public. But one is reminded also of P. T. Barnum’s popular entertainments and human oddities, even of early modes of display in New York’s Natural History Museum. In each case, race became a matter of entertainment / knowledge, the two being all but inseparable in this case.

If each of these phenomena of display operated under different espoused intentions, some deviating more than others from that purportedly philanthropic agenda, all relied on the notion of the authentic trace of difference. Clearly, the idea of discovering something never before touched by “civilization,” an idea hot in the hands of a Lomax or a Levi-Strauss or a P. T. Barnum (or an Ahmet Ertugen, for that matter) has propelled in the West a potent primitivist myth, a myth of first contact. For a song collector like Alan Lomax, the discovery of authenticity and the journey away from the urban environment, into the South, were synonymous, one and the same experience. Indeed, race and region together are the key figures in the Lomax story of authenticity.

If the “social theater” of American music culture involves a preponderance of class and race fantasies, many enacted with the South as stage set, is this drama, as a way of dealing with social difference, not, at the end of the day, superior as a tendency to explicit racism? The question cannot be avoided, must be asked. To restate it: is the American propensity to use marginalized peoples as an “imaginary reservoir” into which conceptions of freedom can be poured, is this fantasy impulse not another thing altogether when contrasted with material manifestations of race and class hatred? Isn’t the idealization of the Other finally a vaguely positive thing, even if distorting, when set opposite the fact of overt racist hostility?

This is one question to ask because it is a question that inhibits and confuses any real understanding of the whole cultural enterprise of representing the margins of America. For how, to that question above, could one not answer an unequivocal “Yes”? Yet, the problem with the question lies in the fact that at the level of its own internal logics, it separates the two things as tendencies, separates the fantasy/idealization of race and class from any explicit acts of racial or class hatred, without for a moment considering the fact that the fantasy/idealization of race and class is perhaps not separable from those explicit acts of hostility. Perhaps the question itself is faulty.

To name one instance in which the connection between idealization and the racist act revealed itself, consider the way in which idealized representations of the black man of a natural American Eden, associated with the soil and enjoying a sexual freedom, have shared an anxious proximity with representations of the dangerous black man of pure sexual energy, a figure purported to be driven by a powerful, natural libidinal instinct, an uncivilized drive that is finally a threat to womankind. The latter visions are, of course, the very ones that fueled many lynching campaigns.

The point here is that “generous” representations of poor black and white Southerners as “natural” can be resignified with surprising ease, turning a positive naturalness into threatening naturalness. As regards representation, it is the privilege of power to play its game of resignification—but it is the “natural” ones who live with the consequences of this game. When one begins to look for it, such uses of the South, of both the black and the white South, emerge with great regularity. In an essay accompanying a recent book of photographs, writer Bobbie Ann Mason describes her youthful experiences of “black music” in terms that finally, and importantly, expose a common mode of identification in which an idealized black South is used to obvious effect: “The music was alien and yet somehow closer to my experience than were the tea parties of more privileged little girls. I sensed that in encouraging me to love this music as he did, my father was teaching me something important.”

Mason’s identification with black culture both forges her association with the margins, romantic in nature, and removes her from the world of privilege, finally establishing for her what might be called a position of privileged marginality. In her identification lies a primitivism based on an idealization of the impoverished, marginalized Other. In the end, of course, the constructed authenticity of a “real” Southern black culture becomes Mason’s authenticity, an act of exchange between Mason and an idealized image that leans heavily on a fantasy of the margins. Thus this fantasy of Southern “otherness” is finally a poorly concealed, wishful narrative of the Self. Michele Wallace’s poignant attack on Mailer’s “White Negro” might finally fail only in not recognizing that Mailer’s is merely a strong example of a common mode of identification—if it is a problem, it is much bigger than Mailer:

It may be one of the signs of a truly decadent society when major so-called radical voices begin to romanticize oppression. Mailer had, in “The White Negro,” become such a voice. Since the new, sanitized, civilized man was killing us off, Mailer exhorted us to return to that brave and noble primitive creature of the jungle. Never mind that such a man had never really existed, except in the warped imagination of Western males, and certainly did not exist in Harlem.

