Prairie View A&M University

From the SelectedWorks of T. DeWayne Moore

December, 2018

“Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating , the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian American Experience in the Mississippi Delta.” T. DeWayne Moore, Prairie View A&M University

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY International License.

Available at: https://works.bepress.com/tdewaynemoore/8/ 154 a r s c Journal

Figure 1. Ralph Lembo in the 1920s. Courtesy of Ralph Lembo Prestidge. original article | t. dewayne moore

Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta

This essay examines newspaper articles, government documents, personal family collections, and secondary sources to refute and corroborate interviews about Ralph Lembo and restore the good name of the Mississippi talent scout and manager whose passionate, multi- faceted engagement with the entertainment world brought many artists to major recording companies, including Columbia, Paramount, OKeh, and Victor. Lembo drove Rocket 88 air- conditioned automobiles, wore alligator boots and Panama-brimmed hats, and he stepped up and offered his large plantation when several other potential sites had refused to support the establishment of Mississippi Valley State University. Lembo relished playing the drums in his band the Pot Lickers and operating several music stores in the mid-Delta, which brought him into contact with an immense well of talent, including such figures as Kansas City Jim Jackson, , Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Rubin Lacy. This article also explodes the negative and ongoing bias against Lembo and argues that he discovered the “King of the Delta ,” Charley Patton.

alent scout Harry Charles had a piano store in Birmingham, Alabama. Polk Brockman was a furniture and music store proprietor in Atlanta, Georgia. R. T. TAshford operated a record store and shoeshine parlor in Dallas, Texas. Henry Speir was a phonograph technician and music store proprietor on Farish Street in Jackson, Mississippi. Each of these major southern cities boasted talent scouts who discovered recording artists for the major record labels prior to World War II. Each of these scouts dedicated time and energy to capturing southern musical culture and preserving the sounds that have both inspired and haunted musicians, scholars, and enthusiasts around the globe ever since. One of the most under-recognized and important talent scouts for the major labels during this time was a largely obscure grocery store owner and retail merchant who had immigrated from Comiso, Sicily, and found his way to the small town of Itta Bena, Mississippi, not far from Greenwood. Raffaele “Ralph” Lembo has never really interested scholars enough to warrant serious attempts to uncover evidence about him beyond a limited amount of oral testimony. In many accounts, he is portrayed like a character in a Horatio Alger novel whose inauspicious career started with selling dry goods from a pushcart and ended with his being a “part-time talent scout who focused most of his energies on building his retail emporium.”1 He is perhaps best known for his spoken interjection on Rubin Lacy’s “Ham Hound Crave,” his discovery of the , and his arrangement of Bukka White’s debut session on Victor in 1930. After the onset of the Great Depression,

ARSC Journal XLIX / ii 2018. © Association for Recorded Sound Collections 2018. All rights reserved. Printed in USA. Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 155 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta Lembo seems to have faded into the background like so many of the unissued blues sides of the pre-World War II period. The works of Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow have been a most salient influence on subsequent scholarship. Calt and Wardlow’s King of the : The Life and Music of Charlie Patton puts forward several incorrect assertions and gives an overall negative impression of Ralph Lembo, with Charley Patton supposedly refusing to stoop so low as to record for the “tricky” Italian and instead presenting himself as a recording prospect to talent scout H. C. Speir in Jackson, Mississippi.2 Their fantastic tales of Lembo’s unscrupulous management stem from their errant belief that he lost a lawsuit and paid “thousands of dollars in damages.”3 They also portray Lembo as an overzealous advertiser whose desire for valuable, exploitable recording properties outweighed his desire for success in local business. Strangely, Patton is said in King of the Delta Blues to have assessed all the rumors floating around Greenwood regarding Lembo and decided not to record for the Itta Bena talent scout. Even though Patton was a well-traveled musician by the late 1920s, the two authors do not tell about his auditioning for Speir on Farish Street in Jackson, as he had apparently done for Lembo in some fashion – either on the streets or inside his store. Calt and Wardlow tell us that Patton wrote a letter to Speir instead, requesting that he pay a visit to his home on the plantation of Will Dockery between Cleveland and Ruleville, about a hundred miles north of Jackson. The authors depict Speir as a man willing to take extraordinary financial risks on difficult and unobvious talents, and the Sicilian immigrant as never venturing outside Itta Bena, making several major finds for the recording labels but then withdrawing from scouting altogether amid what Ted Gioia interprets as a “maelstrom of accusations and recriminations.”4 Drawing on a wealth of previously unexplored newspaper articles and government documents, and interviews with the descendants of Ralph Lembo, this article re- examines the oral testimony of the informants who provided the bulk of information on the Italian immigrant to correct misinterpretations, highlight unreliable evidence, and reconstruct an accurate historical narrative encompassing his broad range of business ventures as well as his multi-faceted engagement with the entertainment world. While the rest of the state ignored some of its most influential cultural traditions, Lembo identified the torchbearers and sent them to major record labels, including Columbia (Rev. C. F. Thornton), Paramount (Rubin Lacy), Okeh (Mississippi Sheiks), and Victor (Bukka White). Lembo also played drums for his hillbilly band and the Itta Bena Orchestra, operated several music stores in the mid-Delta, and provided the land on which historically-black Mississippi Valley State University was built in the late 1940s. Having known the Itta Bena merchant in his youth, Mississippi Valley State University vice president of public relations Dr. Roy Hudson declared that Ralph Lembo “was always a man who walked out of step with the rest of the planter community.”5 He also had no problem walking in front of the planter community, taking the lead and confidently showing others a path forward.

Francesco and Agata Lembo’s second child was born on June 28, 1897, in the town of Comiso, Italy. Francesco gave the child, a son, the name Raffaele. Not much is known of the boy’s life before age ten, when he received his Certificato di Compimento del Corso Elementare Inferiore, which certified that he had completed elementary school.6 In 156 a r s c Journal

Figure 2. Ralph Lembo in the 1920s. Courtesy of Ralph Lembo Prestidge.

1910, he climbed aboard a ship called Liguria with his mother, younger brother Sam, and older sister Stella.7 The immigration experience of the Lembo family was typical of those of many Sicilian families in the early twentieth century, but it was markedly different than that of mainland Italians recruited to labor on the plantation. Most mainland Italians carried their entire families with them to work in the Delta, but Sicilian men often immigrated first, found work, and got settled, and then sent for their wives and children. Francesco Lembo immigrated in 1904 and established himself at Itta Bena, Mississippi, before sending for the rest of his family. Most Sicilian families arrived at the port of , Louisiana, as did young Raffaele, his mother, and siblings. Soon they made their way to Itta Bena, Mississippi, where the family patriarch had made himself familiar with the fruit and vegetable business.8 Ralph Lembo recognized the incentives that came with American citizenship. Though he never shed all elements of his Italian identity and benefitted from the close- knit Italian community in Itta Bena, he fully engaged with the process of acculturation to the way of life in America. In August 1918, having changed his name, Ralph Lembo registered in the military to serve in World War I.9 His native country of Italy had recently completed its third year of involvement in the conflict, and U. S. General John Pershing had sent a regiment of his expeditionary force to Italy in June to unite Italian, British, French, and American troops along that front.10 Lembo did not see any action or return to his native land during the war. In 1920, one census enumerator recorded 22-year-old Lembo, by then a retail merchant, renting a home at 72 Main Street in Itta Bena, in which he lived with his wife Rosa and his mother-in-law, Rosie Battalio. They lived next to his parents on one side and a Chinese merchant on the other, and all were “alien,” or unnaturalized, Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 157 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta residents.11 The following year, however, Ralph remedied that situation and petitioned for naturalization. On the petition is the first full physical description of the young man; he stood stout at five feet, seven inches, with dark hair and brown eyes, and he had somehow lost the tip of the little finger on his right hand.12 Ralph Lembo experienced serious losses in his early twenties. In the summer of 1923, his younger brother Sam died, his skull crushed after his vehicle flipped over while travelling at a high rate of speed about two miles north of Dundee.13 His father, 58-year-old Francesco Lembo, died the following week in a Memphis hospital.14 The sudden and unexpected loss of Sam, according to one family member, simply proved too much grief for the patriarch to overcome.15 Ralph Lembo’s wife and the mother of his two children fell ill unexpectedly in the spring of 1925. On March 4, at the young age of twenty-four, Rosa Lembo passed away. Her remains were interred at the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Greenwood, and her mother erected a small grave marker, which now sits alone among many unmarked graves in the Italian section of the burial ground. After Rosa’s death, Lembo’s young daughter Agnes went to live with her aunt Stella, who in ensuing years took it upon herself to hold not only her family together, but also the larger Italian immigrant community in Itta Bena.16 While raising a young son alone, the Italian grocery store proprietor mourned for as much as a year, but he opened up his heart once more. On September 14, 1926, he remarried, to Eura Gay Smith, whose family was from Sunflower County. Calt and Wardlow write that Lembo started his mercantile career by selling dry goods from a wagon, a profession taken up by other Italian immigrants to the Delta and which would come to carry a stereotypical association.17 An article in the Hattiesburg American in January 1925, for example, which is represented as having been written by Lembo to the editor, explains that once he learned of the high prices demanded for banana splits in pharmacies, he reasoned that, since he sold the pharmacies their bananas, he, “a son of sunny Italy,” should run for mayor or go into the drugstore business himself.18 While occasionally invoking ethnic stereotypes, the article is written in such egregiously stereotypical dialect that it’s difficult to make out all of the words in his alleged announcement for an upcoming special mayoral election. Lembo never entered the four-man race, and the description of his business interests – “selling bananas three and four for a nickel” – was only partially accurate.19 As early as 1919, the Greenwood Commonwealth described Lembo as a “clever and prosperous… merchant,” and by the mid-1920s, in addition to his grocery store in Itta Bena, he had a store in Morgan City and some commercial property in Greenwood.20 In January of 1924, moreover, he had purchased the Itta Bena Dixie Theatre from the Jenkins Brothers, intending to display high-quality pictures and even bring in some major musical acts.21 The Dixie Theatre became the venue in which Lembo developed a range of entertainment activities. In the 1920s, boxing was a premier high school and college sport, and most growing municipalities had a fight card each week made up of professional matches, Golden Gloves, and some other gimmick competitions. Prize fights received well-rounded coverage in the newspaper, and heavyweight championship fights were promoted extensively.22 Ralph Lembo took on the role of boxing promoter in Itta Bena, scheduling several boxing matches. In March 1926, for example, he brought in Pensacola Buck to go four rounds with “Battling” Taylor. Some of the other colorful 158 a r s c Journal characters of the boxing ring included Hooting Bull and Johnnie Green, the originator of “Jerry’s Pile Driver Jab.”23 Ralph Lembo was also an accomplished dancer. From a very young age, he instructed and encouraged his son, Frank, whose dancing career started to take off under his father’s guidance in the spring of 1926. One blues artist later observed that Ralph Lembo was a great dancer.24 Saenger’s Theatre in Greenville billed young Frank as the “dancing wonder” in May. An article in the Commonwealth lauded his abilities and predicted that he was destined for the silver screen.25 When he began devoting more time to his son’s career, Lembo sold the Dixie Theatre to his sister and brother-in-law, Stella and Joe Paluso, in February 1926.26 The sale did not impinge, however, on his future plans, but rather allowed Lembo to begin dancing with his son on the stage. Ralph and Frank were quite the popular entertainers, well-known in the Delta for their dancing.27 Frank also appeared

