We grew up with three partial generations. To this day, we call the people who lived on that block the Kerr Street Gang. Record companies would send copies of their records to the hot disc jockeys around the country, so there were 18 million records in our house! We had a turntable, and I listened to everything - every feasible music form that you can image. His history teacher was the first black disc jockey his name was Nat D. So the whole "entertainer" aspect of him never stopped.Īs a result of the entertainer part of him - and partly because his history teacher in high school was a disc jockey at WDIA - Rufus wound up being the second black disc jockey on the very first radio station in the country with an all-black music programming schedule. ![]() He was an extraordinary dancer - tap dancing, in particular. Rufus entertained on weekends at different clubs. But the mill was something he did to put food on the table. That textile mill was almost an aberration, because from the time Rufus was in his middle teens, he was an entertainer. My understanding is that because this factory supplied a lot of the cloth for military uniforms, and because that was such an important component of the war, most of the factory employees got a pass from being drafted into World War II. My father, Rufus, worked at a textile factory called American Finishing Company - a pretty miserable place to work. To this day, I think she holds the record for getting more membership commitments for the NAACP than anybody in the history of the organization. She became a nurse at John Gaston Hospital and was a civil rights and political activist. I admired her sitting up burning the midnight oil studying medical textbooks. My mother, Lorene, was a stay-at-home mom until I was about six years old, and she decided to go to nursing school. Carla was born one year after me, then Vaneese followed 10 years later. Nice people and a lot of kids to play with. ![]() They wound up being called "the projects" later, but it was fun growing up there. I was born in Memphis in 1941 and grew up three blocks from Beale Street. ©DPI Jul 2011 | Photo by Steve Roberts Marvell Thomas STAX Records Pioneer,
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