Searching for Gus Cannon

It’s at the third cemetery where I begin to lose hope. I’m lost somewhere in rural northern Mississippi in those heady summer days of 2021 when the world had finally opened up after the COVID vaccine’s arrival. Rental cars are in short supply; Enterprise sold off its fleet in 2020, so, instead of the Hyundai Elantra I booked, I am driving a gas-guzzling 4Runner meant for backpackers and people who put marathon stickers on their back windshield. I maneuver the SUV out of a narrow pathway between gravestones which look straight out of a Hollywood props department and decide to head back to my Airbnb in Memphis and, specifically, the promise of a hot chicken tender plate from Hattie B’s.

But on my way back towards the interstate — Google Maps struggling to stay connected to any cellular network — I pass a fourth cemetery. There’s no way that’s the one, right? I think as I drive past. But I can’t shake the suspicion — or the guilt. I had driven this big, dumb vehicle across the steppes to a cell phone-bricking part of the country on a mission. My pride makes me whip a U-turn. No man left behind, no stone left unturned. I figure that if I’ve spent three hours chasing one specific banjo-playing ghost on what is my first “vacation” from work in 18 months, I can afford another 30 minutes.

I drive the perimeter of the square cemetery, the 4Runner moving like a Jawa Sandcrawler. I worry this sidetrack has been for naught; I could be 30 minutes closer to fried chicken if I had just been rational and bailed on this boondoggle. As I pass the final side of the cemetery, I see it. The thing I’ve been chasing. It’s a banjo engraved on an upright granite slab standing sentry over the headstones around it. I almost leap out of the 4Runner a la Grand Theft Auto, hardly coming to a stop before I climb down from my perch and hustle towards the final resting place of the man who, in some small way, helped make the blues and all music after.

His gravestone marks his age as 104 when he passed away, the plaque below it states 103, and newspaper reports of his death report that he was 96. But that discrepancy is not important right now, because the conflicting facts distill down to what is true: In his long life, Gus Cannon altered the evolution of American roots music. But you probably don’t know that. I didn’t either before discovering Cannon as part of my obsession with Memphis’ Stax Records (I have a tattoo of the label’s logo and its sister operation, Volt, on each of my wrists). Cannon’s recorded output is laughably small in comparison to my major fixation. There are some sides cut for Paramount and Victor in the ’20s and ’30s — among some of the first blues recordings ever made — after he had spent years on the vaudeville and Black-owned venue circuits inventing and perfecting his brand of blues and jug band music. Gus Cannon’s sole long-player, Walk Right In, is, in fact, one of the rarest blues albums to have ever existed on vinyl. Its original run of no more than 500 copies was distributed almost entirely in 1963 within the Memphis metro area. Today, an original copy will set you back a minimum of $1,300. It has existed for years in a nether world of rare albums and obscure banjo blues — a genre with an even tinier market in 2024 than the already small one back then. The songs here, plus a few appearances on some blues compilations, round out his brief oeuvre. With that unique Venn diagram, Gus Cannon’s music, understandably, wasn’t anyone’s priority for a reissue. Until now.

Back to that Mississippi cemetery for a moment. Cannon’s Wikipedia entry links to a website that identifies the location where he was buried. Maybe cemeteries’ names change or the person collecting this info just had it wrong. All I know is that there are three cemeteries in and around Hernando, Mississippi (about 30 minutes south of downtown Memphis), which do not hold Gus Cannon’s earthly remains, and the one that does is not called Greenview Memorial Gardens as that website claimed. At least, it wasn’t called that when I was there. I’d chalk up one wrong cemetery to user error or a Google Maps mistake, but three? It’s hard not to find some poetic resonance in that; not only is Gus Cannon’s age a mystery, so is the location of his final resting place.