Table 1. The Known and Suspected Involvement of Ralph Lembo in Pre-World War II Sessions

Date Location Label Artists Involvement New Orleans, April 1927 Columbia Rev. Thornton/Rev. Cotton Certain LA Rev. Thornton/Rev. Cotton/ Dec 1927 Memphis, TN Columbia Certain Reuben [sic] Lacy Walter Rhodes, Lewis Black, the Rust College Possible Quartet, and Pearl Dickson March 1928 , IL Paramount Rube Lacy Certain May 1928 Chicago, IL Paramount George “Bullet” Williams Possible Aug 1928 Chicago, IL Paramount Rev. Frank Cotton Certain New Orleans, Dec 1928 Brunswick Bo Chatman Possible LA June 1929 Richmond, IN Paramount Charley Patton Possible Sep 1929 Richmond, IN Paramount The Graves Brothers Possible Lembo had ?? Artophone recommended at Late 1920s ? (Herwin) least one blues artist Feb/Mar Shreveport, LA Okeh The Mississippi Sheiks Certain 1930 Washington White, Napoleon Harriston, May 1930 Memphis, TN Victor Certain Rev. M. H. Holt and His Congregation Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 159 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta as the “dancing wonder of Leflore” at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis with the Seven Aces Orchestra. Later, the father and son duo won first and second places in the Tri-States Charleston Contest at the Peabody. This led to a string of appearances as “The Charleston Wonders” in several Delta theatres, including at Tchula, Grenada, and Yazoo City. In the fall, however, Frank started to attend school and his dancing career was largely over, but his father was uniquely poised – not to mention exquisitely located – to turn his ear and energies towards the talents of local musicians. The town’s accelerated and determined modernization in the twentieth century created a market for the passions of the Italian merchant. No more than a couple of hundred people lived in the town of Itta Bena in 1890.28 The “Home in the Woods,” as it translates from Chickasaw, witnessed a more than three hundred percent rise in population to fifteen hundred over the next couple of decades, and a team of civil engineers constructed the downtown district to convey a unique character. With the picturesque background of Roebuck Lake, the brick-paved streets had sets of adjoined buildings facing each other on its borders. Itta Bena’s downtown boasted several restaurants, movie theatres, cafés, shopping marts, and boutiques in the town plaza by the time of Lembo’s arrival in America. In the next few years, the town’s leading citizens even formed the Itta Bena Business League, which produced its own newspaper, The Itta Bena Times. By 1922, the town had become a mecca for blind street singers and aspiring musicians, who realized that the musical appreciation of the local populace could be quite lucrative. According to the Jackson Daily News:

These unfortunates may be found upon one of Itta Bena’s street corners at any hour of the day, two or three in town near all the time. Some of these negroes are talented musicians, producing harmonious sounds from nothing more intricate or complicated than a short section of cane with small holes bored in the sides. Some play the harp, mandolin, and , while others produce only vocal music. Not all are musicians, but the greater number run Beethoven and Caruso a close second.29

The 1922 newspaper description suggests that the Lembo family made a fortuitous decision to establish themselves at Itta Bena, in and around which had developed a vibrant musical scene. Not only did Lembo have a unique opportunity to scout amazing street singers, preachers, and skilled instrumentalists, but he also developed crucial contacts in the recording industry before anyone else in the state. In February 1927, the Commonwealth announced his new profession as “manager of a troupe of [African American recording] artists consisting of a precentor of a congregation on a nearby plantation.” A phonograph company had already held its preliminary examination, and Lembo expected the district manager to bring the contracts to his store and ink the deal with Columbia Records.30 In mid-April, Lembo carried his troupe of artists, including Reverend C. T. Thornton and Reverend Frank Cotton, to record phonograph records in New Orleans for a couple of days. “The Prodigal Son” (Columbia 14233A) and “Keep Him from Rising” (Columbia 14233B) were the two sides recorded by Rev. C. T. Thornton and released on Columbia under the name, “C. F. Thornton.” The two sides recorded on the same day by Rev. Cotton, however, were never issued. Yet, the recording manager for Columbia told 160 a r s c Journal

Figure 3. Downtown Itta Bena. Courtesy of Ralph Lembo Prestidge

Lembo that he had a “great preacher” in Rev. Thornton and a “great artist” in Rev. Cotton. The Commonwealth asserted that this was “the first time that any one from the Mississippi Delta [had] engaged in the making of phonograph records” and planned to advertise them in the Delta.31 Not long after he returned from New Orleans, Lembo announced the first public performance of the string band under his direction, the Itta Bena Pot Lickers. One of the reasons Lembo became a talent scout was his ear for music. Booker Miller, a musician who performed on the street corners in Itta Bena insisted, “[Lembo] was [of] a musical incline himself…, and he knew about what it’d take” to make records.32 The five- piece hillbilly group included drums, French harp, guitar, mandolin, and water bucket. The show took place on May 30 at the Dixie Theatre.33 The Pot Lickers also delivered a performance at the theatre in Drew on June 4.34 It is interesting that Lembo organized his hillbilly outfit in the summer of 1927 – the same year that Willie Narmour won the fiddling contest at nearby Winona and met a talent scout for Okeh Records. Gayle Dean Wardlow interviewed Ralph Lembo’s widow on two occasions.35 In one interview she recalled a “trip they made to the hills around Carrollton, Mississippi – some twenty miles to the east of Itta Bena – and listened to a hillbilly group.”36 While Mississippi John Hurt biographer Philip Ratcliffe explains how Okeh recording director Tommy Rockwell discovered both Narmour & Smith and John Hurt, the Carroll County musicians may have had an influence on or inspired the creation of Lembo’s Itta Bena Pot Lickers.37 In the last months of 1927, a particularly strong musician named Rubin Lacy accepted a position as overseer on a plantation between Itta Bena and Greenwood. Before long, he started to perform inside Ralph Lembo’s music store, and Lembo told him about Columbia Records and their plans to set up recording equipment and sessions in Memphis. According to Lacy, the Italian scout hoped to “take Rev. Thornton and Rev. Cotton up there and wanted to carry me up there” too.38 On December 8, the Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 161 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta Commonwealth reported that Lembo and his “troupe of singers” had been engaged “by the Columbia Company in making more records,” one of which was “The Itta Bena Blues,” perhaps “composed by local talent.”39 Even though Rube Lacy recorded several songs, including “Black Dog Blues” (145347-2), “Long Lonesome Blues” (145348-3), “Railroad Blues” (145349-2), and “Red River Blues” (145350-2) on December 9, the Columbia Company never issued a single one. The musical content of the much anticipated “Itta Bena Blues,” therefore, remains a mystery. Itta Bena Baptist Church “clergyman” Frank Cotton once again entered the studio and recorded sides which were never issued by Columbia.40 Presenting us with a possible reason the sides remain unheard to this day, Lacy informed of Cotton’s belief that once he started to preach and got caught up in spirit, it was wrong to abruptly stop preaching the word of God. Thus, when he recorded and the red light signaled him to stop, he continued preaching as if he didn’t understand the meaning of the glowing bulb. Taking on the role of the parson, Lacy declared: “I’m going to make this record this time, but I don’t mean to make them another one. I ain’t going to mess up God’s word that way. When I get happy I have to be choked down.” Rev. Frank Cotton either found his composure, or found someone who could choke him, because later in August 1928, he travelled all the way to Chicago for a final session, in which he recorded four sides – “Born Again” (20830-2), “Prayer for Sinners” (20831-1), “By the Pool of Siloam,” (20837- 1), and “Jesus Healed the Sick Woman” (20836-1). issued all of the sides recorded by Cotton in August 1928. The final recordings of Rev. C. T. Thornton – listed under the name C. F. Thornton – were two sermons recorded in December 1927 for Columbia (Open the Door of the Church 145351-2/ We’ve Got to Move 145352-2). These recordings remained unissued. About a month after the Columbia session in Memphis, Lembo welcomed the manager and the recording engineer for the Artophone Corporation, of New York, to his music store in Itta Bena. The two men contracted Lembo to provide talented blues singers for Artophone, and they planned to set up recording equipment in an unidentified southern city as soon as possible. While all of the artists scouted by Lembo had thus far recorded only for Columbia, the Commonwealth declared that he would “soon have his artists on Okeh and Victor Records,” making him “one of the leading music dealers of this line in the south.”41 Victor, Columbia, Okeh, Paramount, and Vocalion were some of the major players in early days of “race” recordings, which catered to the musical tastes of African Americans. Many records were cut in hotel rooms, auditoriums, and small storefronts that the labels rented for a few days or weeks. Talent scouts and record labels often took out advertisements, such as the ones that Lembo took out in the Commonwealth, saying, “Colored People Attention! I need colored talent who can play the guitar and sing the blues. This is your chance to be on a record if you think you are good. See at once, Ralph Lembo, Itta Bena, Miss.”42 After the Columbia session in Memphis, Rubin Lacy went back to his position as overseer of the plantation outside Itta Bena and waited for a letter telling him to come to Chicago. “That’s where I made my record,” he exclaimed. In February or March 1928, Lembo accompanied Lacy to the Windy City to record two songs.43 “Mississippi Jail House Groan” and “Ham Hound Crave” (Paramount 12629), which featured the blues guitar that Lacy learned from George Hendrix as well as the spoken interjection of Lembo on the latter piece. The record, indeed, sold moderately well, and Lacy received his flat fees for 162 a r s c Journal

