Fair warning: there’s a LONG and semi-complicated backstory to my current obsession with today’s song selection, so I need to beg your forbearance in advance, dear readers. For fans of Memphis music, I can promise you won’t be disappointed, as this may be one of the most interesting music stories you’ve heard in a while. For the rest of you… well, first, WHO ARE YOU?!… and, second, my general life-advice is that you should enroll yourself in the category “Fans of Memphis Music” post haste (then go back and read the previous sentence). If you’re unwilling to do that, you should probably just scroll down to the video and skip the rest of this.
First things first: my song selection for today is the R&B classic “Mustang Sally.” It was originally recorded by (the truly, criminally under-appreciated) Sir Mack Rice in 1965 and made popular by Wilson Pickett when Pickett released it as a single and included it on his album The Wicked Pickett a year later. “Mustang Sally” is a staple song for most bar-bands everywhere in the United States, but it’s practically a requirement for bar-bands in Memphis and the surrounding Delta. I think you’d be hard-pressed south of the Mason-Dixon line, and most places north and west of it, to find anyone who doesn’t know the song and, what is more, doesn’t also know how and when to sing along to the audience-response part that makes it an enduring favorite: Riiiiide, Sally, Ride. (Random, unrelated, awesome anecdote that I couldn’t figure out any other way to incorporate except as a parenthetical statement here: the first and only time I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane, I jumped with a skydiving-cameraman. After I landed safely on the ground and they asked me what music I wanted for the soundtrack to the video of my jump, I chose “Mustang Sally.”) According to Rolling Stone, Pickett’s version of “Mustang Sally” almost literally ended up on the studio floor. As the legend goes, after Pickett finished his final take of the song at FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, the tape flew off the reel unexpectedly and broke into pieces on the floor. Pickett’s session engineer, the genius Tom Dowd, cleared the room and told everyone to come back in half an hour. In that time, Dowd managed to piece the tape back together and saved what became one of the most famous recordings of the 60’s.
And that story of Pickett and Dowd is not even the interesting backstory I want to tell you about “Mustang Sally.”
As a lover of music, a musician and also a Memphian, I’d make a ballpark-guess that I’ve heard “Mustang Sally” more than 5,000 times in my life. (My first draft of this post said “10,000 times” but a friend suggested that I might be exaggerating. Fwiw, I don’t think so.) Several years ago, I noticed that the way the song is played live in Memphis, that is, by Memphis musicians, is noticeably different than the way it is played anywhere else I’ve heard it played live and, what is perhaps even more peculiar, noticeably different than any recorded version of the song. Just for the record, I didn’t have any kind of eureka! moment when I realized this. Rather, it was a slowly, steadily-accumulating set of aggregate experiences, of hearing this song over and over and over, played by countless different bands in a multitude of different locations and in many different cities– Nashville, Boston, Lexington, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, State College, Chicago, Eugene, Little Rock, New Orleans, Baltimore, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Houston, New York City, Miami, etc. (a non-exhaustive list of all the places that I’ve actually heard “Mustang Sally” played live)– that eventually coalesced into something that might generically resemble a “realization.”
In fact, the very first time I said out loud what I had been long suspecting was only last summer. I was participating as a faculty member in the Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies, a summer research program at Rhodes College, during which the first week is spent giving student Research Fellows a week-long, 8-hours-a-day “crash-course” in Memphis history and culture. I had the very good fortune that year of having Charles Hughes (a bona fide expert in Memphis and Delta music, as well as country, soul and R&B) and Hamlett Dobbins (a native Memphian, Rome Prize-winning artist and music-lover) as my colleagues. One day, in the van with Charles and Hamlett on our way to take the students to the Stax Museum, I somewhat off-handedly mentioned to them my (still-unrefined) hypothesis that Memphis musicians have a unique version of “Mustang Sally” that is different than the way that song is played anywhere else. Not having a live Memphis band right there with me in the van to serve as confirmation, I basically had to resort to singing/humming/vocally-approximating for my colleagues what I saw as the difference between “Mustang Sally” as everyone knows it and “Mustang Sally” as it’s played in Memphis. I could tell that they were suspicious of my speculation at first but, thankfully, my (yeah, I’m going to call it) expert performance of the difference was immediately recognizable to them, and they acknowledged straightaway the difference to which I was referring. Charles Hughes, who knows more about Memphis and Delta music than anyone I’ve ever met in my life, had a few impromptu speculations about my intuition, but asked me if I knew why it was the case that there was a uniquely “Memphis” version of “Mustang Sally”… and I was like, HIIK bro, I was kinda hoping you knew.