The primitivism Wallace locates in Mailer’s writing, as was argued above, is hardly without historical precedent. In the arts, in particular, so long as the artist figure is romantically construed as an outsider, the tendency to identify the artist with the margins of society and to construct a fantasy of the margins that flatters the artist will be a common strategy. And, most importantly, the authenticity conferred upon the artist through this identification with the margins is best maintained if the very constructedness of the marginal figure, the fantasy of otherness, is denied or, at least, veiled. And an appeal to the Realist tradition and, quite often, the objectivity of the photograph—“it’s not my fantasy, you see, it’s out there!”—provides just such a veiling effect.

If there is an explicit argument waiting to emerge from these analyses, it relates to the idea that perhaps fantasy can exist as fantasy, can avoid that slippage through which fantasy comes to masquerade as a social truth and, in the worst case, become trouble for those on whom that very fantasy (recall the lynching campaigns) is projected. This is not to say that such fantasy must end, is wrong in any hands. There is no reason to condemn the man whose elaborate dream of an elsewhere helps him to understand and interpret the world in which he lives. As one of J. M. Coetzee’s characters asks himself: “How am I to endure the ache of whatever it is that is lost without a dream of a pristine age, tinged perhaps with the violet of melancholy, and a myth of expulsion to interpret my ache in me?” More particularly, how is one to live in uncertainty without creating in the imagination a place and a people who live beyond that flux, where a connection to nature’s unchanging cycles grounds them in an eternal present? To dream of this place is not a weakness, it is a need.

* * *

Dusty Springfield and Alan Lomax both participated in what Robert Cantwell calls “social theater.” Likely they both had the need of which I speak above. In this they were hardly alone. Freud would say we’ve all got it. It’s a longing. And many work it out through “social theater.” The zone of such theater is, of course, crowded, and not all of it by what everyone would consider flattering company. Which is to say, Dusty Springfield and Alan Lomax were in the realm of “social theater” as Roy Clark and Buck Owens were in it on Hee Haw, as Leadbelly was in it when dressed as a convict and ready to play the MLA meetings, as Pete Seeger was in it when he left Harvard to ride the rails with a banjo in his rucksack, as Bruce Springsteen was in it when in his return-to-folk phase he associated himself with the uprooted farmers of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. And for many of these performances, the imagined South has provided a backdrop, the region’s black and white populations the bit players for a drama that has been staged again and again. The place is no realm for geographers.

American music culture’s costume ball extends back at least to minstrelsy’s blackface traditions and vaudeville’s comic dramas of social types. The Grand Ole Opry’s “authentic” singer of country and folk musics, dressed in rural garb, is born from the ashes of vaudeville’s rube character and minstrelsy’s traditions. To be sure, it is to highlight just this role-playing and use of costume, so long been a part of American music culture, that Cantwell uses the term “social theater.” But somewhere along the line, the costume ball assumed a costume of its own, masquerading as the real, as an absence of costume. The vision of authenticity that has been generated by, for instance, folk music culture has been grounded in a realist aesthetic, finally slipping into denial as regards its own theater. If it’s easy to see in Hee Haw a later day vaudevillian spirit, the ideology of the realist-influenced folk movement made it difficult, very difficult, to consider the manner in which something related to that theatrical, vaudevillian spirit lurked behind the high-mindedness of an Alan Lomax or a Pete Seeger. And, in this respect, the folk movement took a sorry turn.

Social theater, though vaudeville is a fine example of it, need not be the clown’s domain alone. Dusty in Memphis proves this. Serious, melancholy, perhaps the finest example available of R&B coming together with pop, Dusty in Memphis goes into the imagined South without dressing the place and its people up in realist garb. Dusty’s album looks nothing like Walker Evans’ album. While the folk movement, the documentary movement, and a gritty American literary scene had, in too narrow a fashion, adopted that realist look as the official uniform of truth, Dusty’s project demonstrates that there is no trip down South that is not a trip into the imagination.

Led by a singer in a mask, the team that made Dusty in Memphis, went after beauty and came up with a little truth.

I was in love with Dusty in Memphis because I was in love on a regular basis. And what a mess that could be. I needed someplace to go with all of it. That album gave me one, a fantastic place, a place I’d gone before. But never had I gone with such a guide.

Afterword: A Short Interview with Stanley Booth

WZ: How did it happen that you wrote the liner notes to Dusty in Memphis?

