FROM CAT TO DOG TO CHICKEN TO PENGUIN AND OTHER BIRDS

  “My dad didn’t wear shorts at home often”, Carla Thomas told me in 2002 right after the release of her Live in Memphis CD. On stage he certainly did. Also known as “world’s youngest teenager”, Rufus Thomas was famous for his action-packed live shows, filled with dancing and humour – and shorts and cape as his trademark.

  Matthew Ruddick has written a book titled Funkiest Man Alive – Rufus Thomas and Memphis Soul (University Press of Mississippi/Jackson; ISBN: 9781496838407; 334 pages), and in the middle it contains eight pages of black & white photos and still 35 b&w photos elsewhere in the book, some familiar promotional pics but many also from the family collection. Rob Bowman wrote the foreword, and fortunately both discography and index are included.

  Born in Cayce, Mississippi, in 1917, Rufus, however, grew up in nearby Memphis, Tennessee, only 40 miles of Cayce. His fledgling steps in show business started from playing the part of a frog in a school play, rehearsing tap dancing from the age of ten and developing his natural skill as a comedian in high school. In 1936 he joined the Rabbit Foot Minstrels – “the world’s most famous colored show” – where he also sang the blues, and later became part of the show business duo called Rufus & Bones with Robert Couch - a popular team, especially at the Palace Theater on Beale Street in Memphis. Not only a minstrel, Rufus also raised a family those days. He married Lorene in 1940, Marvell Thomas was born in 1941, Carla one year later and Vaneese in 1952.

  A popular MC in live shows, Rufus also became a “radio announcer” in the all-black programming WDIA station in Memphis in the early 50s, and he deejayed there on and off till 1973, and for the second time starting from 1986. He formed his own band in 1949 and released his first single – I’ll Be a Good Boy/I’m So Worried – a year later.  His follow-up records appeared on Bullet, Chess and on Sam Phillips’s Sun Records, where the answer to Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog called Bear Cat turned into a # 3 rhythm & blues hit in 1953.

  Rufus rode his second wave of success in the early 1960s, when first The Dog and then Walking the Dog were released on Stax, as well as the similarly titled album and his duets with Carla, such as Cause I Love You and Night Time Is the Right Time. The third success period occurred in the early 70s, when such funk hits as Do the Funky Chicken, (Do the) Push and Pull and The Breakdown hit top-ten on Billboard’s soul singles charts. Do the Funky Penguin still reached #11, and also his three Stax albums between 1970 and ’73 were rather good sellers.

  In spite of occasional tensions between Rufus and some of Stax’s heavyweights, there were also many highlights in that community, such as the Stax tour to Europe in 1967 and Wattstax five years later. After Stax went bankrupt in 1976, Rufus still recorded for such labels as AVI, Hi, Gusto, XL, Ichiban, PWP and High Stacks, and he remained active until his death in December 2001, due to colon cancer.

  Matthew Ruddick writes about Rufus and his life based on pieces of information from many sources. He analyses the records in detail and lists the musicians not only on records but also in various events, and – being a Londoner – he also remembers to mention the British covers of Rufus’ recordings. He has interviewed many persons associated with Rufus, and one can only regret that he wasn’t able to interview Rufus himself, when he was still alive. I believe those quotes and answers would have taken this book to another level.

  Now the book actually tells more about Memphis music than Rufus himself. Matthew chronicles familiar histories of Sun Records and Sam Phillips, Elvis, Willie Mitchell, William Bell, Lester Bihari & Meteor Records, David Porter, Isaac Hayes, Don Bryant, Jim Stewart and Chips Moman, to name a few. This is interesting for the uninitiated, but I guess all soul music enthusiasts have read Rob Bowman’s definite opus, Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records. Robert Gordon repeated the story in his Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, and now in a way we get the same story all over again. To the bibliography I’d like to add still Roben Jones’ Memphis Boys: The Story of American Studios and James L. Dickerson’s Chips Moman (Chips Moman Book Review January 2021 | Soul Express). There are also many anecdotes in biographies of Mavis Staples, Bobby Womack, Magnificent Montague, Wilson Pickett, Bobby Bland and Otis Redding – some of them published in recent years.

  Carla Thomas is featured extensively, and Marvell and Vaneese also get their fair share, and here I’d like to reprint what Vaneese told our editor Ismo Tenkanen way back in 2001, when her Talk Me Down CD was released: “I sang on my first session when I was eight years old. I’ve been singing all my life. Common wisdom has it that my brother, Marvell, when asked about my birth said that he was happy to have three-part harmony – meaning him, my sister Carla and myself. We had lots of sing-a-longs at home on the family piano.”

  Rufus was multitalented and in a sense a bedrock for the Memphis music scene, and that’s why it’s good finally to have a biography on him. There are a few inconsistencies (e.g. on KoKo Records and Carl Sims), but I was especially happy to read comments from Graziano Uliani, who invited Rufus to the Porretta Soul Music Festival in Italy altogether six times. Today Porretta is the number one maintainer of Memphis music legacy in the world, and Rufus has a park dedicated to him over there.

© Heikki Suosalo