The Tennessee Kid

Abstract

The Tennessee Kid Hal Crowther (bio) Photographs can mislead, and sometimes conceal more than they reveal. But on occasion, usually in hindsight, a photograph radiates so much insight you need sunglasses to examine it. A photograph in my college yearbook, circa 1962, shows a bunch of mugging freshmen engaged in the lame freshman humor that [End Page 36] coat-and-tie group portraits traditionally provoked. Two turkeys in the back row are holding up a sign pilfered from a diner somewhere: “One Golden Brown Juicy Breast—with all the trimmings—89 cents.” Standing next to them, his torso half obscured by the juicy breast sign and a very strained look on his face, is a freshman from Memphis named James Ridout Winchester. You have to look carefully to confirm what you know for sure in hindsight, that it isn’t Jimmy Winchester’s hand holding up the left end of the breast sign. His hands appear to be deep in his pockets, and the sick look on his face says clearly, “Who are these people, and where am I, and why?” And this was in September, long before one of the six-month Siberian winters that drove more than one Southerner to transfer to Tulane. It might be an understatement to say that Winchester was never comfortable at Williams College. Though a good fraternity welcomed him—he was a Tennessee thoroughbred with a pedigree that included Robert E. Lee—classmates never saw much of Jimmy. He was up in Bennington entertaining bohemian girls with blues chords, or he was on the road with his band, or rehearsing a rockabilly combo deep in the basement of the student union (if you sat quietly in the snack bar, you could just feel the beat). He lived off-campus with a divorced woman. Four years later, Winchester’s senior yearbook photograph shows much longer hair and a still-quizzical expression. Beneath it, no honors or activities are listed, though one of the class musicians Jimmy used to play with listed a band called Roget and the Mojo Teeth. Winchester wasn’t the only one who experienced alienation in the Berkshire Mountains of New England. My hillbilly homesickness yielded slightly to an appetite for dead poets and distilled spirits, not necessarily in that order. From the beginning it was music that enabled Winchester to water [End Page 37] his roots and endure his exile. He was from Memphis—a major South Memphis thoroughfare is Winchester Road—and most of us lacked the musical sophistication to grasp a fraction of what that implied. Elvis to be sure, but also Beale Street, B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Sam Phillips and Sun Records, Booker T and the MGs. W. C. Handy was still living in Memphis when Jim Winchester was a teenager. When Handy died in 1958, Winchester’s grandfather spoke at his funeral. It was an unfair advantage. Where I grew up, live music was Salty Austin and the Allegheny Ridgerunners, aping Porter Wagoner. On weekdays Salty sold Electrolux vacuum cleaners door-to-door and left personalized guitar picks instead of calling cards. Once a month at American Legion Post 808, an emaciated, Baptist-looking woman named Audrey performed standards on the Hammond organ, backed up by her husband Pike, who looked anesthetized and played the drums with brushes. The culture gap between Sam Phillips and the Audrey/Pike ensemble might account for the discrepancy between Winchester’s musical achievements and my own. But probably not. “My mother tells me music was always my focus,” Winchester recalled in 1999. “I studied piano all through grade school and high school, and I was always in a band with my friends, and I played the organ in church. But really, looking back, I always wanted to play guitar in an R&B band.” Going his own way, Winchester became a man of mystery at the college, the kind classmates tend to mythologize. I remember the rumors that he was in Boston or Springfield most weekends, opening shows for Taj Mahal. But a year out of Williams, after graduate study in Germany and a summer playing lounge piano in Memphis, Winchester took his myth to another level...