rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">6 Including the rural areas surrounding Memphis, the potential listenership was almost half a million black Americans. With cross-town competitor WHBQ also spreading the word of black music and a new type of popular music by the name of ‘rock’n’roll’, Memphis soon had twin points of attack on the record buyers of America.
With Beale Street fast fading into musical folklore, a new up-and-coming recording studio shook the world. While the first half of the century had seen the city gaining a reputation as a hotbed of blues and jazz excellence, the second half belonged to rock’n’roll. But then, as now, a high proportion of Memphians either didn’t know or didn’t care what was going on on their own doorstep while the sounds of Memphis were being lauded around the world and especially in the UK, as the Beatles and Rolling Stones would later prove. The Beatles’ cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ was just one example of their love of Memphis music, while the Stones’ championing of the blues was legendary.
It was in 1953 that this musical revolution unwittingly began. Elvis Presley walked into the Memphis Recording Service to make his first single. The owner of the studio was thirty-one-year-old Sam Phillips. He’d opened the studio at 706 Union Avenue in January 1952, catering to people who were willing to pay to record their own piece of vinyl. Presley paid his money, cut his songs and left. It would be another two years before he returned to record a single for Phillips’s own Sun label.
The early 1950s record-buying public was eating up the easy listening sounds of Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby but that was all about to change. Phillips with his Sun label was now recording B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf while his friend the local DJ Dewey Phillips would play them on his WHBQ radio show, ‘Red Hot & Blue’. It was Dewey Phillips who got hold of a test pressing of the first Presley single for Sun, ‘That’s All Right, Mama’, and proceeded to play it over and over on his show. The response was phenomenal; the post-war boredom vanished for the nation’s teenagers and a new mix of music and sex flooded into every American living room.
Suddenly parents and children were not listening to the same music any more. James Dean became a new kind of screen idol and rock’n’roll provided the rebellious soundtrack. Record stores and music shops seemed to spring up on every street. In Memphis the success of Presley helped open the door for the likes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Presley was basically a white man singing black music. Sun Records made the most of the opening as young men from around the South travelled to Memphis to try their hand at being a rock’n’roll star: Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash were just some of the ones that became superstars.
While the 1920s were the golden age of Memphis Blues and the 1950s were the glory years of rock’n’roll, the 1960s saw Memphis emerge as the bona fide centre of soul. The prime mover behind the new direction of Memphis’s music was Stax Studios.
Banker Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton founded Stax (and gave it its name from the first two letters of their surnames, St-Ax) after Stewart had begun recording country acts in 1957. His studio had had its first hit with the Mar Keys’ instrumental jam ‘Last Night’ in 1961. The Mar Keys were the first white band in Memphis with horn players, a black band trademark. Booker-T and the MGs’ ‘Green Onions’ in 1962 was another nationwide success for the studio. The next decade saw Stax have over 150 Top 100 singles. The ‘Stax sound’ came from bands that were used to playing to both black and white audiences, and then synthesizing this mix to a precise degree. Otis Redding, Carla Thomas and Sam & Dave became international stars on the back of it. Stax would later become embroiled in the Big Star story.
The future members of Big Star arrived just before rock’n’roll took off. Chris Bell was born in Memphis on 12 January 1951, the second youngest of six children: Virginia, David, Vicky, Sara, Chris and Cindy. Bell’s mother, Joan Branford, was English. She met US B-17 bomber crew member and Memphis native Captain Vernon Bell in Norwich during the Second World War. The pair married in England, moving back to the United States at the end of the war.
Once back home, Vernon was discharged from his military duties and set up what was the first of a string of cafés and restaurants. The Little Tea Shop opened its doors for business in January 1946, the Knickerbocker restaurant on Poplar Avenue followed, as later did a series of Bonanza Steak Houses and Danvers Fast Food outlets.7
The Bell family expanded as fast as their restaurant business and with the family home fast becoming too small for six children the Bells moved out to East Memphis in 1956. Chris and younger sister Sara were closest in age and were often mistaken for twins, not just because of their similar looks and age, but because they went everywhere and did everything together. All of the Bell children attended White Station Elementary School at the corner of Poplar and Perkins and went on to White Station High School, although Chris changed schools later on. The Bells were a typical well-off middle-class family who attended the local Episcopal church on Sundays.
Chris wasn’t a big music fan – an early favourite was Brenda Lee – but he was an avid comic book collector. ‘I remember Chris being curious about many things as a young child,’ says David Bell. ‘He had a sort of scientific bent along with an aptitude for mathematics. I never had the patience that he displayed in putting things together, whatever they might be.’ This precocious will to learn would later be borne out in his approach to studio work.
On 26 January 1951, exactly two weeks after Chris, Andrew Hummel was born in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where his father, John Hummel, was serving in the Navy. After Andy’s younger brother, Robert, was born in 1952 the family moved back to Elkwood Drive in Memphis and when a third child, Sally, came along they moved to Worthington Circle in midtown Memphis. John Hummel was a doctor who had been put through medical school by the Navy so he was required to serve a certain amount of time afterwards. When his service ended he moved to Memphis to set up his own practice as a gynaecologist.
Their first move to Elkwood Drive was actually covered in some detail in the local press. Andy’s mother, Barbara Jo Walker Hummel, a native of Murray, Kentucky, had been crowned both Miss Memphis and Miss America in 1947 and the local press followed her every move. For example, a full page in the Memphis Press-Scimitar was given over to her brief visit to Memphis in 1947 to look at engagement rings during a stop-off at the airport between promotional duties. ‘Thousands Brave Electrical Storm To Greet Miss America at Airport’ the headline proudly states, covering the meeting of Barbara Jo, her father and John Hummel to look at prospective rings for thirty minutes before flying on. In Memphis she presented a daily TV programme for WHBQ from 1955, called Lady of the House, in which she hosted guests and gave tips to housewives from three till four in the afternoon. Meal planning and food preparation was the main thrust of the show, which was aired just in time for wives to prepare the evening meal for husbands coming home from a hard day at the office. Andy often made a guest appearance on the show before he started at school. Barbara could often be found in the local papers during the 1950s even if it was just a photograph of her dressing her children or teaching them how to read. As well as bringing up three children she found the time to perform in musical comedy stage shows (she was an excellent singer by all accounts), model clothes and later (unsuccessfully) run for political office in the state legislature.
At the same time that Chris Bell was starting at White Station, Andy began at the all-male Presbyterian Day School. ‘Elementary school was kind of a big mystery to me,’ recalls Hummel. ‘I never quite got it and never really fitted in very well. I was very bored and became rather lazy around the third grade. My parents never seemed to take much of an interest in my schooling other than just sending me off, and then screaming at me when my grades were bad. One thing they did do was make me take piano. Starting in the third grade I had a lesson every week and had to participate in recitals, which I hated of course.’
Jody Stephens was born in Memphis on 4 October 1952, the middle of three brothers – Jimmy was two years older and David five years younger. Stephens’s father, James, from Virginia, and mother, Rose, from Massachusetts, met in Washington at a roller skating rink. When they started talking, it turned out that they both were working at the same hospital, the former in the X-Ray department and the latter as a secretary. Jody