Sister Cities: Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans and Stax Records’ Memphis

They are sister cities, one is high maintenance and fussy, but so seductive. The other is warm and friendly, but carries a razor in her boot. They share a parent, the Mississippi River, and legacies as the two most vital cities in American music history. They are New Orleans and Memphis.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, New Orleans, far above any other city, played a fundamental, indispensible part in the development of jazz, rock and roll, and the elusive but distinctive quality that transcends all genre, funk. Memphis, meanwhile, blossomed into a formidable recording-industry hub. No homegrown New Orleans record company approached the commercial success of Memphis’s Sun Records—where Sam Phillips, almost unbelievably, made the debut commercial recordings of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis. That all happened after Phillips engineered early recordings of B. B. King and Howlin’ Wolf, among others, and produced the near legendary “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (including controversial rock pioneer Ike Turner). Of course, there’s Stax Records, which groomed Booker T. & The MGs as its house band and launched the careers of Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes, or even Hi Records, which made Al Green a star, produced the classic “I Can’t Stand The Rain” by Ann Peebles, and recorded the spine-tingling O. V. Wright, many an aficionado’s choice as the greatest vocalist in soul music. That’s not to mention the crack production team at American Sound, who churned out more number-one hits than any Memphis studio, albeit with established star talent from all over the pop music spectrum. (Even at that, it must be noted that Little Richard recorded “Tutti Frutti” in New Orleans, and local record producer Cosimo Matassa cut numerous seminal sides at his little J&M Recording Studio for big music companies from outside the city that tapped into New Orleans talent.)

The celebrity death match between the two cities is too close to call, with New Orleans mustering Louis Armstrong against Memphis’s Elvis Presley, Jelly Roll Morton against W. C. Handy, and Fats Domino versus Al Green in the heavyweight division. Insanely creative and creatively insane pianists James Booker of New Orleans and Phineas Newborn Jr. from Memphis highlight a loaded undercard of colorful, revolutionary, if not always recognized characters, like the Crescent City’s Professor Longhair, forgotten R & B king and rock pioneer Roy Brown, and Fats Domino’s chief songwriter and producer Dave Bartholomew, plus the Bluff City’s founding father of music education, Jimmie Lunceford, star-crossed crooner Johnny Ace, and Beale Street blues players from Memphis Minnie and Furry Lewis to Junior Parker and Bobby “Blue” Bland. And those rosters are just a beginning. Seriously, how about Ernie K-Doe versus Rufus Thomas? Dr. John against Justin Timberlake?

The separation between the two great Mississippi River music towns comes not from any discrepancy in talent or cultural contribution—their respective histories lived—but in their histories written. A couple of new books, Thomas Brothers’s Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism and Robert Gordon’s Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, got me thinking about the differences between the bodies of written history surrounding New Orleans music and Memphis music, despite the similarity of the places’ historical impact.

A virtual library addresses the question, “Why New Orleans?” going back to Fredric Ramsey’s 1939 Jazzmen, through numerous studies of individual artists and the city’s notable neighborhoods, on up to more recent scholarship like Ned Sublette’s The World That Made New Orleans, detailing the components of African, European, and Caribbean cultures that set New Orleans apart from other American cities beginning before there were American cities. In the latest addition to this library, New Orleans’s genius of place goes national with Louis Armstrong becoming its most famous export.

Thomas Brothers has continued where he ended...