Jacktown USA: More than a history lesson

JANS – Two years in the making, Jacktown USA, a comprehensive look at nine prominent blues and southern soul artists with deep Mississippi roots and crucial ties to the capital city of Jackson, has just been released by Republic Books of Jackson.

“Mississippi is the birthplace of American music, and Jackson is the capital city of American music,” said co-author Kamel King, a practicing attorney at Frascogna Law Group. He heads up Emerald Tiger Artist Management, which represents the artists in the book. “Guys like Dexter Allen, Eddie Cotton, and Zac Harmon grew up in or very close to Jackson. The city has had a tremendous impact on their musical lives, and the musical lives of everyone featured. In this book, you’ll find out why.”

The Grammy component is eye-opening. Mississippi far and away leads the country in the total number of Grammy awards and nominations across all genres since The Recording Academy began presenting the awards in 1959. Several of the artists featured in Jacktown USA have won the coveted award, some more than once.

“The book is a slice of truly important Mississippi history, and it was a joy to put together,” said co-author Joe Lee, author of nine suspense novels and three works of non-fiction. “There are so many funny stories, and there are poignant recollections that will move you.

“For me as a music lover, what really made an impression was how all of the artists are deeply committed to making sure the legends who showed them the ropes – B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf – are never forgotten.”

The introduction is especially compelling, with the reader being transported back in time to when the ground was laid in Jackson for these artists to chase their dreams. There were opportunities galore and contacts to be made – from the many small clubs and juke joints scattered across the city to local radio stations that didn’t hesitate to play homegrown talent on the air. The Capital City of American Music even boasted several record labels, such as Trumpet in the 1950s and Malaco in the 1970s and beyond.

“Some of the stories that were told hit really hard,” King said. “They were times Joe and I looked at each other and just knew we had a dynamite product on our hands.”

There’s Zac Harmon describing what it felt like to be chewed out in front of a live audience at age eighteen by Mississippi blues legend Sam Myers, when the older man decided his protégé needed to be told right there on stage to stop pretending he was Jimi Hendrix, because, son, that ain’t the blues.

There’s Chad Wesley, while fulfilling a lifelong dream of playing at the Mississippi Coliseum, ignoring the screaming promoter telling him to get the hell off the stage when Wesley’s encore, the Hendrix classic, Voodoo Chile, went more than fifteen minutes. The headliner, Parliament/Funkadelic front man George Clinton, would later tell Wesley that he got to hear most of the shredding through the open door of his dressing room and loved it.

There’s the mind-blowing rollercoaster of emotions Grammy-winning arranger Benjamin Wright went through after being told to his face by Arista label head Clive Davis that his arrangements weren’t worth the paper they were printed on, only to get a call an hour later from the late Quincy Jones – a call which led to Wright’s stellar work on Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” and James Ingram’s “One Hundred Ways” among other pop smashes.

“Kamel and I talked several times about common threads that run through the book,” Lee said. “Nearly all the artists were raised in the church and either got their start in gospel or played in gospel groups before leaning into blues and southern soul. Many people lean on their faith when times are tough, and these are people who’ve absorbed some hard hits on their journeys. But they never lost sight of their goals or their faith.

“I admire Eddie Cotton for being so fervent about keeping alive the legacies of the great bluesmen of the past. Zac Harmon is the same way, never missing an opportunity to point out that the blues genre is an American art form, and that if he has anything to do with it, history books – or whatever people use to get information one hundred fifty years from now – will not list John Mayall or Eric Clapton as the father of the blues.”