Stanley Booth: Mr. Wexler called and asked me to write them. What could I say?

WZ: When I asked Jerry Wexler if at any point he felt uncertain about bringing a pop artist like Dusty Springfield to Memphis, into a situation associated with R&B, he suggested that his initial uncertainty, minimal even at the outset, vanished quickly. Why do you think the Dusty in Memphis experiment proved successful, leaving Atlantic with a commercial flop that would eventually enter the canon of great American recordings?

SB: The band at American was infinitely adaptable, as evidenced by the long list of extremely diverse artists they accompanied. Wexler was always trying to direct his artists toward a greater degree of funk (cf. Aretha Franklin, who’d been a quasi-jazz type at Columbia). He saw an opportunity to put Dusty Springfield in a richer context than she’d performed in previously. I don’t know that I would call the album a commercial flop. She got quite a bit of radio play on “Son of a Preacher Man.” The album attained a classic status because her performance was impeccable and the musicianship was, of course, first-rate.

WZ: Was there any feeling around Memphis, whether among musicians, producers, the local intelligentsia, or the local hairdressers, that Dusty Springfield had washed ashore in the wrong town?

SB: I think the only one who felt uncomfortable was Dusty. As you know, she recorded the final tracks not in Memphis but in New York.

WZ: While a teenager, Mary O’Brien (yet to become that other creature, Dusty Springfield) recorded the song “When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Ala-bam’.” The song choice alone—not to mention the joyful, pseudo-Southern accent in which it was sung—suggests that she, like many of her generation, had an early interest in that fantastic thing, the American South. Shortly after writing the Dusty in Memphis liner notes, you went on the road with The Rolling Stones, another British phenomenon with an interest in the South. What did the South have that these young British musicians craved?

SB: As you know, “Midnight Choo-Choo” was written by Irving Berlin. Outsiders’ fascination with the South and Southern music goes back at least into the first half of the nineteenth century. It’s certainly a curious phenomenon. However, it’s not hard to understand how a young immigrant would find it more reasonable (in a commercial sense) to write “Come on and hear, come on and hear, Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” than “I’m a little Russian Jew, and I’m longing just for you.”

WZ: Could you say that on some level they used the idea of the South to re-invent themselves? I say idea of the South because that’s what they encountered first, the mythological body not the place itself.

SB: I don’t think they re-invented themselves as much as they invented a dream of Southern Paradise. “Pale moon shinin’ on the fields below—darkies singing songs soft and low — you’d needn’t tell me, because I know — that it’s sleepy time down South.” Of course we’re comparing apples and oranges here. Irving Berlin is many kinds of writer all by himself. The Rolling Stones are a number of others. But none of these people, I think (including Dusty Springfield), ever believed they were Southerners.

WZ: I found the following quote in a volume called A Boys Book of Folklore: “ In the North, young men dream about the South. The more discriminating among them slide down the darkness and go straight to Memphis.” In my view, these words cover a lot of territory, and with a striking economy. They remind me that the South was my Wild West. Somehow, the region—take Flannery O’Connor’s South—was the perfect backdrop for the fundamental narratives (good vs. evil, instinct vs. reason, pecker vs.brain) that have been told and retold, one culture to the next. Any thoughts?

SB: When was A Boys Book of Folklore published?

WZ: There’s a sexuality associated with the South that is conspicuous when contrasted with that of, say, New England. Of course, the New England Puritan heritage is a tough one to dress up in lingerie. But the point is made concrete if one does research: it becomes clear, for instance, that no pornographic websites use New England as a hook, whereas the South, as in “Girls of the South,” is definitely in evidence on the internet. In another context, when one reads Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, it’s hard to miss the fact that the Southern backdrop is the very thing that allows Caldwell to slide into something akin to a softcore pornography— those sundresses, revealing to begin with, just can’t stay on. How would you explain the sexuality that is so often attributed to the region?

SB: Well, it’s warm. In fact, a gay friend told me he’d never understood Tennessee Williams until he came to Memphis. I’d lent him a second-story apartment with no air conditioning. He said to want to have any sort of sexual contact in the summer in Memphis, you’d have be a pervert.

