P.S. We love you

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not anti-penguin.  I am not a penguin-hater. If a “Power to the Penguin” movement existed, I would support it.

But my question is this: when did penguins become symbols of Christmas? I’m no yard-art expert but I have noticed a proliferation of illuminated wire and inflatable penguins over the last few years during the holiday season.  It’s as if the penguins are part of an “Occupy Front Yards” campaign.

You’ve seen ‘em – they’re mixed right in with the mechanical wire light-covered reindeer nodding their heads incessantly toward the plastic nativity scene.  The one that looks like Baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wise men not only are beaming radiant love but may also be powered by some undocumented nuclear device.

If the penguins are supposed to be happy little buddies of Santa’s eight tiny reindeer and Rudolph (whom Blitzen and the others may regard as “’Number Nine’- the jerk who came in and stole our thunder with his blinkin’ red nose and stupid song after we got the whole thing up and running”), they are obviously on an extended play date.  Penguins are indigenous to the South Pole.  If you sent your letter to a big fat man in a red suit at an address near The Penguins’ house, no wonder you didn’t get want you wanted for Christmas last year.

Our very own "P.S."

Will the real Christmas yard art please stand up!

Everybody sing: Where has Plastic Santa gone (long time passin’)?  I’m talking tacky, red and white, chipped paint jolly old elves lit with 40 watt GE light bulbs from inside their fat bellies.  As inflatable penguins have moved in, it seems Plastic Santa (or “P.S.”, as we refer to him in the Kerr house) has moved out.  I don’t blame him. The King of Christmas Yard Art is a kind and loving guy but enough is enough.  Plastic Saint Nick could justifiably exclaim, “Christmas penguins – bah, humbug!”

A popular blues and country music motif is the line “You never miss the water ‘til the well runs dry.”  Likewise, of course, owning a Plastic Santa never occurred to me until I noticed they were dwindling in number.  My wife and I began a highly unscientific Plastic Santa count originating twenty years ago at a movable and quite fluid Christmas party aboard a Johnny Walker tour bus that wound through Nashville.  As we noticed they were becoming scarce, I began a quest to find our own P.S.

With some guidance from a friend who advised me to steer my sleigh toward an estate sale in Pegram, Tennessee in Cheatham County, just west of Nashville, this year I hit pay dirt.

So now, upgraded from yard art status, P.S. stands beside our Christmas tree in the living room.  And every night when we plug him in, it’s as if:

We hear him exclaim as we turn on his light, “Happy Christmas to all, not a penguin in sight!”

Text and photo copyright 2011 Les Kerr

Visit www.leskerr.com

Glen Campbell – Still on the line

Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman album

The extended guitar solos in Galveston and Wichita Lineman were worth more than the price of admission for me.  Glen Campbell’s Goodbye Tour came to the Ryman Auditorium November 30, 2011 and the performance was an unadorned look at a man whose music has brought much joy to many people for over  four decades.

There was a lot of love for Campbell flowing from the audience who packed the hard old Ryman pews and from those around him on stage.  The band  included his son Cal playing drums, daughter Ashley playing keyboard, banjo and guitar, and son Shannon playing guitar.  With each song, everyone in the room was pulling for the star whose memory is leaving him.

After a teleprompter glitch caused a false start at the show’s beginning, Campbell launched into Gentle on My Mind, the song that brought him into the consciousness of most of the world in the 1960s.  And then he did them all. The aforementioned Galveston and Wichita Lineman, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Where’s the Playground Susie, Dreams of the Everyday Housewife, Try a Little Kindness and on and on from his early career.

This is a man with soul, joy and dignity who knows what he’s about.  He laughed about his memory loss and said, “Did you ever go into a room and forget why you went in there?  That happens to me a lot.”  As he moved around the stage with the agility of a much younger performer, Campbell’s eyes looked for and at the teleprompter screens with a determination to offer the showmanship for which he is famous.  While they didn’t catch all the lines at the right time, those eyes still had the twinkle of a singer delighted to be on stage.  He referred to Nashville throughout the evening, sending the message that he was truly happy to be on the Ryman stage singing for us.

A Picker’s Picker

Song lyrics may have been elusive at times but the notes on his guitar came as naturally as the smile on his face.  The intro Campbell played on the electric 12-string as he began Southern Nights and his acoustic guitar part on Dueling Banjos with Ashley playing banjo showed that his fingers remembered every lick.  I was reminded why I wanted the Ovation acoustic guitar I got as a high-school graduation present – that was his trademark ax in the sixties and I still play my mid-1970s Legend model today.  To call Glen Campbell an inspiration for guitar players is a vast understatement.

