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1 Memphis Monday Morning 1945–1948 When fifteen-year-old Robert Bland walked down Beale Street for the first time after his family moved to Memphis in 1945, he found a city filled with hope, racial division, and the music that would change America. Robert was a shy country boy who was old enough and bright enough to know that Memphis held a whole new world of opportunity for him compared to the tiny rural cotton towns where he had grown up. Thankfully his mother agreed; she, in fact, was the one who had hatched the plan of moving to the city in the first place. She had experienced all her life the hard, daily grind of small-town, Jim Crow southern living and instinctively knew, especially with young Robert’s aversion to books and school, that he would likely end up in the cotton fields forever unless she did something soon. The only thing the boy seemed to enjoy doing was singing, and she thought perhaps he could best take advantage of this affinity if they moved to Memphis where there seemed to be music everywhere, even if a lot of it was not the church music that she so very much preferred. So, soon after Mrs. Bland’s parents moved to Memphis and World War II ended with Japan’s surrender on August 14, the Bland family—young Robert, his mother, Mary Lee, and his stepfather, Leroy—made the twenty-two-mile move southwest from Barretville, Tennessee, to Memphis. The city on a bluff above the Mississippi River was now, according to the New York Times, “the cultural as well as the social and commercial capitol of a huge area of near-by Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri.”1 They first lived with Mary Lee’s parents on Hill Street on Memphis’s north side, but soon moved to their own apartment downtown at 398 Vance Avenue, when Mary Lee found a job at the Firestone Plant on Thomas Street and Leroy landed a position at a foundry on the north side. Later, Leroy worked as a laborer at Samuel Furniture until he found easier work repairing juke boxes at Joe Cuoghi’s on Summer Avenue. Joe Cuoghi later became one of the founders of Hi Records, where Leroy’s 7 Memphis Monday Morning: 1945–1948 8 stepson would make records in 1967 with the legendary soul producer Willie Mitchell.2 However, before all that was to occur, Robert had first to find his way in his new home town. His parents urged him to return to school. Booker T. Washington High School was not far from their apartment and recognized as one of the best secondary schools for young African Americans in the South. But Robert would have none of it. He had made it through only third grade in Rosemark, where the family had lived before moving to Barretville, and it had been a struggle to do that. The truth was that, between picking and chopping cotton almost year-round, he had attended classes only sporadically and had never even learned to read or write. So, in this pre-GED/adult education era, to a self-conscious adolescent newcomer, it seemed either entering high school, as unprepared as he was, or returning to elementary school, as old as he was, would be far more embarrassing than suffering the occasional indignities of living a life of illiteracy. Besides, by now Robert was used to working and earning his own spending money, and school, he reasoned, would afford him little immediate opportunity to find a job that would help to support him and his family while he tried to forge some kind of career in music. So he scraped up enough to buy a second-hand bicycle and found a job delivering groceries from the little store on the corner of Vance and Hernando Streets, a few blocks from the Blands’ apartment. The job didn’t pay much, but with tips he made enough to begin saving for a car. The job also gave him the opportunity to explore his new neighborhood.3 Fortunately for Robert and his family the economy in Memphis was thriving . The price of cotton had doubled in the past five years.4 Robert and the veterans returning triumphantly from World War II looked on Memphis as the place in the mid-South to make their marks and to escape the cotton fields and rural poverty of the Delta’s Depression in which many...

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