978.1.62619.534.9 { Paperback, 128 + 16 full -color
pp ,
$19.99 }
JUNE 2014 the history press • charleston, sc www.historypress.net
memphis barbecue smokes the competition April 2014 I am pleased to announce the publication of Memphis Barbecue: A Succulent History of Smoke, Sauce & Soul by Craig David Meek. Memphis is equal parts music and food—the products of a community marked with grit and resiliency. The city’s blues and soul music have lifted spirits, while barbecue has been a serious business ever since pork first entered Memphis's culinary landscape with Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, who brought the New World its first herd of pigs. Succulent pulled pork and ribs have become part of the fabric of life in the River City, and today they are cooked up in kitchens ranging from the internationally acclaimed, like Corky’s, to the humblest of roadside dives. Told through the history of its barbecue is the story of the city of Memphis, from legendary joints like Leonard’s Barbecue, where Elvis Presley hosted private parties, to lesser-known places like William’s Bar-B-Q in the West Memphis, Arkansas neighborhood, where wild, late-night blues juke joints served as a red-light district across the river from Beale Street in the 1950s and ’60s. Sink your teeth into this rich history chock-full of interviews and insights from the city’s finest pitmasters and ’cue gurus who continue the long tradition of creating art with meat and flame. Memphis Barbecue: A Succulent History of Smoke, Sauce & Soul will retail for $19.99 and will be available throughout Tennessee and online at www.historypress.net. Many thanks, Sarah Falter
Sarah Falter Publicity at The History Press
MEET THE AUTHOR • Book Launch with a Talk & Signing Tuesday, June 10, at 6:00 p.m. Booksellers at Laurelwood 387 Perkins Road Extended, Memphis, TN
• Whole Hog BBQ, Live Music & Book Party Friday, June 27, at 6:00 p.m. Hi-Tone Café 412-414 North Cleveland Street, Memphis, TN
• Book Talk & Signing, Followed by BBQ Tasting Thursday, July 10, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Cotton Museum 65 Union Avenue, Memphis, TN Additional events TBA
The History Press is proud to present this new title: M emphis B arbecue : A S ucculent H istory of S moke , S auce & S oul by C raig D avid M eek 978.1.62619.534.9 { Paperback, 128 + 16 full - color JUNE 2014
pp ,
$19.99 }
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C
raig David Meek is a lifelong Memphian. He graduated from the University of Memphis with a degree in journalism and worked as a newspaper reporter, photographer and copyeditor. He has owned a small wholesale automotive parts business for the past decade, making sales calls throughout the Mid-South. For the past three years, he has written about his quest to try all the barbecue and soul food restaurants in the Memphis area on his “Memphis Que” blog. He lives in the Vollentine-Evergreen neighborhood with his wife, Jessica Elvert, their border collie and their two gray tabby cats.