WZ: Along with many other labels, Atlantic Records made a lot of money from recordings done in the South. In some minds, there was a level of exploitation involved, an exploitation that, to some, remains troubling. Jim Dickinson, referring to Jerry Wexler and Sam Phillips, makes mention of larceny as a production method. Others have celebrated the role played by Atlantic and Jerry Wexler in giving voice to a black population. These are two very different interpretations of how a Northern record company operated in the South. Where do you weigh in on the question of Atlantic Records’ Southern adventures?

SB: Nobody at Stax knew how to read a contract. They’d never had to know until they became successful, and by then it was too late.

WZ: The house band at Chips Moman’s American Studios played on a lot of hits. What are some of your favorites? What was unique about the American band when compared with the house bands of Stax or Hi records?

SB: The best things were really the things [Dan] Penn did away from American, such as the James Carr records.

WZ: What track on Dusty in Memphis do you find to be the most successful? In your view, does the album deserve the status it has achieved over the years?

SB: I like “Just A Little Lovin’” and “Breakfast in Bed,” but the best recordings of them were by Carmen McRae with the Dixie Flyers.

WZ: How would you describe the character of Dusty’s vocals?

SB: Pretty good for a white girl.

WZ: In my view, the South is our most mythologized region. Economic trouble has badgered the place, often leaving it physically stuck-in-the-past (in many cases, who could afford to renovate?), a fact that has allowed people to screen all kinds of visions and fantasies on the region’s surface. When I first went down South, I couldn’t help but project onto the place all that I wanted to see, all that I already knew from fiction, from FSA photographs, from lore. Do you agree that there is no getting at the South directly, that one can only go through the tangles of myth that have grown up over the place?

SB: Well, having been a guest at all the best Memphis jails, I’d say it is possible to get at the South directly. But I don’t recommend it.

1 If such praise seems inflated, it’s worth comparing Dusty’s 1969 Dusty in Memphis to Petula Clark’s 1969 Memphis, which certainly seems to nod to Dusty’s effort. Both albums feature the American Studio house band, a conglomerate of A-list musicians put together by the legendary and multi-faceted Chips Moman. Petula’s album, however, despite a number of compelling musical moments, is not cohesive in the way that Dusty in Memphis is. The stunning combination of Dusty’s vocals, the American band, and Jerry Wexler’s song selection lifts Dusty in Memphis over and above Petula’s Memphis. The fact that Clark’s vocals are thinner, far less emphatic, and certainly less intimate than Dusty’s, finally means that by comparison Memphis can’t keep up at critical moments. With Dusty’s singing, the songs seem like stories that have to be told—she demonstrates what I call the Ancient Mariner effect. petula clark, even with the best team behind her, seems profoundly restrained, unnecessarily reserved and polite. Petula never really gets below the Mason-Dixon line. If I had to guess, I’d say she stops somewhere around New Haven.

2 The question regarding my authority in writing this book is a significant question, of course, appropriately handled in a lengthy preface but here relegated to a footnote. And I’ll be frank: my authority rests on the fact that Dusty in Memphis is an album that spoke to me, even through the thick gauze of cool and cynicism in which I was wrapped when I first heard it in 1985. The editor at Continuum told me that, regarding authority, this was enough: write the book. His name is David Barker. If you have any questions or a fundamental argument with this issue, please direct such matters directly to Dr. Barker.

3 In talking with Arif Mardin, I did encounter a memory conflict among two of the producers. Contradicting Jerry Wexler’s recollection, Arif insisted that while in Memphis Dusty did record guide or ‘scratch’ vocals that the musicians could follow.

4 Of course, Caldwell’s collaboration with Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces, 1937, demonstrates even more bombastically the manner in which documentary photography, combined with text, can be used not to reveal a hidden South but to perpetuate a myth of the backwater South.

5 As Vicki Wickham points out, after hearing Aretha’s version, Dusty would only sing it as Aretha, Dusty’s hero did, turning her back on her own recorded version and the phrasing she had developed.

2007

Bloomsbury Academic

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Copyright © 2003 by Warren Zanes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

Printed in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zanes, Warren.

Dusty in Memphis / Warren Zanes.

p. cm. — (33 1/3)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

1. Springfield, Dusty. Dusty in Memphis. I. Title. II. Series.

ML420.S765Z25 2003

782.42164’092—dc21

2003011464

eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-9420-