YEAR OF THE BLUES 2003

Rufus Thomas talks about Memphis

Rufus Thomas (1917-2001)
Rufus Thomas, the “World’s Oldest Teenager,” enjoyed a lengthy entertainment career that spanned Memphis’ critical music eras of the 20th century: performing variety routines with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels in the mid-1930s; hosting amateur hours on Beale Street, where B.B. King and others honed their musical chops; DJing on WDIA, Memphis’s first all-black broadcast station; providing both Sun and Satellite (soon to be Stax) Records with their first hits; and launching a series of memorable soul and funk dances throughout the 1960s and ’70s (ever walk the dog or do the funky chicken?). Just off Beale Street, a monument to Thomas honors his contributions with the following:

Rufus Thomas
Ambassador of Soul
The King of Rhythm and Blues
The funkiest chicken of the South
A star and veteran of service to this community
A man whose talents have endured
And whose performances have spanned generations
Outspoken and outta sight.

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Read a transcript of the video:
RT: What makes Memphis so great? Well, after W.C. Handy, see back in the early nineties, in the early 1900s, I mean, Handy did the blues. He was the first one to put it on paper. And he did all this right there on Beale Street. You have cities now who say that we are home of the blues: Chicago, Texas, Mississippi. But the people from Mississippi during that time came to Memphis to do the blues. They'd stop off on Beale Street and come in there and, and Beale Street was the black man’s haven. And when he’d come here everything that he thought of that was negative, when he hit Beale Street, man, lit up, lit up like a slot machine or a grandpappy on a Saturday night, boy. Everything was fired up. He left all of those things behind him.

Beale Street was the place, that’s where Handy wrote the blues and Handy passed them on to all of the other blues singers of today. But that was the foundation of the blues, Memphis, Tennessee. And after the blues, you know, blues is, I would think, the foundation of all of it anyway, all the rest of that music: jazz, rock and roll and all the rest of the music you got coming, was built on the blues. If you listen to jazz, listen to what’s under it and see what you hear. You can take a piece of the blues and build anything you want right on the top of the blues. But jazz was not there then. Jazz came much later. Jazz is an individual thinking that was built on top of the blues. All the artists built on the blues but blues is the mother of all of it.

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