But once I find it, I’m confronted with the reality of my mission. His plaque is covered in weeds, as if the earth were slowly swallowing not only him but also the stone proving his very existence back into the earth — all traces of his life subsumed into the loam of the Mississippi Delta. Gus Cannon’s career started 125 years ago, and his first commercial output is almost a century old, some of the earliest recorded music that people listened to, loved, and then forgot. Everyone who listened to him back then is also six feet under; anyone who remembers hearing Gus Cannon on a Victrola has met their maker. This is music in danger of going extinct, but not because it wasn’t documented. This is music that could be lost completely — as gone as whatever the folks who built the pyramids played through their proverbial AirPods, as forgotten as whatever the cavemen chanted when they wanted to vibe out. Even when music exists physically, if no one knows to listen, those songs — despite their presence on CDs, cassettes, vinyl, excessively rare 78s, and a lone LP, in Cannon’s case — will fade out forever.

Standing in front of his grave in July 2021, I felt that I not only had a moral obligation to ensure these sounds weren’t lost forever, but also that I owed it to this 104 (103? 96?)-year old who’d played a part in kindling so much of the music I hold dear. It took more than four years of chasing, but this debt has been repaid with VMP’s reissue. I’m not morally peerless on that muggy Mississippi day, however. I take a picture of the plaque, covered in vines, and another of his headstone. Then, I brush the weeds aside, cross myself — despite having not attended church in more than 15 years — and climb in the 4Runner. I head back to Memphis, back to the present.i

    

These are the facts about Gus Cannon, insofar as they are known: he was born the son of a freed slave, most likely in 1883, not 1874 as his headstone claims. He grew up one of ten sons on a former sharecropper’s plantation. His family was a musical one. They played together often and made their own instruments, including a makeshift banjo which had to be routinely tightened by heating it over a fire.

At some point during his childhood, Cannon picked up that banjo. Although its sound is now more closely associated with every folk-pop band with a hit song featuring stomps, claps, and ho-heys, the banjo was once a radical instrument almost exclusively played by Black Americans in the 1800s. Enslaved people created its modern incarnation by using supplies available in America to build similarly stringed instruments from Africa. Eventually that model morphed into the one Cannon and his family played.

As a teenager, the musical life called to Cannon. He moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the late 1890s and started playing music on the weekends between manual labor gigs. At some point, he became pals with Jim Turner, who introduced Cannon to W.C. Handy. At the time, Handy had become a local legend as the leader of a dance band packing out houses in the Delta region. Within a decade, he would be considered the “Father of the Blues,” the first person to think of writing down sheet music for the songs he heard. Cannon learned to adapt the jocular rhythms and the lowered third and seventh chords to banjo playing, eventually manifesting as his own vision of the blues.

Starting in the late 19th century, Cannon toured regularly with medicine shows, where, as strange as it sounds, he supported traveling elixir salesmen by playing standards and Handy’s songs. Around 1910, Cannon linked up with multi-instrumentalist Hosea Woods, harmonicist Noah Lewis, and banjo-guitar player Elijah Avery, in what would become the most prolific iteration of his group. Three years later (at least, according to Cannon lore), he and Woods composed one of the group’s first originals, the song that would remain Gus’ signature all the way to his tombstone: “Walk Right In.” The song became his band’s calling card, luring people to their shows on Beale Street in Memphis when they were home from their medicine show tours.

Sometime in the early ’20s, a musician named Will Shade started drawing big crowds on Beale with a new vision of the blues which included a jug as an instrument. While the jug band concept had been around for 20 years by then and Cannon had played in some of them before, the style hadn’t yet reached peak popularity, as jug bands were mostly a local, Delta area tradition in his time. Shade’s group took the sound outside the juke joint, and his records, credited to the Memphis Jug Band, began selling like hotcakes. Cannon followed Shade’s lead and added jug to his band, and, in turn, helped pioneer the recording of the genre — an important missing link between Dixieland jazz and the blues, which would eventually catalyze R&B and rock ’n’ roll.

Cannon recorded his music for the first time sometime after his 43rd birthday. First, he was invited to record eight sides for Paramount Records (then a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company) under the moniker Banjo Joe. He wasn’t backed up by his usual band, however; bluesman Blind Blake joined him for those. The Banjo Joe records predated Paramount’s golden era (roughly 1929-1932), and they made a negligible impact on Cannon’s career at the time.