Before I go on any further, here is Pickett’s version of the song. This video is not the official “recorded” version of the song; it’s a live performance (which is awesome and which you should watch because Pickett was a consummate performer). You’ll see that his live version doesn’t depart in any fundamentally structural way from the recorded version that we all know. It’s a hair faster in tempo, but otherwise unaltered from the studio. We’ll use this as our “control” case in the following:
But that is not how “Mustang Sally” sounds in Memphis.
Obviously, you’ve got to hear the Memphis-version of “Mustang Sally” to really get why I’m obsessed with this song, so I’ve got a few examples. The difference is subtle and it comes at the transition from the chorus back into the verse. In this first example below, performed by my very good friend Chris McDaniel, the part that you need to listen for (and which distinguishes “Memphis Mustang Sally” from the regular version) happens for the first time at 0:40-0:48, then again at 1:24-1:32, and so on.
Here’s the “Memphis” version again, this time by the Beale Street All-Star Band, fronted by one of the hardest working musicians in town, the inimitable Carl Jones.
If one time is an accident, two times is a coincidence. But three or more times is definitely a pattern. So, here’s one more for good measure, this time from The Juke Joint All Stars.
In sum, the difference you’re hearing is something like this: in the transition from the chorus back to the verse, the “Memphis version” has two staccato punch-chords (often further-punctuated with horns, or the keyboard version of horns), followed by a walk-up back to the C. If you’re from Memphis, like me, and you’re accustomed to hearing the song played this way, like I am, then hearing the traditional version sounds strange. I’ve often caught myself off-beat when I hear the song in other cities, having been thrown off my groove by the missing transition. But the craziest part of all of this is that I have never, NOT ONCE, heard the Memphis version played anywhere else… and the only time I hear the traditional version in Memphis is when it is being played by bands who are not Memphis bands.
I’ve got a few working theories about how the “Memphis version” was put together. My guess is that it’s mostly a sped-up rendition of the Pickett version, with the idiosyncratic chorus-to-verse transition being a sort of mash-up of The Rascals’ recording and Buddy Guy’s recording. The horns are clearly borrowed from Buddy Guy, but the “punchiness” of the Memphis version sounds like it was at least in part borrowed from The Rascals (who copied it from the original Mack Rice recording). Neither The Rascals nor Buddy Guy do the walk-up back to the verse, nor does Rice or Pickett, but that seems like a natural move for musicians to do and, at any rate, it’s very characteristic of the Memphis sound. So, my instinct tells me that what we now hear when we hear the Memphis “Mustang Sally” was more of an organic creation that grew out of an attempt to combine elements of the several recorded versions, with the rough edges being subsequently smoothed out live by Memphis musicians. That is, I don’t think anyone composed it this way or played it first this way…. but, of course, I may be wrong.
My obsession with “Mustang Sally” basically comes down to this (so-far unsolved) mystery: who originated the “Memphis Mustang Sally”? I’d really love to know who, if anyone, played it first this way, and when. Or, alternatively, I’d love to know for sure that it was never really done that way “first,” which I strongly suspect is the real story of “(Memphis) Mustang Sally.” I suspect the version that Memphis musicians know and play has been passed down over the last couple of generations like a recipe for Thanksgiving dressing. Somebody added a few horns, somebody added a pinch of a guitar-lick, somebody thought more organ would be nice, somebody decided the dressing pan wasn’t the right size and restructured the whole thing to fit a new rhythm-section, and eventually what came out in the mix was something that resembled Momma’s original recipe for delicious Thanksgiving dressing, only updated to accommodate the taste of the people who were actually going to be sitting down at the Thanksgiving table.
In other words, I suspect it was made exactly the same way all the rest of Memphis music was made.
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Here’s your quick-access link to the entire 30 Day Song Challenge 2014 prompt-list and my picks for each day.