Ghost on the Canvas

Campbell performed songs from his new CD, Ghost on the Canvas, and the lyrics seemed to be perfect for where he is in his life.  Especially poignant are the title song and A Better Place (view video at the link below).  I have never heard a singer perform more personally honest music.

Toward the end of the evening, his hit Country Boy was a standout.  Finally, being ever the entertainer that he’s always been, Campbell led the audience in singing Rhinestone Cowboy as one of many standing ovations again swept the auditorium.

Minnie Pearl once said that Grand Ole Opry master of ceremonies George D. Hay advised her to, “Go out there and love the audience – they’ll love you back.”  Well, Glen Campbell loved those of us in the audience that night and we loved him back.

For a great video including an interview with Glen Campbell about his current Ghost on the Canvas CD and archival footage, visit this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbr_rCrEPVE&feature=player_embedded#!

Glen Campbell: A Better Place video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4mylwPMPhM

Visit Les Kerr’s web site at www.leskerr.com

Copyright 2011 Les Kerr

Sharecropping Cotton Chopping Delta Blues

On Saturday, November 19, 2011, I had the pleasure to perform at B.B. King’s Blues Club in Nashville with my longtime friends Sara Shepard and Johnny Mire. It was a benefit show for the American Red Cross and I really enjoyed sharing the stage with my friends for a good cause.

Although B.B. King wasn’t there, it was exciting to perform in the club and restaurant that bears his name. This great Mississippian and bluesman is someone I have admired for a long time. Having grown up in Mississippi myself, I’ve certainly been aware of his music for many years. The first time I saw him perform was in the early 1980s and I’ve seen him many times since, including his shows at the opening of his Nashville club several years ago and more recently at the 2010 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

BB King, JazzFest 2010

In 1994, Mr. King played at Riverfront Park in Nashville. My wife, Gail, and I drove back hurriedly from a family reunion in Mississippi to catch the Sunday afternoon show. As usual at Riverfront Park events, the stage was a barge in the Cumberland River pulled up to concrete at the foot of the sloping hill along First Avenue that makes a natural amphitheater. We watched the show and King reigned royally along with his guitar Lucille, as always.

At the end of the show, I said to Gail, “I would certainly enjoy meeting him.” Being the observant journalist that she is, Gail said, “Well, that ramp coming off the stage is the only way off and B.B. King will be coming down it in a minute.” So we went to the bottom of the ramp and I was able to shake his hand. We talked about being from Mississippi briefly and he gave me a “BB King” guitar pick.

I met him again several years later at the Nashville club opening and he was just as gracious.

Les Kerr onstage at B.B. King's Blues Club

Mr. King was the inspiration for a song I wrote called “Sharecropping Cotton Chopping Delta Blues” in 1996. The song was inspired by the story of his early life from his years in the Delta to his arrival on Beale Street in Memphis. The lyrics are below and you can also click the link to hear the recorded version. I am still inspired by his story, talent, and showmanship and it was a thrill to perform it at B.B. King’s Blues Club. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Click to hear Sharecropping Cotton Chopping Delta Blues by Les Kerr

Sharecropping Cotton Chopping Delta Blues
Words and Music © 1996 by Les Kerr

In the Mississippi Delta where the tall blues grow
From the Peabody Lobby down to Catfish Row
You can chop that cotton with your weary hand
But you’re working for nothing if you don’t own the land
In your over-hauls and your hole-y shoes
You got the Sharecropping Cotton Chopping Delta Blues

Itta Bena, Mississippi, of thee I sing
It’s the Land of Cotton and B.B. King
You can feel the blues in your aching back
They come oozing up from that cotton sack
If you had the choice, you would not choose
To sing the Sharecropping Cotton Chopping Delta Blues

To a cotton-picking rhythm, you begin to sing
Then you nail it down on a guitar string
If you can make a song from a field-hand shout
Then a slow bus to Memphis is a quick way out
And you can tell the folks how you paid your dues
And sing the Sharecropping Cotton Chopping Delta Blues

Songwriter: Les Kerr ASCAP
Publisher: O.N.U. Music ASCAP
Originally released on the CD Red Blues, Les Kerr, 2000
Use of music or lyrics without permission prohibited by copyright owner.