Figure 4. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Figure 5. Rube Lacy on the cover of Blues Feb. 12, 1927. Unlimited #32 (April 1966) the session recordings as well as some of the royalties, a practice all but unheard of in the race record industry. Lacy tells a story about Lembo planting a tree in the talent scout’s front yard and naming it “Rube Lacy” in his honor. It certainly was a fine, practical, and honoring gesture to celebrate the self-proclaimed “Blues King.” Even decades later, when a young graduate student tracked down him down in California and asked him for an interview, Lacy told him that he had to ask his “manager,” Ralph Lembo.44 According to Calt and Wardlow, the way Lembo handled these initial sessions with Rev. C. T. Thornton and Rube Lacy proved problematic in future endeavors. The majority of the information on which their assertions are based comes from several taped interviews with Booker Miller, of Greenwood, but Calt’s unrecorded interviews with David “Honeyboy” Edwards and Wardlow’s unrecorded tales coming from the Rev. James Buchanon, of Moorhead, also serve – to some degree – as corroboration. One problem with the testimony of Booker Miller is that many times he offers only what he heard from other folks. Regarding Rube Lacy, Miller states that Lembo “never did pay him…that’s what the people said.”45 But “the people” were not so reliable as a source, as we have seen above. Miller also heard from “the people” that Rev. Thornton collected a thousand dollars in damages after suing Lembo over one of his recording sessions, but the parson subsequently got arrested for “passin’ out false checks,” according to one unidentified Itta Benian.46 A thorough search of local and statewide newspapers from the late 1920s and early 1930s did not produce any evidence of any criminal case, any lawsuit filed or any judgment entered against Ralph Lembo. A visit to the courthouse in the Leflore County seat of Greenwood also failed to turn up any civil suit related to the Itta Bena merchant.47 H. C. Speir, on the other hand, pulled a pistol and shot an unarmed man Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 163 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta inside his music store on Farish Street over mortgage payments that were due him. Though the shooting victim lived and Speir was only convicted of assault and battery, he had sent a clear message to anyone even thinking about threatening his financial position.48 While it certainly remains possible that Rev. Thornton filed a lawsuit against Lembo and won his claim to the tune of thousands, it is also remains highly unlikely that an African American would have engaged in and won such a legal action against a successful merchant in a 1920s Mississippi court of law. Though no evidence of legal troubles could be found about Lembo, a couple of newspaper items mention Rev. Thornton. In May 1928, the Commonwealth reported on a rumor that Rev. C. T. Thornton had been shot and killed with a Winchester rifle by one of the deacons of a Delta Church near Roebuck. Several members of his own congregation in Berclair, however, informed the newspaper that the parson was very much alive.49 Indeed, Rev. C. T. Thornton was alive, and he was arrested on March 3, 1929, charged with passing bad checks. Justice R. F. Love set his bond at $1,000. The Commonwealth noted that he had “recorded several of his songs for the phonograph,” which demonstrated that he was a powerful preacher. While several members of his church hoped to secure his release long enough to allow him to preach on Sunday morning, they lacked the capital to “post his forfeit” and he remained locked away in the city jail. The constables and justices of the peace decided to “handle bad check arrests just as other arrests,” by locking up the writers of bad checks until their day in court.50 The criminal practice had become a problem, and the recording artist did not receive any leniency in the courts.51 It seems that Ralph Lembo – in comparison to Speir and Thornton – was a model citizen about whom no one had any reason for concern, whether or not he owed or was owed. Hardly reeling from the costs of a legal defense, Lembo began a major expansion of his business interests in Itta Bena and Leflore County beginning in late 1927. Already operating several cafes in other Delta towns, John D. Kiriaga opened a café exclusively for whites in the Lembo building on Humphreys Street. Lembo, therefore, moved his place of business to the Bradford Building adjacent to the new post office.52 Around this time, Lembo renovated the Bradford building and created the headquarters of his grocery/music store empire, which, by the end of the following year, included a second music store in Swiftown and a third operation at 315 Carrollton Avenue in Greenwood.53 The expanded business landscape allowed the Italian American talent scout to attract popular recording artists to appear at his store in Itta Bena. Columbia recording artist Art Gillham, for example, better known as the Whispering Pianist, visited the town in mid-May on a circuit tour of Loew’s-Saenger theatres in the South. Gillham’s intimate performance style made him popular on records and radio, but it did not work well in the larger theatres, which had not yet installed microphones and public announcement systems that would later boom his voice.54 Lembo called Gillham and had him come over from Greenwood’s Saenger Theatre to perform in his music store, an ideal setting for the performance of such hits as “I’d Walk a Million Miles to be a Little Nearer to You,” “So Tired,” “Now That I Have You,” and “I’m Drifting Back to Dreamland.”55 Gillham’s visit had come as a surprise and only a few fortunate locals got to hear the pianist whisper a performance, but Lembo would have more opportunities to draw a crowd. 164 a r s c Journal

Figure 6. Chicago Defender, Oct. 11, 1930

Figure 7. June 2, 1928, Chicago Defender. Courtesy of T. DeWayne Moore. Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 165 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta In late September, for example, Lembo arranged for the Saturday-afternoon appearance at the grand opening of his Victor Phonograph and Radio Store in Greenwood of Vocalion recording artist Jim Jackson, a slightly older Memphis musician originally from the northern hills of Hernando, Mississippi, who had an enormous hit record, “Kansas City Blues” (Vocalion 1144).56 Another advertisement in the Commonwealth on the same day, referring to the merchant’s newfound “weakness” for selling records, phonographs, and radios, exclaims, “At Last---Ralph Lembo’s Dreams Have Come True!” He invited everyone to make his new store at 315 Carrollton Avenue their own personal headquarters while in town, and he emphatically requested that folks give him a chance to prove that he would stock only the “latest records and phonographs that could be had” in America.57 One of his last discoveries, Bukka White, “always figured” that it was his love for the music that gave him his “first start at making money,” because “he had to love what he first started to make him have money, you know.”58 The Commonwealth announced the following month that Paramount recording artist Blind Lemon Jefferson would perform at the segregated black school in Itta Bena on the evening of October 5, 1928.59 Lembo also arranged for an earlier appearance by Jefferson at his Itta Bena store in addition to the performance at the school. The merchant was so proud to have the man he called, in one advertisement, “the most popular Blues singer” in town that he paraded him through the streets in a wagon prior to the store appearance.60 David “Honeyboy” Edwards, who had moved with his father to Wildwood plantation near Itta Bena shortly before the , recalled:

“The most famous guy when I was young was Blind Lemon Jefferson[, and he] come through there. He had placards posted all around that he was going to play at a little school out by ltta Bena, play for a big dance. They was charging seventy- five cents to come in. I sure wanted to see him but I couldn’t make that seventy- five cents! I used to play a few Lemon Jefferson numbers – everybody did.61

Concerning the performance of Blind Lemon at the behest of Lembo, Calt and Wardlow argue that he “was less interested in Jefferson’s ability to collect a crowd at a record store already doing brisk business…than in his potential worth as a recording property.”62 Lembo, however, could not re-discover Jefferson. He was already a valuable recording property. He had sold an inordinate amount of records for Lembo’s contact, Art Laibly, at Paramount. Calt and Wardlow may be suggesting that Lembo hoped to steal Lemon Jefferson away from Paramount and lock him into a long-term contract himself, but I do not believe that is the case. The appearance of Jim Jackson at his store opening in Greenwood went so well that, more likely, he simply decided to hire another famous blues singer to help get people into his store in Itta Bena. Lembo’s “promotional…stunt backfired,” according to Calt and Wardlow on the last of four highly fantastic pages in King of the Delta Blues.63 An “unnamed spectator” at what the authors dub a “promotional debacle” corroborated Booker Miller’s questionable assertion that Lembo wanted to arrange a session for Jefferson. He did not want it enough, however, to pay the proven talent his asking price. The testimony of the “unnamed spectator” suggests that Lembo was not overly excited about Lemon’s “potential worth as a recording property.” The evidence Calt and Wardlow present would, in fact, seem to support the opposite of their conclusion. 166 a r s c Journal

Figure 8. (l - r) Unidentified individual, Ralph Lembo, and Joe Glorioso, in Chicago in the 1940s. Courtesy of Ralph Lembo Prestidge.