Later, his group, Cannon’s Jug Stompers, made their recorded debut in 1928 after signing to Victor. Once Shade tipped off the label heads that there were more musicians playing jug music, they signed Cannon and sent him, Woods, Avery, and Lewis to the studio for multiple sessions, which would produce around 26 songs. The sound captured on these sides is sparse and haunting; the jug, which Cannon had rigged up around his neck, and the harmonicas sound like they’re drifting in through a foggy night. Listening to them with 2024 ears, it’s incredible to hear how so many musical DNA strands — soul’s hollering and testifying, R&B’s grooves, rock’s rambunctiousness — are all present in these early recordings. Like every star in the sky is the distant reflection of light shining from hundreds of years ago, every popular song you listen to now has roots in these sides that Cannon and his contemporaries laid down.

On the 78 version, “Walk Right In” is delightful, especially with an extended kazoo solo. But it gives no hint that it would eventually become the No. 1 song in the country. The band didn’t even bother to cut it until late in their recording run, during their fourth session. Before that song, their most popular hit was “Minglewood Blues,” which would find an unexpected afterlife with the Grateful Dead’s “New Minglewood Blues.”

Cannon’s Jug Stompers sold well enough for them to keep making 78s, which, back then, was the ultimate marker for commercial success. A label inviting a group back for more records was a sign they were onto something. The success of these jug band records ultimately primed the pump for the iconic, lasting blues 78s of the late ’20s and early ’30s; labels were suddenly much more keen to take a chance on any musician who came up from the Delta with a guitar on their back.

But the listening public was discovering other styles, too, via these early record labels, and, soon enough, the jug band craze began to fizzle as the Great Depression took hold. Cannon and his band went back to Memphis and slowly dissipated. Lewis went home to Ripley, Mississippi; Avery disappeared from the historical narrative; and Woods allegedly died in the ’30s. Cannon became a regular on Beale Street again, playing for pocket change. As he crept toward his 70s, he kept busy with intermittent manual work, busking around Memphis, and occasionally playing at the famed Peabody Hotel while the ducks swam in the lobby fountain. It wasn’t until the first wave of baby boomers became teenagers that Cannon’s career would pick up again.

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Driven by high school and college students during the ’50s and ’60s, the folk music craze was good to many a bluesman, and that musical movement is likely why anyone knows their names today: Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James. These men, who decades before had given up the ghost of a musical career after their 78s failed to take off, suddenly found themselves the toast of a generation of twenty-somethings in search of what was “real.” They soon found themselves touring and playing colleges far away from the Delta region where they’d first made their name, revered by people too young to have been alive when they first made records. It must have been a wild, disorienting experience.

During that boom, Cannon was also “rediscovered,” which meant some college kid had taken the time to go to Beale Street and “find” him, though he’d never really stopped performing. Cannon would get some out-of-town gigs thanks to those students, but he didn’t reap the same rewards as some of his contemporaries. His style of banjo blues wasn’t as beloved as the raw, acoustic guitar-driven kind that audiences loved in the ’60s. Despite outselling artists like Son House in the ’20s — Cannon had made many more records, the ultimate judge of sales in those days — he didn’t receive the same hero’s welcome on the coffeehouse scene as those other rediscovered musicians.

That is, until a folk group signed to Vanguard Records, The Rooftop Singers, took Cannon’s signature song, “Walk Right In,” to the top of the Billboard charts. The Rooftop Singers were one of many groups that followed in the wake of The Kingston Trio and The Weavers, a movement immortalized in the Coen Brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis. These manufactured groups were built to hit the folk scene running and make a splash, and that they did. The Rooftop Singers were designed around the idea of a sped-up “Walk Right In” as their centerpiece song. Not only did it become their signature hit, it was the No. 1 song in the country for two weeks in 1963, lingering in the Top 10 for weeks more (it simultaneously registered on the R&B and Country charts, too). Their version of Cannon’s song might be one of the more bizarre No. 1 hits you’ll ever hear — it sounds like a soap commercial jingle in its 1963 context, and more so in 2024. It’s made even more peculiar by the band’s aesthetic, like a trio of bank tellers ready to inform you of an overdraft on your account.

Their chart-smashing success did not lead to a windfall for Cannon, however. Songwriting credit went to The Rooftop Singers, who had changed many of the lyrics to sound more relevant to the times. This meant that Cannon did not see a penny from a song he had performed since at least 1913. While he saw some press (a profile in folk music magazine Sing Out! and a piece in the Saturday Evening Post), those words didn’t translate into dollars. He would rightly remain bitter over this for the rest of his life.