Books I recommend by and about B.B. King:
Blues All Around Me (The Autobiography of B.B. King) by B.B. King and David Ritz
B.B. King Treasures by B.B. King and Dick Waterman

Visit Les Kerr’s Web Site at www.leskerr.com

Dewey’s Tune

Railroad Man

Granddaddy, me and a toy train

October 18, 1900 was my grandfather’s birthday.  It was just a few months after legendary  railroad engineer Casey Jones was killed in a train wreck and later immortalized  in song.  My grandfather, George Dewey Pittman, became a railroad man, too, on the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad, or the GM&O, as most people called it.  Granddaddy eventually became Master Mechanic in charge of the mechanical shops in five of the states where the GM&O operated.

In 1954, he and my grandmother moved from Louisville, Mississippi to Jackson, Tennessee, with the Iselin shop as his GM&O base until he retired in 1971.  I was born October 19, 1956, just one day and fifty-six years after Granddaddy, as we often  joked.  He was a hero to me and instilled a respect and romance of railroads in me that exists to this very day.  Jackson was also the last home of Casey Jones.  Granddaddy took me to Jones’ home and museum so many times when I was young that he was issued a lifetime free admission pass to the museum.

On Christmas and summer visits, one of the thrills of my life was going to the railroad shop with him.  He had bought an old Ford from my dad to take to “The Shop” so grease
and debris wouldn’t get on his prized Buick Special that he and my grandmother loved so much. I remember piling into that old Ford, leaving Arlington Street and heading for The Shop where mechanics, engineers and office staff got to know me by name.

I'm in a big, red GM&O locomotive!

Granddaddy would take me up into the cabs of diesel locomotives with the engineers and let me blow the whistle.  Or into dusty old cabooses where I could climb up into the cupola and look out as if I would soon radio an engineer about matters of a train’s operation. Once, he took me from Jackson to Humboldt in a caboose when he was checking something up the line.  To me, it was better than any jet airplane, ocean liner or even a moon rocket ride could have  been.

I feel that music right down to my toes

My grandfather also loved music. As a young man, he was a big fan of Jimmie Rodgers, The Singing Brakeman.  Later, while he still loved country music, he became a devoted fan of the Lawrence Welk TV show.  And until he died, he talked about the time my grandmother made him take her to see that Russian “sympathy awkstra” that  came once with much fanfare.  My mother used to make me watch Leonard Bernstein’s classical TV broadcasts on Saturday afternoons and when Granddaddy visited us, he would switch to the Wilburn Brothers, Porter Wagoner and Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’ shows the minute she left the room.

Granddaddy clipped this and we found it in the family Bible after he died.

When I was a kid with a toy guitar, I used to stand right in front of our old Zenith black and white TV set and pretend I was on with Lester and Earl or Porter.  Granddaddy loved that.  Once, due to the vibration of that big television, I said, “Granddaddy, I feel that music right down to my toes!”  He remembered me saying that the rest of his life and when I started playing real guitars in high school bands, he often reminded me of it.

After almost fifty years with the GM&O, Granddaddy retired and moved to Pascagoula to live with my mom, step-father and me.  He lived in an apartment in our backyard and I  spent many hours with him during my high school and early college years.  He helped me learn to drive in his big Buick (this one was a huge Electra 225) and we often took spins out Old Highway 90 where he would buy fresh tomatoes from a farm stand he knew about.  He taught me how to pick the best ones and how to shell black eyed peas and butter beans, which my mother “flat knew how to cook,” as he used to say.

As my high school graduation approached, Granddaddy told me he wanted to buy a new guitar for me as a present.  I picked an Ovation Legend, which was stolen the next year.  So he bought me another one which I still play, thirty-six years later.  Granddaddy died in 1976 and I’m glad that he got to see me play that guitar on TV in Biloxi. He often told me that he knew in his heart that I would be playing it in Nashville, Tennessee, someday.

Still playing that guitar

On October 18, 1981, five years after Granddaddy died and the day before my twenty-fifth birthday, memories and emotions inspired a song I wrote about him called Dewey’s Tune.  You can listen to it here and I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Listen to Dewey’s Tune: Dewey’s Tune – Les Kerr

Dewey’s Tune ©1981 Words & Music by Les Kerr; from the CD Southern Sound Sessions

Learn more about Les Kerr’s music, books and appearances at www.leskerr.com

Blog text and photos Copyright 2011

Jimmie Rodgers clipping from the collection of Les Kerr

Destination: Gulf of Mexico

The lighthouse base, 2011

Recently, seeing what’s left of the Round Island Lighthouse near Highway 90 in Pascagoula, Mississippi where I lived in the early 1970s brought back a boatload of memories of sailing out to it as a boy.  In my “12-foot yacht,” a Singing River Pram called the New Moon, I made lots of trips out to Round Island.  Often I went by myself and sometimes a friend would come along.  The skipper and crew capacity of that small, wooden, low-freeboard boat was a total of two because of how low additional people made her ride in the water.  More people than that could be the demonstration of how a sailboat could become a submarine if even a medium-sized wave came along.