Rather than being a “tricky” store owner who gambled with artists’ careers, Lembo was serious about his local investments in entertainment, and those of his close family. He invited the famous Utica Institute Jubilee (UIJ) Singers from the Utica Normal & Industrial Institute, for example, to perform on August 10 at the Dixie Theatre, which was owned and operated by his sister and brother-in-law. Having recorded extensively for Victor Records in New York and Camden, New Jersey in several sessions between 1927 and 1929, the UIJ Singers’ prior performance on July 24 “was a real treat,” and he hoped the event would be successful again.64 In the wake of Jefferson’s appearance, Lembo sold his entire stock of dry goods and began specializing solely in the sale of musical items. He also moved his music store from the Bradford building to the building once occupied by the Post Office Café at 114 Humphreys Street.65 The “debacle” described by Calt and Wardlow must not have been too bad. “Blind Lemon come down,” Booker Miller informed, “to Itta Bena, I think, twice, before he died.”66 Jefferson agreed to come back to the area at the behest of Rubin Lacy, who continued to perform all around the Delta. Lacy contacted Art Laibly at Paramount, and he forwarded the invitation to Jefferson, who may have even ridden in his chauffeured automobile from Chicago to Rubin Lacy’s home in Itta Bena, which served as the staging ground for a tour around the mid-Delta: Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 167 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta “I invited Blind Lemon to come to Itta Bena and visit me, which he did, and we played in the theatre in Greenwood and the theatre in Moorhead together. And he stayed around here…a week or two…play[ing] first one place, then another, until he had to go back to make another record.”67

To be sure, Lembo enjoyed scouting new artists, and he loved to find musicians whose value as recording properties was high, but he was not willing to sacrifice his local reputation or compromise his integrity solely to procure a higher commission from record labels. Calt and Wardlow, in their efforts to explain why Charley Patton did not record for Lembo, go to great lengths to build up the notion of his reputation for dishonesty and explain the decision of Patton in such terms. One potential reason Patton may have refused to record for Lembo was the location of the recording session in New Orleans. Even though he had a son who was born in New Orleans, Patton did not enjoy even dwelling on the subject of the Crescent City. Booker Miller believed that Patton had had a bad experience there at some point. “He never did say why,” Miller states, “but he always let me know that he didn’t like it.”68 It would seem to have nothing to do with Lembo’s supposedly dishonest reputation. Miller may only have said Lembo “was tricky” because of how Wardlow framed the previous question, “Do you think word got around that Mr. Lembo wasn’t so straight an arrow?”69 Wardlow’s apparent bias may stem from talent scout H. C. Speir’s less-then-stellar recollections of discovering Charley Patton. In 1965, Wardlow tracked Speir down, but he did not record his early interviews. When he finally did record several interviews with Speir, Wardlow asked, “What did you tell me about Patton? I think you mentioned one time that, uh, that Patton had written you a letter and he wanted to come up and talk with you about making records.” Speir confirms that he received a letter from Patton and asserts, “Someone had given him my name. Of course, I told him I would pay his expenses to come down, which he did, and I accepted it.” Speir’s recorded testimony suggests strongly that he had independent knowledge of Patton’s abilities as a recording prospect. Each time Patton’s discovery comes up, Wardlow tells Speir he went up to visit Patton. You never actually hear H. C. Speir say that he travelled to Dockery.70 Yet, the first page of King of the Delta Blues features a lengthy narrative about Speir driving up to Dockery.71 Although he recorded “Tom Rushen Blues” about a local and presumably recent event, there is no evidence that Patton was living on or even near Dockery in 1929. On March 10, 1929, he married Magnolia Hill in Tunica and declared that he lived in the small hamlet of Penton, which sits almost a hundred miles north of Dockery.72 His first Paramount session was three months later on June 14. Though the whole notion of the letter is a bit strange, it may be vaguely accurate, only it was probably later in Patton’s career, while he lived at Holly Ridge, that he contacted Speir in hopes of continuing his flagging recording career. Son House even described a visit to Speir’s store with Patton and Willie Brown at the instigation of Patton around the end of 1933 or beginning of 1934, and it’s logical that a letter from Patton to Speir could have set it up.73 Patton may have even tried to contact Ralph Lembo, who had retired from scouting in the 1930s, but it also remains a good possibility that Lembo was the scout who sent Charley Patton to his first session in Indiana in June 1929. Contrary to the assertions of Calt and Wardlow, Lembo was never interested too much with signing Jim Jackson or Lemon Jefferson. He hired the popular race recording artists, 168 a r s c Journal as he did Art Gillham, to promote his growing music store business and get more local people interested in buying records. The music-lover inside him may have even taken time to enjoy the performances. The promotions, however, were not a “debacle,” as the two authors suggest. Rather, the appearances of African American musicians who had become stars of the recording industry, probably impelled Charley Patton, the “King of the Delta Blues,” to visit the music store in Itta Bena the following spring. Bolivar County, Mississippi, blues accordionist Walter Rhodes recorded four songs with the Harney Brothers in Memphis for Columbia in 1927. Rhodes was almost certainly one of Lembo’s discoveries, and he may have suggested other artists pay him a visit. In mid-June 1929, Charley Patton’s initial recordings included an almost exact lyrical cover of Walter Rhodes’ recording of “The Crowing Rooster.” Though the accordion is an unusual instrument on which to hear the blues, Sonny Boy Williamson II’s guitarist Joe Willie Wilkins recalled Rhodes’ blues performances “quite well.” In an interview with Bengt Olsson, Wilkins explained:

He used to play around here [Bobo, Mississippi]. He walked around the streets and played for country suppers. He had a band; there was “Baldhead” on guitar, another guitar picker, and a fiddler from New Orleans they called “Sam.” They played nothing but blues. They played that all the time.74

Lembo also may have worked with Russian Jewish immigrant Oscar Herman Livingston, who, along with his brother Jake, operated Livingston Brothers Hardware Company in Ruleville. He was enlisted to serve as a talent scout for Columbia.75 In July, he had been elected president of the Ruleville Rotary Club, which invited not only influential leaders from around the state to speakat their meetings but also musicians from southern cities as far away as New Orleans and Memphis.76 Through these artists, he may have connected with the major record labels. Livingston may also be responsible for sending Walter Rhodes to Columbia. Livingston may even be responsible for connecting Art Laibly with Charley Patton, or Patton may have worked with Lembo in this regard. While there are many reliable, unsolicited comments made by Booker Miller in his interview with Wardlow, the portions that have damaged the historical reputation of Ralph Lembo are weakened by leading questions and misleading answers. Unfortunately, this portrayal of Lembo may have led to an unfair and ongoing bias against him in subsequent scholarship. In a fairly recent article based on a 1976 interview with Delta blues musician Bukka White, for example, David W. Johnson comments in one footnote: “White’s description of Ralph Lembo reflects the attitude of an African American musician of his time toward a white producer who he may have thought was exploiting him.” The footnoted section of the transcribed interview, however, only concerns White’s belief that Lembo possessed a real love of music and that he “had a big plantation and a big…furniture store, grocery store, all together combined.” In the next section, White admits that Lembo was so proud of him for his performances that he treated him very “nice.”77 White very well may have felt as if he was being exploited, but he does not express that sentiment in the entire interview. Ralph Lembo was at the pinnacle of his influence on the musical world as the door closed on 1928. Having heard about the great skill of the Chatmon family band, Lembo Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 169 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta offered to pay a couple of the songsters ten dollars each to come play one evening at his store in Itta Bena. While many of the Chatmon brothers could have entertained the crowd in Itta Bena to much satisfaction, fiddler Alonzo (Lonnie) Chatmon decided he wanted to tour cities in the Delta with a talented local musician not in his family. Having only performed on the local stages around Bolton and Jackson in recent years, yet certainly having long since proved himself no slouch on guitar, Walter (Jacobs) Vinson had made a name for himself at Saturday night frolics outside of Bolton. He caught the attention of Lonnie Chatmon around the same time as the invitation to perform at Itta Bena. Vinson was also a very strong blues singer and . Since the blues was very much in demand by the record companies, Vinson would have also been attractive to Chatmon to insure the success of their recordings. According to Vinson, Lonnie approached him one day and declared, “I want you to play with me.” Chatmon wanted the skilled accompaniment of Vinson on his upcoming tour through the Delta, where every town promised that good musicians could “make some money.”78 Lonnie Chatmon and were the nucleus of the future string band aces the Mississippi Sheiks, and Vinson recalled going to Itta Bena “to play for this fellow [who] was running a furniture store.”79 As they practiced leading up to the scheduled start time, Vinson came up with a nine-bar ditty on the guitar and hollered out, “I’m sitting on top of the world!” The tune was attractive to Chatmon, who asked, “What kind of song is that?” It was the type of song that piqued the interest of Ralph Lembo, who recognized the songwriting talent and novelty of the musical combo. Vinson recalled that they “played for Ralph [Lembo] at the furniture store” for the “whole evening.” “He paid us ten dollars apiece to play for two and one-half hours for him,” recalled Vinson. After Lembo paid them, Chatmon turned to his partner and exclaimed, “See, we can get ten dollars apiece anywhere we play at” in the Delta. Before the duo left, Vinson added, Lembo queried “How long you around?” He wanted them to “come back tomorrow,” or in a couple of months, and he’d sign them up to “make records.”80 In a couple of months, Lembo sent them to what turned out to be the most important recording session of their career. He sent the musicians to record for Okeh Records in Shreveport, Louisiana. Atlanta-based talent scout Polk Brockman set up the equipment, and Vinson and Chatmon walked right up and presented themselves to him. It was the February 17, 1930, session in which “Sitting On Top of the World” (403806-A) was recorded and paired for release with “Lonely One in this Town” (403806-B).81 Other songs from this session were also big hits: “Stop and Listen,” “Alberta Blues.” It was a very successful and profitable session. The Mississippi Sheiks recorded a total of eight sides at the session that were later released on the Okeh label.82 While most of the sides featured only Walter Vinson and Alonzo Chatmon, one of them (403806) included the workings of a second guitarist, Alonzo’s brother Bo Carter, which suggests that Ralph Lembo may have also been involved in his unusually long recording career, which lasted until 1940. More circumstantial evidence comes from ethnomusicologist David Evans, who also conducted an interview with Eura Gay Lembo, the widow of Ralph Lembo, before she remarried in the late 1960s. He admits that, much like the later experience of Wardlow, the interview proffered very little useful material. Yet she remembered a very important bit of information that suggests her husband worked with Bo Carter. The only musician with whom she remembered her husband working was one who sang about 170 a r s c Journal

Figure 9. Ralph Lembo with grandchild. Courtesy of Rosanna Lembo Prestidge.

