Road To Memphis by Max Décharné — MOJO, issue 121, December 2003

Road To Memphis

For the past 35 years, moustachioed rock'n'roll historian Tav Falco has been chronicling the juke-joint lives and barrelhouse dreams of Memphis music's kings and queens. Max Décharné checked out the archive.

"Memphis will always be known as a place for innovation", Sam Phillips observed when tav Falco first met him in 1978. The leader of swamp-soaked rock'n'rollers The Panther Burns, Falco first hit town on the Missouri Pacific Railroad working as a brakeman out of North Little Rock, Arkansas, in the lates '60s. He has been filming and photographing the unique cultural life of the Bluff City ever since. His films of black biker gangs, rural honky-tonks and legendary bluesmen such as Sleepy John Estes and Johnny Woods, have seen him memorably described by Variety as "the first to treat Fellini to a Mississippi mud pack".

"In 1974 Randall Lyon and I formed a documentation, art-action group, TeleVista", says Falco, 'and we began to make trips over the border into Mississippi. We were invited by R.L.Burnside to the Brotherhood Sportsman's Lodge, his honky-tonk, far in the backwoods in the vicinity of Como, Mississippi. The wail of hid voice could be heard far out into the woods, and its haunting tones drew people in from all directions... not only for the promise of song and dance, but for featured entertainments such as continuous game of dice, chicken frying in an iron skillet... and girls, blue gum beauties working tricks in an attached private room. It was here that I heard a primal form of one-chord trance music that would forever colour my understanding of western music. It was this blues that held the highest African retentions of any North American music.

"At the time I kept hearing this term, 'Panther Burn'. Who is it? What is it? Then I found out. It's a place: Panther Burn plantation off of Highway 61 just north of Greenville, Mississippi. A legend surrounds it. At the turn of the century before last, a wild cat, a black panther, became displaced from forest and plain, homeless in the wake of expanding cultivation. The local planters launched a campaign to rid themselves of this creature. One night, they ran it into a cane brake and set the cane on fire. The shricks and howls of the panther perishing within the flames were so horrific that the place became known from then on as Panther Burn. A fitting name for a rock'n'roll band, I thought." So it was. After an early '70s TV show featuring their 'demolition' of Train Kept A Rollin', remembers Tav, "the appalled TV host annouced to viewers in three states, 'I think I need a bath after that'."

Max Décharné's new book Hardboiled Hollywood: The True Crime Stories Behind The Classic Noir Films is available through noexit.co.uk.

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