Round Island isn’t very far from Pascagoula and the north side of it was within plain sight from any place along the beach.  Back then, we could easily see the northeast side from our kitchen window on Farnsworth Avenue, a short street about a half-block from the seawall, behind the homes on Beach Boulevard.

Battered by hurricanes but still on the island in 2004

Sometimes I would sail all the way, heading west, just north of the “Mud Lump,” before turning south toward the island.  The Mud Lump was land created when the deep ship channel was dredged and what was removed from the channel path was piled
up on the west side of it.  Other times, I would cheat and sail down along the ship channel, then pull the boat across the Mud Lump and head for the island from there. Either way, the lighthouse was the prime reason for my trips.

In those years, the lighthouse stood at its complete height, though the outside was a faded white and the inside was charred black by many bonfires.  The spiral stairway was long gone but the rail around the top just outside the lens was still there.  That’s the way I remember it.

In 1988, after I had moved to Tennessee to pursue music, I wrote a song about the lighthouse. I remembered how much I enjoyed the solitude of knocking around that

Round Island Lighthouse doorway

island, going into the lighthouse and having it all to myself.  Of course, others had it all to themselves as well, but I don’t recall ever seeing anyone else near the lighthouse on any of my trips to Round Island.  To this day, I keep a picture of it above my desk.  Looking at it or singing the song always takes me “back to excursions on a twelve-foot yacht; Destination: Gulf of Mexico.”

Listen to Les’ song Destination: Gulf of Mexico here: Destination-Gulf of Mexico – Les Kerr

Destination: Gulf of Mexico- Words & Music © 1988, Les Kerr.  From the CD Southern Sound Sessions.  CDs available at www.leskerr.com.  Downloads available on Itunes, CDBaby.com (http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/LesKerr)  and BeachFront Radio (http://www.beachfrontradio.com/leskerr1.cfm) .

Blog text and photos Copyright 2011, Les Kerr

From Pascagoula to Ocean Springs…

My first guitar, complete with extra Black Diamond Strings

“You can stretch my broken guitar strings

From Pascagoula to Ocean Springs

I’ve played all kinds of music on the Gulf of Mexico

I played a little country, played a little rock

I’ve played ‘uptown’ and around the block”

Whatever it takes to give the folks a show” *

Old Highway 90.  That was my favorite way to get from Pascagoula to Ocean Springs in the 1970s, even though the relatively new Interstate 10 could get me there with a smoother ride.  And a lot less scenery.

Today, I will head for Ocean Springs again, this time from Nashville with my friend Johnny Mire to play in the Second Annual Mississippi Songwriter Festival.  Johnny and I were in the same Pascagoula High School class and we were both budding guitarists and
singers then, although we didn’t play together.  Turns out that we both moved to Nashville at about the same time and we haven’t played together during those years, either.  That is,

Johnny Mire (left) and Les Kerr, 2011 Photo: Dylan Mire

until this year when, as more mature songwriters, we have gotten together to rekindle a friendship and swap some tunes and memories.  I’m sure we’ll create new memories this weekend – who knows, they may end up in a song.

Music, for me, has always been a wonderful way to make friends.  My first “stage” was in Mrs. Irene Shepard’s Spanish class in Pascagoula when I finagled a way to play for classmates by demonstrating the guitar’s Spanish heritage.  Clever, right?  Of course, I had to throw in a little of my Elvis imitation, as well.  “Gracias, Senora, muchas, muchas gracias!” (Spanish for “Thank you, Ma’am. Thank you very much!”)

I wasn’t an athlete or star student, but thanks to my guitar, I had an identity and a calling card with which to make friends.  It will be fun to see old friends and to make new ones this weekend and it’s an honor to be included in the festival lineup with some incredible songwriters.