“Corinna.”83 Though she certainly may have referred to a local musician who happened to have played the song – and she might have referred to Charlie McCoy, who together with Bo Carter had a hit with “Corrine Corrina” recorded in November 1928 (Brunswick 7080) – it makes more sense that she refers to Bo Carter. This is likely not only because his brother Alonzo had been discovered by Lembo, but also because Bo liked to introduce himself to folks as the composer of “Corrine Corrina.” In a later article written by Elaine Hughes, the daughter of Farris Novelty Company proprietor J. D. Farris of Vicksburg, she recalls an intimate performance by the songwriter at her parents’ house.84 “The first thing he said to me,” she opens, “was, ‘You know I wrote Corrine Corrina. I can sing it for you.’”85 He clearly left an impression on the jukebox salesman’s daughter, who did not put her memories down on paper until over forty years later. In all likelihood, he left an impression on the wife of the talent scout from Itta Bena as well. Later in 1929, the nation reached a turning point that brought an abrupt end to the Roaring Twenties – the stock market came crashing down and the country began spiraling into the Great Depression. The life of a former Silas Green Minstrel also reached a turning point around this time when he happened to walk past the music store of Ralph Lembo in Itta Bena.86 Booker Washington White, later known as Bukka White, had been farming on shares at Swan Lake and performing in various Delta juke joints in previous months. Having seen him performing in town, Lembo spotted him one day walking down the road with a guitar and invited him into his office to audition. In one interview, White recalled, “I was going to see my brother. I passed by [his store] with the guitar on my shoulder, and [Lembo] had a colored fellow come out there to flag Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 171 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta me down. I started…running. I didn’t know nothing about no Itta Bena.” Though he was a bit apprehensive, White relaxed soon enough after accepting the Italian American merchant’s offer of some bonded bourbon whiskey, no doubt a rare sight in the days of Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 through 1932 nationwide. In Mississippi, however, it began in 1908 statewide and did not end until 1966. Lembo enjoyed the songs performed by White and offered him a chance to record in Memphis. The twenty-year-old did not hesitate to accept the offer, and on the morning of May 24, 1930, White stood out on a dirt road that ran from the small hamlet of Swan Lake to the Webb community with a friend named Napoleon Hairiston. Lembo pulled up in a brand new Studebaker carrying two younger white musicians and an African American. The two young white instrumentalists – perhaps Frank Wheeler and Monroe Lamb, who recorded at the same Memphis session – quickly hopped out, however, in objection to riding in a cramped vehicle with a bunch of African American blues singers. Thus, White and Hairiston hopped in and, along with an inebriated preacher, M. H. Holt, they accompanied Lembo to Memphis. On the morning of May 26, White and Hairiston went to the Memphis Municipal Auditorium where the engineer from Victor set up his equipment. Holt did not arrive on time that morning, and Lembo reasoned, “[Since] I’ve got to have eight songs, why don’t you boys just make them all yourselves.” The contract called for several sides of a religious nature, but neither White nor Hairiston was inclined to start preaching. Thus, Lembo exclaimed, “How about religious songs?” White believed that he could oblige as long as they wanted some style of music. White and Hairiston first recorded ten secular pieces, most of them blues. The engineer from Victor, meanwhile, sent for a female singer to provide a high voice characteristic of church singing, and once she arrived White cut four religious sides. White referred to the singer as “Miss Minnie,” and there has been some speculation that she was Memphis Minnie, who indeed recorded with Joe McCoy for Victor on the same day immediately before White and Hairiston. As for compensation, White variously reported such figures as $240 and $400 plus a new guitar.87 The excited notes Ralph Peer sent back to RCA Victor’s headquarters about White and Hairston’s recordings suggest that everyone had been in quite a jovial mood after the session. In reference to Lembo and White, Peer reported, “This is a new artist brought to Memphis by Ralph Lembo of Itta Benna [sic]…the four blues selections are very good cornfield type and should have a big sale in the delta country…‘I Am in the Heavenly Way’ and ‘The Promise True and Grand’ are sacred selections done in Holy Roller style. We have nothing else like this, and I recommend a quick release of one of these records.”88 In a later interview, White exclaimed, “I’ll never forget that [as long as] I live. I was singing church songs, you know, and he paid me good. Yeah; he really paid me good.”89 What Ralph Peer described as “good cornfield type,” Henry Speir called the “meatbarrel” style blues. These blues were not cleaned up or dressed up; rather, they were downhome, stripped bare – and they paid well. After setting up Bukka White’s entry into the recording industry, Ralph Lembo may have grown tired of the record business. According to his wife, it became increasingly difficult to collect his fees and royalty payments as the country slipped into the depths of economic depression in the 1930s. Once he stopped scouting, Lembo devoted more energy to his role as leader and drummer of the Itta Bena Orchestra, which included saxophonist McNeil Bartling, violinist Morris Zlotnick, banjo player John Ed Stevens, cornet player 172 a r s c Journal

Joe Heard, and pianist Gladys Bradford.90 The Itta Bena post of the American Legion also staged periodic variety shows featuring a “buck dance,” original plays, dances, sermons, special songs, quartets, and Ralph Lembo and his orchestra.91 His passion for the music store did not fade along with his career as a talent scout. On the contrary, he brought his wife into the store in the early 1930s, and he continued to run ads in the Commonwealth through and after World War II. He may have even had a hand in bringing Bessie Smith and her band to the Dixie Theatre in Greenwood in 1932.92 In the late 1930s, Lembo entered into a partnership to sell portable phonographs with a man named Philip Glorioso, who lived in the home next to Lembo’s. The business partners and neighbors also became travelling companions on trips to the Kentucky Derby in Louisville and other “eastern points.” They travelled to Hot Springs, Arkansas, a haven for illegal gambling since the 1880s and a favored retreat for Al Capone in the 1920s. According to grandson Ralph Lembo Prestidge, the two men owned an interest in a Hot Springs nightclub. Jimmy Prestidge, the oldest grandson of Ralph Lembo, also recalled that his grandfather used to operate slot machines and juke boxes in different locations in the Delta.93 Lembo used to drive around and settle up with the business managers of the clubs and cafes that installed machines. In 1938, Lembo and Glorioso took out an advertisement in the Delta Democrat Times welcoming Italian ambassador Fulvio Suvich on the occasion of his visit to the Delta.94 At the time, Suvich was a controversial figure due to his allegiance to Benito Mussolini. While national leaders denounced fascist dictators in his presence on one stop of his southern tour, Italian immigrants from all over the Delta held a celebration for the ambassador on his stop in Leland.95 Due to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and occupation of it until 1941, the celebration in honor of the ambassador’s visit would have driven a wedge between the Italian and African American communities of the Delta. The entrenched racial hatred of southern whites had incentivized such divisions for Italian immigrants. The first- generation of Italian immigrants did not possess an intense hatred of African Americans, but later generations recognized the benefits that came with white privilege. According to Libby Borgognoni, who oversees a museum in the old rectory of Our Lady of the Lake church across the Mississippi river from Greenville, “We ate together, we played together, we worked in the field together, we sang together” in the 1920s. Former priest and author of Delta Italians Paul Canonici declared, “It was a different world.” As a child, he recalled peering through the windows of a black church at ecstatic worshippers, and watching black baptisms, as well as an incident in which Klansmen besieged his family home in Boyle and shot his dog.96 Many Italian families, such as Canonici’s, served as a marginal solution to the labor problem at the turn of the twentieth century. Though most victims of convict-leasing and debt peonage were black, many first-generation immigrant families experienced serious anti-Italian and anti-Catholic prejudice in the Delta. Indeed, the fear that Italian immigrants, being without the deep racial hatred of southern whites, might intermarry with African Americans, made it more advantageous for Italians to forego racial harmony and distinguish themselves from blacks to attain the benefits of white privilege.97 The family history of Italian grocer Charles Serio in Washington County, who also took out an ad supporting the ambassador, demonstrates how the concept of law and order did not extend across ethnic boundaries for first-generation immigrants Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 173 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta any more than it did for African Americans at the turn of the century. In 1878, 34- year old Giovanni (John) Serio had immigrated to the United States from Cifalu, Sicily, with his 10-year-old son Vincenzo,.98 Over the next twenty years, the Serios became naturalized citizens, learned English, and established their business in Glen Allen working as peddlers in the mercantile trades. Locals generally considered them inoffensive. Around 1900, however, Vincenzo started to achieve a reputation as a “bad man” in several localities in southern Washington County. After a group of locals strongly advised the Serios to vacate Glen Allen, the merchants left the town and took up residence in nearby Erwin. In July 1901, while Giovanni, Vincenzo, and a nephew, Salvatore Liberto, slept inside the small store and residence of “Ole Man Frank,” a group of armed men opened fire on the building, killing the Serios and leaving their nephew badly injured. News of the slayings soon reached Governor Longino and the Italian Consulate.99 The sheriff investigated the case and Governor Longino offered a hundred-dollar reward for any information leading to the capture of the murderers, but the sheriff was never able to ascertain the identity of the wretched souls. One newspaper reported that they were “supposed to have been from the lower end of Lake Washington.” The grand jury investigated the lynching of the two Italians over the five- day session of circuit court, but they were unable to find “any true bills.” The grand jury questioned sixty-seven witnesses, all of whom “seemed to know nothing.”100 In the mid-1920s, when the Hattiesburg American published an article ridiculing Ralph Lembo about his Italian ancestry, the abilities of Mississippians to dehumanize anyone not acculturated into the American mainstream remained all but unchanged. Notions of difference allowed folks to classify people as “others,” which justified all sorts of abhorrent behavior from ridicule to assassination in the name of community confidence.101 Unlike African Americans, the descendants of first-generation Italian immigrants could eventually escape the stigma attached to “others” through the process of acculturation and enter fully into the mainstream of white society. By shedding the Italian spelling of his name, learning to speak English, regularly attending the Presbyterian Church, establishing profitable retail businesses, marrying a local woman, and passionately embracing the process of scientific farming, Ralph Lembo greatly accelerated his acculturation process during his lifetime. His 1960 obituary, in fact, makes no mention whatsoever of his Italian ancestry.102 Yet, as his grandson Ralph Lembo Prestidge suggests, his own knowledge about the difficulties of those who find themselves outside the mainstream motivated him to step forward in the late 1940s when the first Legislature-authorized junior vocational college for African Americans needed a large plot of land.103 In November 1948, the state building commission had been denied the sale of a string of prospective sites across the Delta – including ones in Vicksburg, Greenville, and the current site of the Greenwood- Leflore Airport – and had few options remaining. A group led by Indianola attorney Forrest Cooper had offered 487 acres on Highway 49 for the site, of which 102 acres in 16th Section school lands were offered without cost. In addition, citizens of Indianola offered a $5,000 bonus, while county authorities agreed to build highways at the college. The cost of the Indianola lands was $56,155. It was the best offer on the table until Ralph Lembo stepped in. He had purchased a large plantation while living in Itta Bena. Whereas phonographs, records, and musical performance constituted his passions in the 1920s and ’30s, cotton farming 174 a r s c Journal