At the same time in Memphis, across town from Beale Street, Jim Stewart’s Stax Records had a problem: Their first-ever LP, Green Onions, by the label’s house band, Booker T. & The M.G.’s, had become a huge national hit, and their distributor, Atlantic Records, needed more records to push out on the fledgling Stax’s behalf. Otis Redding’s singles wouldn’t start hitting it big until later in 1963, and the label didn’t have a roster capable of quickly producing an LP in the meantime. Stewart, seeing the success of “Walk Right In” on the charts, thought of Gus Cannon. Given that Stewart himself was a fiddle player, Cannon’s style of blues — a step a way from bluegrass and, later, Americana — was right up his alley. According to Estelle Axton (the “Ax” half of Stax), Cannon was a regular guest, alongside the label’s other would-be legends William Bell, David Porter, Booker T. Jones, and The Bar-Kays, at the Satellite Record Shop attached to Stax’s studios on McLemore Avenue. Stewart took a chance to capitalize on the “Walk Right In” craze and made Cannon an offer to record his debut LP for the label.

It’s surreal to think what Stewart’s phone call with producer Jerry Wexler and one (or possibly both) of the Ertegun brothers, Atlantic’s owners, must have entailed after Walk Right In was completed. I imagine Stewart said something like: “Yeah, we know you guys loved Green Onions, and we have a hit with this soul sound, but we’d like to go with the septuagenarian banjo player for the next one.” By my estimation, it’s the single wildest left turn in a label’s direction in recorded music history.

Unsurprisingly, Atlantic declined to distribute Walk Right In nationally. They were one of the few labels of the era that had been reluctant to dive in with both feet to promote old blues musicians, leaving Stax with the entirety of rights to the album. They made no more than 500 copies for the Memphis market, the standard regional quantity, and never pressed another. Until it was reissued on CD in the ’90s, those 500 LPs were the only way to hear Cannon’s sole album — its existence a rumor, a wisp, a Holy Grail for cratediggers at Memphis Goodwill locations. And it remains that way today: At the time of this writing, Walk Right In isn’t available on any streaming service.

In all my searching, I have only laid eyes on a physical copy at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, built where Stax’s studio once stood. That copy only came to the museum recently; Executive Director Jeff Kollath told me he made it part of his mission to get a copy of every Stax album ever released, and, by luck, someone who had found an original pressing of the album locally brought it to him and his staff ahead of selling it themselves on eBay or Discogs. After some negotiating, that copy now lives at the museum. Shangri-La Records (the best record store in Memphis, in my opinion) also has one unopened copy, perhaps the only other remaining on earth.

This isn’t hype or hyperbole on my part. Walk Right In is a true rarity: It’s not even an album anyone could see until this reissue, nevertheless hear. Now, you can.

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Walk Right In represents an anomaly in blues albums; it not only captures Gus Cannon’s playing, but also features his running commentary on how he found the songs and what they mean to him. He even tells some jokes. It’s not just a studio album: These 30 minutes capture what it must have sounded like to catch Cannon down on the corner of Beale and Second, playing his banjo and holding court. While the songs he and his erstwhile band (Shade, his old rival, on the jug and Milton Roby on the washboard) play on this album are now in the public domain, it’s important to remember they were brand new when Cannon first started playing them in the 1890s.

On the first track, Cannon tells his life story, recounting making his first banjo out of an old guitar neck and a kitchen pan before his brother won him a proper instrument in a craps game. After, he plays a little jig, the first song he ever learned, to set up a few measures of “Walk Right In.” It plays like one of Alan Lomax’s legendary field recordings, wherein Lomax would ask his bluesmen subjects about the inspirations behind their songs and how they came to learn them. Walk Right In is an accidental archival project, even in 1963.

