ON THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

Lionel Hampton in Memphis circa 1955

In the Jim Crow South, a network of afterhours clubs gave birth to a revolutionary sound.

By EDDIE DEAN
The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll
By Preston Lauterbach 
Norton, 338 pages, $26.95


It was called the stroll. In the era of Jim Crow, you could find it in the black section of most any town in the South and in the segregated North as well: the main street and hub of locally owned businesses, from the shoeshine stand on up. Block after block of black enterprise at its most resilient: the Red Goose Barber Shop and the Tick Tock Tavern; Rex's Billiard Hall for Colored and the Frog Pond Ballroom; banks, pawnshops, funeral homes, eateries and hotels. (click below to read more)

There were strolls in small towns: Desiard Street in Monroe, La., and Second Street in Muskogee, Okla. In midsize burgs: Fifth Street in Macon, Ga., and Central Avenue in Tampa, Fla. And in big cities: West Dallas Avenue in Houston; Rampart Street in New Orleans; Auburn Avenue in Atlanta; and, most renowned of all, Beale Street in Memphis.
The stroll was a place where a black man was beholden to nobody and to nothing except his own whims and desires, a haven where musicians like Rufus Thomas worked their own turf for their own crowd in clubs like Sunbeam Mitchell's at the corner of Beale and Hernando.
These "niteries," especially the lowdown joints like Sunbeam's—50 cents at the door, with after-hours clientele such as Nat King Cole ready for a jam session after a whites-only gig across town—kept the stroll hot even when times were hard. The nickel-and-dime revenue stream, fed by an overbrimming pool of musical talent, gave birth to the chitlin' circuit, a network of venues where black performers played one-night stands during segregation.
The term "chitlin' circuit" has congealed into showbiz cliché denoting a shabby, second-rate purgatory where oldies acts like Sam and Dave toiled before crossing over to mainstream success. As music journalist Preston Lauterbach discovered, the whole subject hasn't received much serious attention, never mind respect. In books that mention the circuit he noticed a denigrating trend: "Artists were relegated to the chitlin' circuit. Working it was a grind. Even its title is depressing, derived from what black people call a hog's small intestine."
It takes a former circuit star named Sax Kari, retired to a trailer on the edge of a Florida swamp, to set Mr. Lauterbach straight about a phenomenon so underground that it didn't appear in print, even in the black press, until a 1972 item in the Chicago Defender plugging an Ike and Tina Turner concert. Behind the color line was an intricate, wildly variegated underworld of entertainment and vice. Its venues ran the gamut from a converted South Carolina tobacco barn to the opulent Bronze Peacock Dinner and Dance Club in Houston, 8,000 square feet of wall-to-wall swank.
In the first definitive study of the chitlin' circuit, Mr. Lauterbach uncovers a story as sensational as any day-glo circuit-show poster, featuring "the numbers racket, hair straighteners, multiple murders, human catastrophe, commercial sex, bootlegging, international scandal, female impersonation, and a real female who could screw a light bulb into herself—and turn it on." Despite such distractions, Mr. Lauterbach stays focused on how a synergy of street-corner commerce and ghetto culture forged a musical legacy that still resonates today. The main players are a cadre of black businessmen who used "innovative economies," including graft and bribery, to build an empire.
It's an off-the-beaten-track excursion, but the Memphis-based Mr. Lauterbach knows where to look. Bolstered by interviews with key circuit vets and surviving relatives, along with a goldmine of source material from the black media of the day, "The Chitlin' Circuit" gives readers a curbside view on the action.
Much of the narrative's present-tense feel and its pulpy detail come from newspapers like the Defender, the Indianapolis Recorder and the Houston Informer, which gave the circuit breathless coverage in their entertainment pages. The era's hepcat lingo ("ork" for orchestra, "ofay" for "white") and hard-boiled, noir ambience give Mr. Lauterbach a tune he can carry. He describes a beat reporter from the Informer on Houston's stroll 'round midnight in 1938: "A prostitute hey babied him over the brittle clap and baritone din drifting from Johnson's Domino Parlor. The hickory smoke from Snow's Barbecue teared up his eyes. . . . The stroll became the stagger."
The street-wise tone works because the book is at heart a well-researched valentine to a lost world of seedy con men, promoters and club owners, the power brokers and hustlers who made the "circuitry spark." Sax Kari emerges as the circuit's wheel-chair historian and ultimate workhorse, with a résumé that includes leading a swing band in the early 1940s and composing the soundtrack for a late '70s blaxploitation film, "Super Soul Brother." His career spans the circuit's evolution from its vaudeville origins and postwar glory years to the funk eras and beyond.
"I was as good as Basie, Dorsey, any of 'em," Kari says of his years barnstorming with his 18-piece ork. "If you couldn't get up to that standard, they didn't come to see you. You had to be dynamite. . . . My lowest salary a night would be $300 to $350 [for the band]. But the circuit was never about making big money—it was about making constant money."
Kari's mentor was Denver Ferguson, a racketeer who ruled the stroll in Indianapolis. Ferguson made his fortune printing lottery tickets and investing in real estate in the city's segregated "Bronzeville," and he saw the financial promise in the circuit at a time when the dollars flowed from live shows, not record sales. He joined forces with Chicago bandleader Walter Barnes, who pioneered the early circuit while promoting himself in a column for the Defender's national edition, a tour diary that gave readers his whereabouts ("Jacksonville is a very fly town") and choice spots on the stroll ("The Grog Cafe is the dining place of the profesh") and shout-outs ("Thanks for the little sip, Eddie").
By 1940, when Barnes perished in a dancehall blaze in Natchez, Miss., he'd left behind what Mr. Lauterbach calls a "neon and mud portrait of black Main Street in the South—the unfolding filaments of the chitlin' circuit," organized and operated by the Ferguson Booking Agency.
In the postwar economy, the large swing bands couldn't turn a profit on the road, so the orks morphed into small combos blasting sax-and-vocal-driven jump blues. Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five was the first major group to make its fame on the circuit. Jordan opened the floodgates for even wilder singers, like Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris, who added more raunch and a bigger beat.
Mr. Lauterbach argues that the new sound was "rock" years before it got the label—"black music was clearly rockin' by 1949," he asserts. Recordings like Brown's "Boogie at Midnight," a Top 10 hit on the R&B charts that year, bear out this claim. "Rock & roll—that's what it was," Jerry Lee Lewis later amen-ed of Brown's Mighty Mighty Men and other bands he heard as a boy outside Haney's Big House, a beer joint and circuit mainstay in rural Louisiana.
Similar sounds drew the crowds at Houston's Bronze Peacock, where guitar legends T-Bone Walker and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown held down steady gigs. The circuit's crown jewel was operated by Don Robey, a high-rolling gambler ("capitalist, if you prefer") who bought his first club from winnings at the craps table. Son of a black father and a Jewish mother, Robey carried a .45 caliber pistol to conduct his business. In other accounts he comes across as a crook and a sleazeball, but he receives a more nuanced portrait here. "The man had vision," writes Mr. Lauterbach. "He foresaw opportunities and, with his gun and his wits, pursued them. He made artists." Robey launched the careers of Bobby Bland and Johnny Ace, among others, and he was the first black music mogul, converting the Peacock into a hugely influential record label that was a model for Motown.
Robey symbolizes the entrepreneurial flash and outlaw swagger that "The Chitlin' Circuit" celebrates, along with the more salacious elements that made the circuit what it was—a freewheeling, freaks-welcome show, where Little Richard, a teenager performing in dress and heels as "Princess Lavonne," could feel right at home.