Figure 10. Courtesy of T. DeWayne Moore

Figure 11. The Lembo family plot in Itta Bena Cemetery, 2017. Courtesy of T. DeWayne Moore. Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 175 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta largely took their place in the 1940s and ’50s. Almost every year, he brought in the first open boll of cotton to the offices of the Commonwealth and gave a report on the boll weevil, weather, and condition of the crops. In 1949, his name was listed with other local farmers as one of the incorporators of the Itta Bena Gin Company.104 The following year, he hauled in the first load of soybeans to the Planters Oil Mill.105 In the mid-1940s, he started to take ads out in the newspaper to sell plots of forty acres and up. When he learned of the state’s needs regarding the vocational college, he worked with county officials to offer up a large plot of land comprising about 550 acres, most of which was embodied in Lembo’s “Scrooge About” plantation. As an inducement for locating the college near Itta Bena, the Leflore County Board of Supervisors voted $20,000 to help in its construction, and also agreed to build roads at the institution. The State Building Commission selected the Itta Bena site over the sites offered at Indianola and Tutwiler in mid-December 1948.106 Lembo continued to operate the remainder of his farm in the 1950s, and he also rented some little houses to the African American students who attended what came to be known as Mississippi Valley State University. Ralph Lembo’s involvement in the also made a deep impact on his children, particularly his son, who had once aspired to dance on the silver screen. His daughter, Agnes, could also play a mean mandolin, saxophone, and the piano. Named after his grandfather, Frank Lembo won wide acclaim in his senior piano recital at Itta Bena High School, and when he attended Louisiana State University, he took an active role in the music school, studying piano and organ.107 Upon graduation, he served over three years in the United States Coast Guard in San Francisco during World War II. When his tour of duty was over, he attended graduate school at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, from which he graduated in the summer of 1947.108 He accepted a position as professor of music at Southwest Texas State Teacher’s College. In 1951, he was shown a signal honor in being chosen for inclusion in Who’s Who in America, a standard biographical dictionary and reference volume used in state libraries.109 He authored a book of avant-garde verse titled Raindust in 1951.110 He also wrote a collection of poems, Words in Mild Breezes, in the late 1940s, which he dedicated to his family. One favorable review lauded, “Frank Lembo shares with other young poets a kind of inclusive sensibility, which he is able to enhance by the skills of the poetic craft, fashioning an armor of rhythmic, stanzaic and musical structure. His selections achieve something fine and honest.” The book was kept a secret for some time, but once his father learned of its existence, he went around town “proudly showing the volume to friends.”111 On the afternoon of September 26, 1960, in the elemental world of the Delta where persistence is sovereign and ashes to ashes and dust to dust takes on real meaning, mother earth embraced a friend of sixty-three years. After an extended illness, Ralph Lembo passed away at Greenwood Leflore Hospital.112 Williams & Lord Funeral Home was in charge of arrangements for the funeral, which was officiated by Rev. Julian White, of Itta Bena Presbyterian Church. He was buried in his family plot in Itta Bena Cemetery. In the end, the story of Ralph Lembo is much larger than the three or four years he worked as a talent scout for the major record labels of the 1920s. He never cheated his artists; rather, he paid royalties at a time when hardly anyone did. Earning him one artist’s loyalty, Rube Lacy remained devoted to his “manager” even after almost forty years. He never lost any lawsuit, and his in-store artist performances were spectacular. Even in such a short amount of time, he discovered Rubin Lacy, Rev. C. T. Thornton, 176 a r s c Journal

Figure 12. Courtesy of T. DeWayne Moore

Rev. Frank Cotton, and potentially other artists who recorded at the 1927 Memphis Columbia session, such as Walter Rhodes, Lewis Black, the Rust College Quartet, and Pearl Dickson. He played a role in the career of the Mississippi Sheiks, Bo Carter, Washington (Bukka) White, Rev. M. H. Holt, and George “Bullet” Williams, and it’s also possible that he was responsible for the initial sessions of the Graves brothers and Charley Patton. Considering that this article is largely corrective, it also serves as a jumping-off point for future research into his business ventures in Hot Springs, Chicago, Hattiesburg, and beyond.

Dr. DeWayne Moore is a historian of African American and Public History and executive director of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. Since 2014, he has been responsible for the memorials to musicians T-Model Ford, Henry “Son” Simms, Frank Stokes, Eddie Cusic, Mamie “Galore” Davis, Bo Carter, and Belton Sutherland. His research has been published or is forthcoming in Living Blues, Rhythm & Blues, Mississippi Folklife, and the Journal of Mississippi History. His research into Ralph Lembo is part of a greater research project about Charley Patton’s heavily revised biography. His manuscript detailing the legal case for access to the grave of and racial violence in the Pine Hills is promised to the University Press of Mississippi, and his dissertation connecting the histories of civil rights and blues tourism was solicited for revision and publication as well. Dr. Moore is also collaborating with old-time fiddler Harry Bolick on a book about Mississippi fiddlers. Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 177 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta Bibliography Abbott, Lynn and Seroff, Doug. To Do This, You Must Know How: Music Pedagogy in the Black Gospel Tradition. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Calt, Stephen, and Gayle Dean Wardlow. King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton. Newton, NJ: Rock Chapel Press, 1988. Canonici, Paul V. The Delta Italians. Madison, MS: P.V. Canonici, 2003). Hay, Fred J. Goin’ Back to Sweet Memphis: Conversations with the Blues. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Edwards, David “Honeyboy.” The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman David “Honeyboy” Edwards. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. Evans, David. “Rubin Lacy: A Discographical Note.” Blues Unlimited 32 (Apr., 1966), 6-7 ______. “The Rev. Rubin Lacy.” Blues Unlimited 40 (Jan., 1967), 3-4; 41 (Feb., 1967), 8-9; 42 (Mar./Apr., 1967), 5-6; 43 (May, 1967), 13-14; 44 (June/July, 1967), 7. Reprinted in Mike Leadbitter, ed., Nothing But the Blues (London: Hanover, 1971), 239-245. ______. “An Early Interview with Son House,” The Frog Blues & Jazz Annual 5 (2017), pp. 29-44, 176-194. Gioia, Ted, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009. Hughes, Elaine. “The Day Bo Carter Played on My Mother’s Porch.” Living Blues 173 (July/ August 2004): 42-43. Hurley, F. Jack, and David Evans. “Bukka White,” in Tom Ashley, Sam McGee, Bukka White: Tennessee Traditional Singers, ed. Thomas G. Burton. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2005. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995. Johnson, David W. “‘Fixin’ to Die Blues’: The Last Months of Bukka White with an afterword from B.B. King on Bukka White’s Legacy.” Southern Cultures 16:3 (Fall 2010). Mazor, Barry. Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015. Olsson, Bengt. Memphis Blues. London: November Books Limited, 1970. Ratcliffe, Philip. Mississippi John Hurt: His Life, His Times, His Blues. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2011. Roediger, David R. Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White. New York: Basic, 2005. Rubin, Louis Decimus. Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog: On Writers and Writing. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2005. Ward, Brian and Huber, Patrick. A&R Pioneers; Architects of American Roots Music on Record. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press and Country Music Foundation Press, 2018. 178 a r s c Journal

Endnotes

1. Ted Gioia, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of 6. “Certificato di Compimento del Corso the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized Elementare Inferiore,” July 27, 1907, in American Music (New York: W.W. Norton & the personal collection of Rosanna Lembo Company, 2009), 64. Prestidge.