Excerpt from Memphis Barbecue
Chapt e r 4
D e cl ine T
he Loeb’s and Coleman’s chains dissolved during a low point for Memphis. In many ways, the trajectory of their rise and fall mirrored that of Stax Records. Founded as Satellite Records in 1957, the label changed its name to Stax in 1961 shortly after moving from the rural community of nearby Brunswick to its famed home on McLemore Avenue in South Memphis. When mentioning the soul music label in his book on the blues, Barlow wrote that “from 1963 to 1975 [Stax] went through one of the most spectacular boom-and-bust cycles in the history of the American music industry,” bringing in more than $14 million annually during its zenith in the late ’60s, when it was home to a roster including Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Sam and Dave and Booker T. & the M.G.’s. The early Stax singles included the 1964 song “Bar-B-Q” by Wendy René, an infectious ode to the city’s signature food. The label suffered several major blows beginning when its biggest-selling star, Otis Redding, and all but two of the original members of the Bar-Kays were killed in a December 10, 1967 plane crash while headed to perform in Madison, Wisconsin. Shortly after, the sale of Stax distributor Atlantic Records resulted in Stax losing the rights to all its material released between 1960 and 1967. Then, on April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, a common hangout for Stax artists. His murder was a devastating blow to race relations in the city and stifled the once-vibrant atmosphere at the famously integrated recording studio. “Stax Records was one of those anomalies that regardless of the segregation that existed in this town, and other areas of the time, it managed to put that aside and it was all about the music. If you could play, we didn’t care,” said Marvell Thomas, who compared it to “an oasis in the desert” during a March 2014 forum on the history of Stax at Rhodes College organized by Robert Gordon, the author of Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion. Thomas, a gifted soul keyboardist whose session credits include Isaac Hayes’s “Hot Buttered Soul,” is the son of Rufus Thomas and brother of Carla Thomas. “The atmosphere changed a lot,” he said of the period following the assassination. “People who had been friends for years suddenly began to mistrust each other. It was not a good place to be at the time.” King was in Memphis assisting striking sanitation workers. His killer, James Earl Ray, was an Illinois native who had become involved with the white power movement
while living in Los Angeles. Ray had no ties to Memphis and only traveled to the city after failing to murder King in King’s hometown of Atlanta, but Ray’s act of terrorism forever tarnished the city’s image. Stax wasn’t the only local institution damaged by the assassination. Henry Loeb was the mayor of Memphis during the sanitation strike, which resulted in him being labeled a racist by many black residents. In the book Memphis Chronicles: Bits of History from the Best Times, author John E. Harkins, who supervised the processing of Loeb’s administrative files while working as the Memphis and Shelby County archivist in the early ’80s, described Loeb as a man who unfairly earned a “bum rap” among scholars and the media. The Loeb’s Bar-B-Q chain owned by Henry’s brother, William, became an instant target. Stores were vandalized and firebombed despite many of them being black-owned franchises, according to William’s son, Bob Loeb. A column by Dan Conaway in the Daily News on April 30, 2010, described the longtime friendship between William Loeb and Howard Robertson, a black postal carrier and part-time waiter at the old Justine’s restaurant who became a partner in several Loeb’s BarB-Q restaurants earlier in the ’60s. Despite the actual ownership of the restaurants, and the intentions of the Loeb family, the name represented authority in a time of rage against symbols of the establishment. In another blow to the black community the same year as King’s death, the urban renewal plan enacted by the Memphis Housing Authority removed about four hundred buildings from the mostly black neighborhood south of Beale Street, resulting in a period when there were more people in jail downtown than residents, according to Jimmy Ogle. The sixty-one-year-old Ogle is a lifelong Memphian who began managing the parks and recreation department in 1979. In 1985, he became the general manager for the newly opened Mud Island park and museum. In 1998, he went to work for John Elkington, helping with the redevelopment Beale Street. In 2000, he became the director of the Rock and Soul Museum at the Gibson guitar factory, and he now serves as the general manager of Beale Street Landing, where tour boats dock at the western end of the historic street. Stax declared bankruptcy on December 19, 1975. The city’s music industry hadn’t even begun to recover when Elvis Presley was found dead in his Graceland mansion a year and a half later on August 16, 1977. By 1979, there were about five hundred residents in the downtown area and one thousand inmates at the jail. “We built the only building in the city known just by its address at 201 Poplar,” Ogle said of the jail. With the loss of their customer base, the retail businesses that had come to dominate Beale folded, with the exception of A. Schwab, a dry goods store founded in 1876 that is the only original Beale Street business left today. The street was fenced off from 2nd to 4th Street, and customers entered A. Schwab through an entrance along the back alley.
OUR MISSION
T
he History Press brings a new way of thinking to history publishing—preserving and enriching community by empowering history enthusiasts to write local stories for local audiences. Our books are useful resources for research and preservation, but it is their value as touchstones for community identity that drives us to publish works that national houses and university presses too often have ignored. Infused with local color, our books are highly readable, often brief and aimed at a general readership.
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