The Commercial Appeal - Go Memphis
Musician Rev. John Wilkins recovers from COVID-19, announces release of new album
Memphis-born, Mississippi-based spiritual blues scion Rev. John Wilkins is home recuperating after a two-month battle with COVID-19. The ordeal found the 76-year-old, spending five weeks in Baptist Memorial Hospital-desoto, where he lay unconscious for nearly half that time, in ICU and on a ventilator.
Having survived his battle with the virus — though he’s still dealing with its lingering aftereffects — Wilkins has announced the release of a new album, “Trouble,” which will be out Sept. 18 from the local Goner Records label. A preview of the album’s title track was released to streaming services July 30.
The album finds Wilkins — the son of 1920s’ blues icon Robert Wilkins, whose songs would go on to be covered by the Rolling Stones and Doobie Brothers — continuing his late career resurgence, which began with the release of his 2015 debut album, “You Can’t Hurry God.”
In a statement announcing “Trouble,” Wilkins said the album’s title track was inspired by the tumultuous state of the world.
“Over the last few years it seemed like every time I turned on the TV or picked up a paper there was a school shooting. There were people hurting others, hurting themselves,” said Wilkins. “In the White House there were troubles, nearly nothing getting fixed, leading to more trouble. And look where we are now. But we will find a way… I just needed to find a stanky beat!”
Wilkins’ father, Robert Wilkins, was a Hernando-born singer and guitarist who was a key figure in the Memphis blues scene of the 1920s, along with fellow notables like Furry Lewis, the Memphis Jug Band, and Memphis Minnie. By the early 1940s, when John Wilkins was born, the elder Wilkins had left secular music behind to focus on gospel and ministry. But his early sides would be rediscovered, as would Robert Wilkins himself, who became a beloved figure during the blues revival of the 1960s, giving him a second career.
As a younger man, John Wilkins would follow his father into music, working as a sideman for the “Mother of Beale Street,” Ma Rainey II, and soul singer O.V. Wright (Wilkins would play on Wright’s classic 1965 single “You’re Gonna Make Me Cry”). Like his father,
John Wilkins would eventually focus on spiritual music, performing with the M&N Gospel Singers, and by the mid-1980s, had taken on a role as preacher at Hunter’s Chapel in Como, Mississippi.
After 30 years at Hunter Chapel, Wilkins was coaxed into the studio, releasing “You Can’t Hurry God” which became a critically acclaimed LP and found Wilkins touring all over the world to support the project.
For “Trouble,” Wilkins entered the famed Royal Studios in South Memphis – the historic home of Hi Records and just a stone’s throw from where he grew up. The project was produced by Amos Harvey and engineered by Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell (Solomon Burke, Al Green).
The album finds Wilkins working up a collection of spiritual soul numbers from a variety of sources including the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ “Wade In The Water,” Ralph Stanley’s “The Darkest Hour,” and Bill Withers’ “Grandma’s Hands,” among its 11 tracks.
The sessions featured a crew of local musicians backing Wilkins, including guitarist Kevin Cubbins (Beale Street Caravan), keyboardist Rev. Charles Hodges (Al Green, Ann Peebles), bassist Jimmy Kinnard (Isaac Hayes, Al Green), and drummer Steve Potts (Neil Young, Booker T & the MGS). Wilkins’ daughters, Tangela Longstreet, Joyce Jones, and Tawana Cunningham, provide vocal harmonies.
“Trouble” is available for pre-order now from Goner Records.
When you ask Stax Records great Eddie Floyd why he decided to finally tell his life story at the age of 83, he laughs and then says, with mock grimness: “Well, you know, there’s not many of us left around that can tell the tale.”
Of Stax’s golden era stars, Floyd is indeed one of the few who is not only still alive but vibrant — both as a performer and, as he proves in his new memoir, “Knock! Knock! Knock! On Wood: My Life in Soul,” a storyteller.
A songwriter and solo artist at Stax, Floyd was a key cog in the label machine for more than a decade, writing and recording hits like “Knock on Wood,” “634-5789,” “Raise Your Hand,” “Big Bird” and “I’ve Never Found a Girl (To Love Me Like You Do).”