2 Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, King 7. “Raffaele Lembo,” New Orleans, Passenger of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Lists, 1813-1963 [online database]. Provo, UT, Charlie Patton (Newton, NJ: Rock Chapel USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2006. Press, 1988), 177. 8. “Ralph Lembo,” Mississippi, Naturalization Records, 1907-2008 [online database]. Provo, 3. Ibid. UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012. 4. Calt and Wardlow’s information about Ralph Lembo came almost solely from one interview, 9. “Ralph Lembo,” U.S., World War I Draft consisting of four tapes, conducted with a Registration Cards, 1917-1918 [online former Patton protégé named Booker Miller. database]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Another informant was David “Honeyboy” Operations Inc, 2005. Edwards, whom the authors quote in the book. About the absence of Edwards from the 10. “American Troops are to be Sent to Italy notes and bibliography, Wardlow explained Immediately,” Natchez (MS) Democrat, June that Calt interviewed Edwards first at the 28, 1918. 34th National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap Farm Park near Vienna, Virginia, July 27-30, 11. 1920 US Census, Itta Bena, Leflore, 1972, and soon thereafter at a coffeehouse Mississippi; Roll: T625_883; Page: 3B; concert in . Wardlow assured Enumeration District: 91; Image: 938. this author that Edwards was only consulted to corroborate choice testimony of Booker 12. “Ralph Lembo,” Mississippi, Naturalization Miller. There is also some information drawn Records, 1907-2008 [online database]. Provo, from the unrecorded comments of Rev. James UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., Buchanon, of Moorhead, as well as Lembo’s 2012. widow, Eura Gay Stowers, who remarried Itta Bena mayor Paul Stowers in late 1968; 13. “5 Killed in Auto Accident,” The (Alexandria, see Gioia, Delta Blues, 64; all interviewees, LA) Town Talk, June 6, 1923. including “Mrs. Paul Sauers [sic],” are listed in sources; see Calt and Wardlow, 175- 14. “Francesco Lembo,” Tennessee, Deaths and 176. I logged all of the recorded interviews Burials Index, 1874-1955 [online database]. conducted by Gayle Dean Wardlow and Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, stored them online at the Center for Popular Inc., 2011. Music; see Booker Miller - tta182ee, tta182ff, tta182ll, tta182mm (http://popmusic.mtsu. 15. Ralph Lembo Prestidge, interview with T. edu/archives/inventory/wardlow.htm). DeWayne Moore, July 14, 2017, Itta Bena, Mississippi. 5. John Martin, “Rest of Lembo Plantation Sought by MVSU,” Greenwood (MS) 16. Stella (Lembo) Paluso was described as a Commonwealth, Apr 25, 2003. galvanizing force in the family; see Ralph Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 179 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta Lembo Prestidge, interview with T. DeWayne ethnomusicologist David Evans) dancer; he Moore, July 14, 2017, Itta Bena, Mississippi. based his contention on their trip to record in a Chicago studio, where he danced to the 17. The Serio family, for example, in Washington music of a man and woman as they played County peddled dry goods, vegetables, and “his kind” of music. A Hawaiian duo, Wela- fruits for several generations; for more Ka-Hoa and Kaai Fern, had recorded just information about the experiences of Italian prior to Lacy; see Rubin Lacy, interview with immigrants, see Paul V. Canonici, The Delta David Evans, February 12, 1966, Ridgecrest, Italians (Madison, MS: P.V. Canonici, 2003). California. [See also the Van Rijn/Van der Tuuk reference, p. 33.] 18. I do not know what Lembo’s connection was to Hattiesburg, but the editor was apparently 25. “Frank Limbo [sic] Pleases Audience,” familiar with him and his accent, which was Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, May 21, 23, thick; Hattiesburg (MS) American, Jan 16, 1925, p.1. 1925. 26. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Feb 11, 19. E.A. Rushing beat out other men named Love, 1926. Beard, and Godsey in the race; see “Rushing is New Itta Bena Mayor,” Greenwood (MS) 27. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, June 26, Commonwealth, Jan 21, 1925. 1926.

20. Lembo brought his wife to King’s Daughters 28. In December 1890, Itta Bena was the site of Hospital in Greenwood after the birth the brutal lynching of Moses Lemon, a black of their first child; see Greenwood (MS) man who the vigilantes feared might incite Commonwealth, Sep 4, 1919. other blacks to violence; the majority of the four hundred people who lived in the area 21. His store in Morgan City burned in 1926, were African American; see, The (Ottawa, KS) and he later purchased a couple of strips Daily Republic, Dec 11, 1890, p.1. of land in front of the south door of the courthouse in Greenwood in January 1927; 29. “Beggar’s Rendevous,” Jackson (MS) Daily “Morgan City Sustains Fire,” Greenwood News, Dec 6, 1922. (MS) Commonwealth, June 17, 1926; “Trustee’s Sale of Land,” Greenwood (MS) 30. “Ralph Lembo Enters a New Profession,” Commonwealth, Jan 5, 1927; “RL Buys Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Feb 12, Itta Bena Theatre,” Greenwood (MS) 1927. Commonwealth, Jan 12, 1924. 31. Booker Miller mentioned recording on a wire 22. Louis Decimus Rubin, Where the Southern in New Orleans, but it might be wired money; Cross the Yellow Dog: On Writers and Writing “Negroes Record for Phonograph Company,” (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Apr 18, Press, 2005), 105. 1927.

23. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Feb 17, 32. Booker Miller, interview with Gayle Dean Mar 13, 1926. Wardlow, 1968, Greenwood, MS, tta0182ll, http://musicman.mtsu.edu/broadsides/ 24. Rubin Lacy asserted that Lembo was Wardlow/pdfs/cpm_94048_tta182ll_010101_ an “awful” (i.e., great, according to pres_.pdf [accessed Sep13, 2017]. 180 a r s c Journal

33. “Itta Bena has New Orchestra,” Greenwood 39. “Making Records,” Greenwood (MS) (MS) Commonwealth, May 30, 1927. Commonwealth, Dec 8, 1927.

34. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, June 4, 40. One census enumerator in 1930 listed Frank 1927. Cotton as a “clergyman” in an Itta Bena Baptist Church; see 1930 US Census, Itta 35. In a letter to David Evans, Wardlow wrote Bena, Leflore, Mississippi; Roll: 1156; about the first interview, “Ralph Lembo is Page: 12A; Enumeration District: 0012; dead. I had a long talk with his wife back in Image: 404.0; FHL microfilm: 2340891. 1964 at Greenwood. Walter Jacobs, one of 41. “Seek Negro Talent for Phonograph Records.” the Miss. Sheiks, told me about Lembo, and Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Jan 18, I went up to see him, but he had been dead 1928. since 1960”; see, Gayle Dean Wardlow, letter to David Evans, July 13, 1966, in the personal 42. Advertisement, Greenwood (MS) collection of David Evans. Commonwealth, Nov 30, 1927.

36. In the middle of a recorded interview with 43. Guido van Rijn and Alex van der Tuuk, New Hayes McMullan, the tape stops around 27:41 York Recording Laboratories Matrix Series, and Wardlow begins reciting his notes from Volume 2: The 20000 & Gennett Matrix Series yet another disappointing interview with (1927-1929) (Overveen: The Netherlands: the former Mrs. Ralph Lembo on March 13, Agram Blues Books, 2012), 29-33. 1969. She had by then remarried to Itta Bena Mayor Paul Stowers. She had started to work 44. Rubin Lacy, interview with David Evans, in the music store around 1931, and therefore March 19, 1966, Ridgecrest, California, in the did not recall the trip to record in Chicago; personal collection of David Evans. see Hayes McMullan, interview with Gayle Dean Wardlow, May 18, 1968, Greenwood, 45. Calt & Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 177. MS, tta0182mm, http://musicman.mtsu. edu/broadsides/Wardlow/pdfs/cpm_94048_ 46. Ibid. tta182x_010101_pres_HayesMcMullan.pdf [accessed Sep13, 2017]. 47. The records for the civil cases filed in Greenwood during the 1920s and 1930s are 37. Philip Ratcliffe, Mississippi John Hurt: His well-preserved and easily accessed inside the Life, His Times, His Blues (Jackson, MS: circuit clerk’s office; a search from February University of Mississippi Press, 2011), 56-57. 2, 1927 to Feb 4, 1935 revealed two civil matters involving Lembo; both cases were 38. Lacy was probably conflating his Memphis related to his business endeavors outside of and later Chicago session when he claimed music; the cases were involving the Ogden that Lembo wanted him to meet “Mr. Art Shoe Company and Whittington Dry Goods Laibly” of Paramount, but Laibly may have Company. arranged to sit in at the Columbia session in Memphis; see Rubin Lacy, interview with 48. “Fireman Shot by Store Owner,” (Jackson, David Evans, March 19, 1966, Ridgecrest, MS) Clarion Ledger, Feb 24, Mar 16, May 10, California, in the personal collection of David May 11, 1929. Evans. Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 181 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta 49. After reading about the untrue nature of the 61. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, The World Don’t rumor, the African American editor of the Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Memphis Bulletin and pastor of a church Delta Bluesman David “Honeyboy” Edwards near Thornton thanked the Commonwealth (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000), correcting the rumor; “Preacher Not Killed,” chap.9. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, May 21, 1928, p.6. 62. Calt & Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 177.

