Furry Lewis and Leon Russell: Achingly Beautiful

The last couple of days have been so jam-packed with writing and good news that my head is spinning. Yesterday, after writing my “Suffragette” review for Ebert (it’ll be up today or tomorrow), I decided to spend some time on Youtube, clicking around for old blues singers.

I came across this extraordinary clip of the amazing Furry Lewis, singing three songs, cigarette dangling, with Leon Russell accompanying him. Those guitars. The drive of them, the convergence of the two sounds, and the intimate setting. Plus a close-up of one of the most beautiful women who has ever lived, Claudia Lennear. YES. (The whole concert is up, in snippets, on Youtube, but it is this one that grabbed my attention.)

The one-legged Furry Lewis was one of those blues guys who played and recorded in the 1920s and 30s, with his own sound, his own style, before descending into obscurity for decades. He lived in Memphis all that time, working for the sanitation department, and playing for change on Beale Street. A familiar figure around town. Without proper archiving, radio play, many of these guys were lost to history. If you wanted to listen to them, you’d have to come across an old 45 in a second-hand record store (or go to Beale Street and wait for Furry to sit down on his corner and start it up). Many people collected records in this haphazard way (Elvis Presley being one of them, who got familiar with all of these old blues guys when he was still a teenager.) But then something amazing happened in the 1960s (although it started in the 50s, with the explosion of rock ‘n’ roll, much of it inspired by that old rhythm and blues, mixed with gospel, country/western, and pop). But in the 1960s, with of the rise of American folk music (before it became politicized), there was a deep interest growing in the continuum of American culture and folklore, the roots from which it sprung. Furry Lewis’ star began to rise again. Alan Lomax was an archivist, scholar, musicologist, working for the Library of Congress under the auspices of the American Archive of Folk Music, and Lomax traveled around the South (and all over the world, actually), seeking out all of the people from the 1920s and 30s, to get them on tape, to interview them, to highlight their contributions, hear from them. Because of that, their profiles became larger than they ever were in the 20s, before that kind of national attention was even possible. (Even if you got radio play, the transmission of said radio shows were mostly local. It wasn’t until WWII when radio technology developed to a degree that those on the radio in Memphis could be heard by folks in Alaska. That was one of the many things that contributed by the Elvis Explosion. Anyway, back to Furry.)

Furry Lewis started touring again, opening for the current acts of the day. Leon Russell was one of the people who had always been so inspired by Furry Lewis’ old stuff, and so he asked Furry to tour with him and open for him. This introduced Furry Lewis to a whole new generation of audience.

There are a couple of really worthwhile portraits of Furry Lewis. One is Stanley Booth’s chapter devoted to Lewis in his seminal book Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter on Furry Lewis. The other book which gives awesome background/context on Furry Lewis, plus a picture of who he was in the 60s to Memphis, his local stature, his omnipresence, is Robert Gordon’s WONDERFUL book It Came From Memphis. I just read that one last year and it blew me away. Gordon lives in Memphis, grew up there, is still there, and the book is an attempt to talk about the music scene in Memphis (always vibrant), WITHOUT focusing on Elvis. Similar to the other sometimes-fine playwrights writing in Shakespeare’s day, or the other Irish novelists publishing books at the same time as James Joyce, you have to get Elvis out of the way in order to perceive what else was going on. It Came From Memphis is about everything that went on AROUND Elvis, and, even better, continues on through the 60s, 70s, 80s. I mean, come on, Big Star and Alex Chilton. The Mar-Keys. William Eggleston. Too many musicians and artists to count. It Came From Memphis is both memoir and musical history.

But watch Furry Lewis in the clip above. And listen to the strains of Leon Russell throughout. A melding of past and present, a convergence of cultural influences, an acknowledgment from Leon Russell (unspoken, but it’s in his music) that his own career would not have been possible without guys like Furry Lewis.