Hosea Woods has a shout-out at the beginning of “Kill It,” one Cannon says he’s played since 1910. Shade’s jug gives the song a riverboat crawl while Roby’s washboard propels it forward. Next, the title track; it’s not the version people have heard most, but it’s the most affecting. Cannon sings the song like it’s coming through the bottom of his feet, pushing his voice to its edges, unfurling at the chorus. At 78 years old (possibly older), his banjo work is still spiritual and otherworldly, simultaneously ancient and modern. Cannon must have played the song a mind-boggling number of times by this point, but he tackles it with an aspirational joie de vivre.

As the album rolls on, Cannon loosens up even more, laughing at his own lines and songs. He cracks jokes on “Ol’ Hen,” with Shade acting as the straight man, and testifies to his fishing prowess on “Crawdad Hole.” He remembers his medicine show days on “Going Around The Mountain,” with its robust jug howl, and, later, describes a Southern farmer’s worst nightmare on “Boll Weevil.” The second side’s stand- out, “Make Me a Pallet On Your Floor,” has roots back in 1890, and Cannon flips the song’s story into one in which he needs to sleep on the floor of his paramour’s place because her bed is too small to rest beside her. The entire second side is soulful and absolutely joyous; it’s Cannon, nearly 80, laying out everything he has left into each song.

The label’s engineers and producers didn’t encourage Cannon’s looseness and yarns between songs; they had been angling for a more straightforward production. As Stewart explained to Stax historian Rob Bowman, “It was really difficult to work with him. He wasn’t really all there because of his age.” While the 78-year-old Cannon deserved some grace, I can imagine it was stressful for Stewart to hear the ticking of his valuable studio time, wondering whether Stax would be a one-hit wonder operation or a legacy label, all the while listening to an old man crack cornpone jokes and play antiquated tunes. The experience would deter Stax from producing another blues album for four years.

That story is yet one more facet of the album that makes its existence nothing less than a miracle. Cannon was by no means greenlit to take this kind of latitude in telling his life story during the recording process. But it was one of many benevolent, albeit unintentional, gifts that Stax has given to music history. The label rescued Albert King from obscurity and gave him new context; it made the Staple Singers secular stars; and among so many other names, it brought us Booker T., William Bell, Isaac Hayes, David Porter, Eddie Floyd, Carla Thomas, Sam & Dave, and Otis Redding. But Stax is also the only label to directly connect what was becoming its future — soul music — with its oldest musical forebearer, a direct nod to an artist who paved the way for everything that came next by blending all of the sounds around him into something uniquely Gus Cannon. In the same way, Stax would create its own unique sound in soul music.

If Gus Cannon hadn’t met W.C. Handy, played with his jug band, toured, or haunted Beale Street for decades until he made Walk Right In, who knows what might be different. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

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As part of my job here at Vinyl Me, Please, I’ve spent a lot of time standing in cemeteries, pondering what it means to leave your mortal vessel, and the long tail of musicians that time has forgotten. On the same trip where I got lost in Mississippi, I also found myself drenched from a thunderstorm, trying to decipher the byzantine structure of another Memphis cemetery, looking for the headstone of a scarcely remembered jazz pianist, Phineas Newborn Jr., in some attempt to understand who he was. I’ve been to museums and I’ve stared at clothing, instruments, and ephemera from men and women who lived, made music, died, and lived again in sonic infamy for as long as people care to remember them. I think this speaks to an existential fear lurking inside all of us: no matter how quotidian our existence may seem to us or those around us, we still want to know we matter, that someone will remember, that we were more than just skin wrapped around 206 bones. I firmly believe that music is the way you can be best remembered; when your art can transport someone anywhere they want, to a memory, an era, or another time of their life, you can live in their mind forever. Music can be one thing to the person who made it and everything to those who hear it.

Gus Cannon’s music speaks to a time before our idea of “modern history,” before either World War, before music could be electronic, before drums were widely available and cheap enough to replace those jugs and buckets. This is music older than the airplane or the television. When Cannon was playing regularly, the first Roosevelt was in office.

Walk Right In is not just a collection of blues classics and the forgotten, celestial seeds of the American Songbook delivered by one of the earliest blues purveyors on record — it’s a time machine, an aural voyage to some version of our world that has disappeared. This reissue is not just any Record of the Month. It’s an earnest attempt to keep the flame of Gus Cannon’s memory burning into a second century, a chance to extend his legacy just a little bit longer. Thank you for helping make that happen.