Soul of the Man: Bobby "Blue" Bland

5. Ain’t It a Good Thing: 1955–1957

63 5 Ain’t It a Good thing 1955–1957 64 Bobby was discharged from the Army in early 1955 and returned to Memphis to live with his mother and stepfather at their new home at 264 Pontonoc Avenue. “I think the army done quite a bit for me, though I didn’t care for it much at that particular time,” Bobby would later sapiently sum up. “I did two years, six months, and twenty-nine days; I had a little bad time to make up. But it grew me up into manhood, actually.”1 Memphis had changed since Bobby had left. Popular music continued to be dominated by the easy listening sounds of Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Patti Page, Nat “King” Cole, and Eddie Fisher, but a group called Bill Haley & His Comets had a big hit with what they were calling rock ’n’ roll, with “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” a cover of Joe Turner’s 1954 number 1 R&B hit. Elvis Presley was now in Memphis recording for Sam Phillips. And most of the Beale Streeters were in Houston working for Duke’s new owner, Don Robey. “I came back and I kind of relaxed for maybe a month,” Bobby recalls. “Then I got a call from Don Robey in Houston. He said, ‘You know I have you under contract.’ So I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ Then he said, ‘You’re under the Duke label, right?’ I said, ‘Yeah, but that’s here in Memphis.’ He said, ‘No, I bought it from David James and I want you to start recording.’ Oh, man, you’re talking about butterflies. I said, ‘Well, where are you?’ He said ‘I’m in Houston, Texas.’ I said, ‘Oh my gosh!’ Then, he said, ‘Well, I have a ticket for you.’ Thirteen dollars and eleven cents—bus fare only—one way!2 So I was there for 18 years. It was a great move for me. I’m very thankful that he honored his list that he had of people that was on the label. So I’m happy that I was thought of and he gave me a chance to record.”3 In Houston, Bobby looked up his old Memphis friends and found out that the 115-room Crystal Hotel on Lyons Street was the place for young African American musicians to stay in Houston. He booked a room there and started exploring the city. He found a bustling post–World War II boom town that was the fastest-growing city per capita in the country. The shipbuilding industry Ain’t It a Good thing: 1955–1957 65 and the recent availability of air conditioning spurred growth throughout the city. The Fifth Ward, where Duke had relocated its headquarters to Erastus Street just a few months before, was dominated by the Lyons Avenue commercial corridor and the largest African American population in the city. Like Memphis, Bobby found Houston to be very much segregated. Schools, parks, waiting rooms, drinking fountains, and lunch counters were all set apart by race. And like Memphis, Houston had separate white and black newspapers, theaters, and baseball teams. Alvia Wardlaw, a Houston art historian, remembered segregation in the city: “It was all around you. You knew what it meant from an early age. You encountered it at the grocery store. There was a colored water fountain and a white water fountain. Every adult in the community made you aware of segregation and discrimination, but at the same time you could forget about it when you were doing things that were part of the community , like going to the games and pep rallies, or hearing civil rights activists like Barbara Jordan or the Reverend William Lawson speak.”4 While there was no ordinance against integration and blacks lived throughout the city, the majority lived in the city’s Freedman’s Town/Fourth Ward, where conditions were so crowded that neighbors could “stand in one house and hear the inmate in the adjacent house change his mind.”5 African Americans also inhabited the Third Ward, the Sixth Ward, and the Fifth Ward, northeast of downtown Houston, bounded by Buffalo Bayou on the south. There, as on Beale Street (but without the cultural cachet), were black restaurants, movie houses, schools, drug stores, saloons, churches, and clubs. Yet, despite the city’s lack of a storied music history, Houston was a lively place to be for Bobby and his fellow Memphis musical...