There are fresh insights from Mr. Lauterbach on icons like Richard and James Brown, who honed their stage-craft on Macon's stroll, one of the most stifling backwaters of Jim Crow repression. There are also fine sketches of less glamorous but no less seminal figures, such as big-band leader Jimmie Lunceford, who introduced music education into Memphis's black public schools in the late 1920s. Alumni included circuit legends, from Isaac Hayes to Booker T, as well as sidemen like Howard "Bulldog" Grimes, the drummer behind Al Green's hypnotic hits on Hi Records from the 1970s.
The runaway success of the record industry helped doom the chitlin' circuit, as the recording studio replaced the roadhouse as the primary moneymaking outlet for musical product. But it was the urban renewal of the 1960s and '70s that did the worst damage, erasing a thousand strolls from the map, destroying the "elegant system" of social and business hubs that had nurtured the scene for decades.
The circuit survives in diminished form in expo arenas and nondescript venues, taking the form of an old-school, often X-rated R&B for a crowd of devotees. "Race segregated it in the old days," writes Mr. Lauterbach. "Tastes would segregate it from now on." His chronicle evokes in all its wooliness the storied past and indestructible spirit of a crucial American subculture, when folks on the stroll "worked all week, and Saturday night was their night to howl."
—Mr. Dean is co-author of Dr. Ralph Stanley's "Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times" (Gotham).