Check the schedule and the venues where all of us will be performing at this web site and come out and see us! www.mssongwritersfestival.com

*From Hillbilly Blues Caribbean Rock & Roll ©1989 Words and music by Les Kerr

For music, books, tour dates and More about Les, visit www.leskerr.com

For info on the 2^nd Annual Mississippi Songwriters Festival, visit www.mssongwritersfestival.com

All because of Elvis…

Our name in lights! TraveLodge Motel, Pascagoula, MS 1974

Elvis fans have converged on Memphis and Graceland as they do this time of year every year.  Here’s an update of a previous post about the importance he had in my life.  I hope this will bring fond memories to those who may remember my musical start with “Les Kerr and The Blue Suede Band” as we barnstormed from Pascagoula High School all the way to Ocean Springs and even Biloxi!  From then until now, it was all because of Elvis.

In 1956, Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley was released. That’s also the year I was born. I have heard Elvis music all my life. When I was nine years old, I saw him on the big screen for the first time in a movie called “Tickle Me.” That did it. Seeing him in a “Rock and Rollicking Storm,” as the movie poster proclaimed, was enough to make Elvis the person I aspired most to be.

Over the next few years, I saw all of his movies many times over. Back then, at the Lamar Theater in Jackson, Mississippi, you could pay the fifty-five cent admission once and sit through as many screenings as you wanted. With each Elvis movie, from the marginal to the magnificent, I became more enamored with the image of the star. Who could beat a life of traveling, singing and always ending up with the prettiest girl in the picture?

But it was September 14, 1970 that absolutely changed my life. We had moved from Jackson to Pascagoula, Mississippi on the Gulf Coast, not far from Mobile, Alabama.  To my absolute delight, Elvis was going on tour again for the first time in a decade and Mobile was on the itinerary. Mom got tickets for me and my across-the-street neighbor Monte Childress to go and see the King in concert. Elvis was thin, agile, charming on stage and sang his heart out at the Mobile Municipal Auditorium that night.

I did it his way

1970 was also the year I began teaching myself how to play the guitar, as many of us did in Pascagoula High School. From the ninth grade until I was a senior, I tried to perfect every Elvis nuance, learn every song and even his famous scarf-throwing technique. Other classmates learned songs by contemporary artists of the day – James Taylor, Cat Stevens, John Denver, and Janis Joplin. But not me – I was Elvis all the way, with a little Johnny Cash thrown in for good measure.

With other good friends who enjoyed music, my first band was born: Les Kerr & The Blue Suede Band. We played talent shows, pep rallies, Junior Civitan meetings and wherever we could get people to listen to us play Heartbreak Hotel, Don’t Be Cruel and Burning Love. Bandmember Garry Downs’ mother made a shirt with a very high collar for me to
emulate tall collars on Elvis’ jumpsuits. I still have it. It’s lime-green (it was the 70s) with a subtle floral design (right!) . It went well with my scarves.

1972 w/Garry Downs & Butch Thompson, Jr. Civitan party

We really thought we had hit the big time when we appeared on “Pas-Point Spotlight,” a 15-minute TV show broadcast on Saturdays on WLOX TV in Biloxi. Many of our high school

Doing my best moves at a pep rally, 1973

friends watched me curl my lip, grab the microphone and wink at the camera as we sang Love Me Tender to the local TV audience.

Good Rockin’ Tonight

I saw Elvis in concert two more times in Mobile  in 1973 and 1975. While he gained weight over those years, he never lost the magic he had with an audience or his magnificent voice. The tickets from those  concerts are among my most prized possessions, as is one unused ticket for an Elvis Presley concert scheduled for August 28, 1977 in the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, Tennessee. I had bought that ticket while in college in North  Mississippi and it broke my heart and the hearts of many around the world when  he died before that show could go on.

Tickets for the three Elvis performances I saw and one for the scheduled Memphis show he never got to play.

In college, I got into bluegrass and the great singer-songwriter boom that was taking place. Then blues, New Orleans music and my own songwriting. However, I don’t think there are any pop, rock or country singers of my generation who were not influenced by Elvis’ performing style in some way, whether they admit it or not.

If I can dream…

I did get to live a dream from my “Elvis years” thirty years later in 2002.   The Jordanaires, the vocal group who sang on so many Elvis records and appeared with him on the Ed Sullivan Show and other historic performances joined me in the recording studio.   They were nice enough to sing on four songs of mine for my Christmas on the Coast CD, including the title song, which is about Pascagoula.  They more than lived up to my expectations as vocalists and as gentlemen.

Recording with The Jordanaires, 2002

Before you’ve “left the building…”

If I could say one thing to Elvis today, it would be something he said himself many times: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Al Parker & Phil Howell "bop-bopping" while I sing lead, Beta Follies, 1972

Copyright 2011 Les Kerr

Visit Les Kerr’s web site at www.leskerr.com