50. “Negro Preacher Held on Charge,” Greenwood 63. Ibid. (MS) Commonwealth, Mar 4, 1929, p.1. 64. The program consisted of spirituals, 51. “Check Writers Will Meet Hard Time in plantation melodies, folks songs, and dialect Courts,” Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth readings, “Singers at Itta Bena,” Greenwood Mar 13, 1929. (MS) Commonwealth, Aug, 9, 1928; Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, To Do This, You Must 52. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Nov 4, Know How: Music Pedagogy in the Black 1927. Gospel Tradition (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 282. 53. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Dec. 28, 1928. 65. “Lembo Moves,” Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Nov 17, 1928. 54. “Art Gillham, the Whispering Pianist,” [accessed June 14, 2017] http://lwhisper. 66. The following year his in-laws sold the Dixie home.mindspring.com/ArtGillham.html. in Itta Bena to James C. Davis, who planned to remodel it. The Dixie in Winona had 55. “Art Gillham at Itta Bena,” Greenwood (MS) installed sound equipment over the summer, Commonwealth, May 12, 1928. and the Dixie in Carrolton had also completed serious renovations. It was a new, amplified 56. Advertisement, Greenwood (MS) age for the theatre; see, “James C. Davis Commonwealth, Sep 21, 1928. Buys Dixie Theatre,” GWC, Nov 14, 1929, p.1; Booker Miller, interview with Gayle Dean 57. Ibid. Wardlow, 1968, Greenwood, MS, tta0182mm, http://musicman.mtsu.edu/broadsides/ 58. David W. Johnson, “‘Fixin’ to Die Blues’: Wardlow/cpm_94048_tta182mm-1_010101_ The Last Months of Bukka White with an pres_/cpm009.mp3 [accessed July 31, 2017.]. afterword from B.B. King on Bukka White’s Legacy,” Southern Cultures 16:3 (Fall 2010): 67. David Evans, “The Rev. Rubin Lacy,” Blues 26. Unlimited 42 (Mar/Apr 1967): 5.

59. “Blind Singer at Itta Bena,” Greenwood (MS) 68. Booker Miller, interview with Gayle Dean Commonwealth, Aug 5, 1928. Wardlow, 1968, Greenwood, MS, tta0182mm, http://musicman.mtsu.edu/broadsides/ 60. Advertisement, Greenwood (MS) Wardlow/cpm_94048_tta182mm-2_010101_ Commonwealth, April 26, 1928. pres_/cpm006.mp3 [accessed July 31, 2017.]. 182 a r s c Journal

69. In another interview with Miller, Wardlow 76. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, July 23, asks another leading question, “Do you think 1927. Lembo was honest?” Having listened to Wardlow suggest that he wasn’t so “straight 77. David W. Johnson also wrote a speech for an arrow,” Miller replies, “I don’t think so.” White’s daughter, Irene Kertchaval, to deliver Miller invokes Rev. Thornton’s non-existent at ceremonies in Houston and Aberdeen, royalty suit – not personal experience – to Mississippi, honoring the 100th anniversary justify his answer. In addition, Wardlow had of White’s birth in 1909; see David W. discussed most of the topics addressed in the Johnson, “‘Fixin’ to Die Blues’: The Last taped interview at least once before turning Months of Bukka White with an afterword on the recorder. One time, when talking from B.B. King on Bukka White’s Legacy,” about Rube Lacy, Miller passes off hearsay Southern Cultures 16:3 (Fall 2010): 27, 32. as a firsthand account. “I think he done mighty well in his musical career,” Miller 78. Walter Vinson, interview with Jim O’Neal declared, “and the last I heard from him he and Karl Gert zur Heide, 1972, Chicago, was a preacher.” Miller had not spoken with Illinois. Lacy in decades, however, and a couple of seconds later, Wardlow realizes, “I told you 79. Frank Proschan and Bruce Kaplan, liner that.” Indeed, the native record collector and notes to The New Mississippi Sheiks, Rounder his subject discussed several of the topics 2004, February 1972. beforehand, which marred the interview. 80. Walter Vinson, interview with Jim O’Neal 70. H. C. Speir, interview by Gayle Dean and Karl Gert zur Heide, 1972, Chicago, Wardlow, near the Pearl River, May 18, Illinois. 1968, http://musicman.mtsu.edu/broadsides/ Wardlow/pdfs/cpm_94048_tta182w_010101_ 81. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, pres_19680518HCSpeir.pdf [accessed July 31, 214. 2017.] 82. “The Sheik Waltz” (403803-A or -B), “The Jazz 71. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 11. Fiddler” (403804A), “Stop And Listen Blues” (403806-A), “Driving That Thing” (403800-B), 72. Charley Patton and Magnolia Hill, marriage “Sitting On Top Of The World” (403805-A or certificate, March 10, 1929, Tunica County. -B), “Lonely One In This Town” (403807-B), Mississippi. “Alberta Blues” (403801-B), “Winter Time Blues” (403802-B). 73. Son House, interview by Alan Wilson and David Evans, 1964, Cambridge, 83. Eura Gay Lembo, interview with David Massachusetts; David Evans, “An Early Evans, August 24, 1967, Itta Bena, Interview with Son House,” The Frog Blues & Mississippi. Jazz Annual 5 (2017), 29-44, 176-194. 84. Bo Carter apparently went around routinely 74. Bengt Olsson, Memphis Blues (London: and serenaded young children in Anguilla, November Books Limited, 1970), 72. Mississppi, while standing in the front yard with another man sawing the fiddle. Leslie 75. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, Miller, of Anguilla, has some photos of Bo 173-174. Carter playing outside her house in the Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 183 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta 1950s; see T. DeWayne Moore, “Bo Carter: 96. “Moses in the Ozarks: The Parable of Italians The Genius of the Country Blues,” Blues & in the South,” The Economist, May 27, 2017. Rhythm 97. Gerald R. Gems, Sport and the Shaping of 85. Elaine Hughes, “The Day Bo Carter Played on Italian-American Identity (Syracuse, NY: My Mother’s Porch,” Living Blues 173 (July/ Syracuse University Press, 2013), 64. August 2004): 42-43. 98. 1900 US Census, Glen Allen, Washington, 86. Evans and Hurley claim that White was a Mississippi; Roll: 832; Page: 1A; Enumeration part-time musician in Silas Green; see F. Jack District: 0070; FHL microfilm: 1240832 Hurley and David Evans, “Bukka White,” in Tom Ashley, Sam McGee, Bukka White: 9. “Italians Assaulted,” Daily (Springfield) Tennessee Traditional Singers, ed. Thomas Illinois State Register, July 12, 1901, p.1; G. Burton (Knoxville, TN: University of “Sleeping Italians Killed,” New York (NY) Tennessee Press, 2005), 164. Times, July 12, 1901, p.2. 100. “Reward Offered for Mob,” Savannah Tribune, 87. Ibid., 164-165. July 27, 1901, p.1; “Erwin Lynching,” New Orleans (LA) Times Picayune, Sep 14, 1901, 88. Memphis, May 1930 sessions: Ralph S. Peer, p.11. correspondence with Loren Watson of RCA Victor, including notes on Memphis sessions 101. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White sent June 6, 1930, Peer Family Archives; (New York: Routledge, 1995); David R. Barry Mazor, Ralph Peer and the Making Roediger, Working Towards Whiteness: How of Popular Roots Music (Chicago: Chicago America’s Immigrants Became White (New Review Press, 2015), 140-141. York: Basic, 2005).

89. Fred J. Hay, Goin’ Back to Sweet Memphis: 102. “Ralph L. Lembo, Itta Bena Dies,” Greenwood Conversations with the Blues (Athens, GA: (MS) Commonwealth, Sep 7, 1960. University of Georgia Press, 2001). 103. John Martin, “Rest of Lembo Plantation 90. “Itta Bena PTA Enjoys Party,” Greenwood Sought by MVSU,” Greenwood (MS) (MS) Commonwealth, Nov 24, 1931. Commonwealth, Apr 25, 2003.

91. “Itta Bena Post Minstrel Set,” Greenwood 104. “Lembo Brings in First Open Boll,” Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, June 26, 1931. (MS) Commonwealth, Aug 3, 1957; “Articles of Incorporation: Itta Bena Gin Company,” 92. Advertisement, Greenwood (MS) Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, May 14, Commonwealth, May 20, 1932. 1949.

93. Jimmy Prestidge, interview with T. DeWayne 105. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Aug 22, Moore, November 15, 2017, Tyronza, 1950. Arkansas. 94. Advertisement, (Greenville, MS) Delta 106. “Itta Bena Site Negro Jr. College,” Greenwood Democrat Times, April 4, 1938. (MS) Commonwealth, Dec 16, 1948.

95. “Beating of the Breast,” Greenwood (MS) 107. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, May 6, Commonwealth, April 29, 1938. 1942. 184 a r s c Journal

108. “Diplomas Go to 23 for Music Studies,” 111. “Lembo’s Book of Poems Among New Books,” Cincinnati (OH) Enquirer, July 25, 1947. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Jan 6, 1949. 109. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Oct 25, 1949. 112. “Ralph L. Lembo, Itta Bena Dies,” Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Sep 7, 1960. 110. Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth, Jan 19, 1951.

Association for Recorded Sound Collections 53rd Annual Conference The Benson Hotel Portland, Oregon, May 8-11, 2019 The conference programs will take place at The Benson, an historic hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon. Join us for talks on sound record- ing topics, including recording technologies, preservation practices, audio archives, copyright issues, recording artists, record labels, record collecting, and radio. ARSC invites proposals for presentations, papers, posters, and panels on the preservation and study of sound recordings—in all genres of music and speech, in all formats, and from all periods. The deadline for proposals is January 4, 2019. For more information: http://www.arsc-audio.org/conference/2019/ARSC2019_cfp.pdf Stay tuned for conference and workshop details! http://www.arsc-audio.org/conference.html

The Association for Recorded Sound Collections is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and study of sound recordings.