In the memoir, Floyd chronicles his journey to Stax and beyond: beginning with a hardscrabble childhood spent in an Alabama reform school, then a move to Detroit where he was a witness to the launch of Motown and later helped cofound the R&B supergroup The Falcons (which would feature fellow soul man Wilson Pickett and future Stax songwriter Mack Rice), and then his decade spent in the heart of Soulsville. The book is a colorful and compelling chronicle of Floyd’s 60-plus years in show business, as a witness and participant in some flashpoint moments in the history of American music.
The book was developed and written with British journalist and Pickett biographer Tony Fletcher. “Tony wrote the book on Wilson Pickett. He had an idea that maybe he should write one for me, too,” Floyd says. “I did tell him all he had to do was change the name from Wilson Pickett to Eddie Floyd, because we did the very same things, we shared the same path.”
Like Pickett, Floyd was born in Ala
Eddie Floyd’s memoir is out this month from BMG Books. bama (Floyd in Montgomery, Pickett in Prattville), raised in Detroit and would find his greatest success in soul music when he returned South. As a singer and songwriter, however, Floyd has always evinced a sophistication and scope that hinted at a varied musical upbringing.
“It’s true, I’ve always been open-minded to every type of music,” he says. “In Alabama, I used to listen to Hank Williams and Nat King Cole. Then when I got to Detroit, it was Lena Horne and Count Basie and guys in jazz. Then I got into doo-wop and eventually R&B and soul. And that’s the way I write; I don’t write just one style of anything.”
Floyd got his start in the business through his uncle Robert West, a Detroit music impresario. “I really was around most of the great artists in Detroit and watched them put their careers together,” Floyd says. “My uncle was instrumental in having every artist that went to Motown, like the Supremes, they
By Eddie Floyd and Tony Fletcher. (BMG Books, 302 pages, $28.95). Available Aug. 11. were with him first.”
As a teenager, Floyd would form The Falcons with Rice, with Pickett later joining. The group would create some minor classics including “You’re So Fine” in 1959 and a hit in “I Found a Love” in 1962. The group split up, with Pickett and Floyd going on to solo careers.
It would be several years later, through Al Bell — then a Washington, D.C., disc jockey and later a Stax executive — that Floyd would make his crucial connection in Memphis.
Floyd began writing songs for the label’s stars like Carla Thomas (penning her hit “Comfort Me”) and was soon partnered with musicians, including guitarist Steve Cropper, in helping pen the classic Stax songbook.
“We started to create things, and we could tell right away it was working,” Floyd says. “At Stax they had such a family atmosphere that even if you did write a song, the feeling was don’t give me all the credit. Give the other guys credit. And the musicians there, they really put themselves into the songs, even if they didn’t have a (piece) of it.”
In 1965, Floyd’s old pal Pickett was in the midst of a fallow solo period when he arrived in Memphis to record at Stax. “Atlantic, (Stax’s) mother company, sent Wilson down to Memphis to record, and me and Steve Cropper got together and wrote some songs,” Floyd says.
It was in the Bluff City where Pickett would reel off a string of career-making classics — including the Floyd/cropper penned “634-5789” and “Ninety-nine and a Half (Won’t Do).” “It was like a double thing with me and Wilson, first in Detroit and then Memphis,” Floyd says.
Beyond writing hits, Floyd would go on to solo success the following year, again collaborating with Cropper on his signature chart-topper “Knock on Wood,” and a series of memorable singles over the next few years. Unlike like many of his Stax brethren, Floyd stayed with the label until the bitter end in 1975, as the company was forced into
At a glance ‘Knock! Knock! Knock! On Wood: My Life in Soul’
bankruptcy.
The demise of Stax and the eventual razing of its South Memphis headquarters in the late ’80s left a hole, Floyd says. “There was 10, 15 years where people worldwide would refer to Memphis and loving Stax, but there wasn’t any way for them to pay tribute.”
Since Stax was reborn as a museum and educational complex in 2003, Floyd has been a regular presence in celebrating its history. “That was such a good thing. We would’ve really been lost without that. Now the history is there, and people come to Memphis from all over.”
Floyd returned to the relaunched Stax Records label in 2008 and has recorded three LPS for the company, in between his work singing with the Blues Brothers Band and for Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, however, he has been keeping mostly quarantined in Alabama. “I’ve been at home since they said to keep all old people in the house — they didn’t have to tell me too much,” he says, laughing. “I’m not too concerned about going back on tour. But if this (virus) passes and somebody calls, it would be a great thing to play again.”