Prairie View A&M University From the SelectedWorks of T. DeWayne Moore December, 2018 “Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 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 ARSC 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, Bo Carter, 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 Blues,” 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 Mississippi Sheiks, 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 Delta Blues: 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 ARSC 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 New Orleans, 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 United States 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.