Sid Selvidge

Music always seemed to be a part of his life. As a child, he considered singing to be a part of playing cowboys and Indians. He recalled:

From about five or six on, I had my own record collection which was mostly cowboy records. The music was integrated into it. Singing cowboys … the music was to me as important as the cowboy story. When we played cowboys, I would sing as I rode.

The older brother of one of my friends that was in high school at the time got Chuck Berry’s Maybellene. And I can remember listening to Maybellene and just being, that was it. I got my first guitar at thirteen from Sears and Roebuck. That period made me want to be a musician just like every other kid in the world. But it was Maybellene that busted me loose.”

Toe Tapping Music

At age 14, he began a job as a disc jockey in Greenville that developed into a lifelong love of radio.

It was a big deal for me when I won a contest when Elvis hit and the musical revolution was happening. WDDT was playing what the station manager, John Gibson, would call ‘toe tapping music.’ But in an attempt to get the young market, they had a contest for a teenage disc jockey. And so I auditioned for that and I won it.

Saturdays, I would go down there and one of the disc jockeys … said to me, ‘You can be a real disc jockey. Your voice at fourteen is mature. I will come by and pick you up every morning an hour and a half before the station opens … and I’ll teach you how to do cold reads and I’ll teach you how to cue records and do tapes.’ And he taught me how to breathe with my diaphragm and how to modulate by looking at the VU meter. He taught me how to do radio.”

Not a Rock and Roller

Cancer struck the Selvidge household when his father died at the age of forty-five in 1955. With an older brother and an ill mother, Selvidge had to grow up fast. He left for military school at age 16 to pursue an academic path that he thought would lead to a career in psychology. At military school, his electric guitar was deemed too loud for the dormitory, so he switched to an acoustic guitar, which he closely identified with throughout his career.

He developed an interest in anthropology and eventually received an undergraduate degree from Southwestern (now Rhodes) College and a masters and Ph.d from Washington University in St. Louis. At Southwestern College, he met Horace Hull and the two formed an acoustic duo that led Sid down the path to folk music.

I never considered myself a blues musician. I heard no blues at all (growing up). When I came to college I was a folk singer. I didn’t consider myself a rock and roller. I knew who the rock and rollers were. They were the kids in the neighborhood that played the parties and … had electric guitars. They looked like Sonny Burgess and … Johnny Cash. I looked like a little skinny blond headed kid.”

His talent was unmistakable, and while still a college student, he began performing around town and making records. Music was everywhere in Memphis in the 1960s, and studios and independent record labels flourished. During this time, he met lifelong friend and musical collaborator Jim Dickinson at the theater that Dickinson had started in the early 1960s.

Horace and I were playing our sophomore year, and in the summer, Horace had left for Europe. Jim had the Market Theater in Crosstown,” reflected Selvidge. “My first real interaction with Jim in performing and that sort of thing was there. I can remember feeling real lonesome sitting up on the stage by myself without Horace.”

But the epicenter of the nascent folk and blues scene was perhaps the Bitter Lemon Coffeehouse. The tiny brick building at the intersection of Poplar Avenue and Humes Street was ground zero for hipsters, blues aficionados and the rising underground culture of 1960s Memphis. The blues revival was beginning and older traditional African American musicians were performing for the first time in years for appreciative audiences of mostly young white kids.

My major recollection of the Bitter Lemon was Furry Lewis. It was an epiphany. I remember Furry playing one night … I had never seen him before and I saw his act. He played slide and I had never seen anybody do that in person … What Furry did with a slide and with his voice. I think of Furry as a great, great singer… but what he could do with the voice he had was so melodic and where he went with it. And that he could do it and play guitar at the same time. At that point when I saw Furry, I wanted to be Furry Lewis. And that was probably the biggest change musically in my life.”

Through his time hanging out at the Bitter Lemon, Selvidge got the opportunity to record and immerse himself in the local music scene. Although he continued his academic career and taught at Southwestern College for a short time, the die was cast: Sid Selvidge had become a Memphis musician.

Somewhere along the line, I think my senior year, I ran into Don Nix at the Bitter Lemon. John Fry opened up his studio at some point. We all started working over at Fry’s together. Nix was there as a producer. Dickinson was there as a producer. Later Terry Manning. Mostly John was behind the console.”

Procape closed so I’m out of work, and Robert Palmer by that point was working at the New York Times as a junior reviewer. John Rockwell was the senior reviewer at the time. (Palmer) said, ‘Do you want to come to New York to play? There’s this place called Tramps and they are transitioning from a cabaret into a blues club.’

Back in those days you didn’t just come in and play one night and leave. You came and you stayed three weeks and build them an audience. And about the third week John Rockwell came in and wrote a real glowing review for a weekday edition and then gave me a weekend slot and called me the greatest voice he had ever heard. And because of that I got a lot of New York press and a lot of attention by record labels none of which could figure out what to do with me.

I was supposed to be up and coming, and I had a family to support and I wasn’t able to support them on what I was making in New York. So I came back to Memphis and I couldn’t get a job in music. I couldn’t get a job in academia. So I went to work as a carpenter (like) a many musicians before me and after me.”

Sid Selvidge could not stay out of music long; he began a long-term residency in a downtown club called Jefferson Square and then in its sister restaurant, The North End. In the 1970s, he formed the Memphis super group Mudboy & The Neutrons with his old friends Jim Dickinson, Lee Baker and Jimmy Crosthwait.

Mud Boy and the Neutrons was basically Jim’s idea. Jim was making headway in the music business at the time as a producer. He had produced Ry Cooder by this point and he was dealing with major labels out on the west coast. … So he had some connections with Warner Brothers (and) he had a development deal.

He called me up and it was real sweet, and he said, ‘We’re all stars,’ and he had been with the Dixie Flyers. He had played on a bunch of hit records at this point. ‘So let’s form a band and we’re all stars. Everybody is on equal footing.’”

When the recording for Warner Brothers didn’t pan out, Mud Boy and the Neutrons became a live band that Bob Dylan is quoted as calling “that great band that nobody can find.” Their recordings are sparse, but the band continued to perform in Memphis until the Lee Baker's death in 1996.

The spirit of the music is here. Memphis is a real paradox and it’s one of the things that has always endeared me to this town - is that when music happens in Memphis especially back then, racially I felt comfortable with all of the people who lived in this city … At the time it expressed what the country was feeling. And I look at art … To me art is the rooster or the dog before the earthquake. And it tells you what’s going on down under there. It tells you what structural changes are getting ready to happen in your society. And I think that’s basically what the coming together of the cultures into rock and roll and the continuation of the blues and the evolution of soul music allowing African Americans an avenue towards affluence and towards integration within a larger cultural context and into an American context rather than an ethnic context. I think you saw this first with the music. Memphis is the crucible of music in this country.”

Sid Selvidge died in May 2013 after a prolonged battle with cancer. Beale Street Caravan is still heard weekly on hundreds of radio stations around the world. His impact on the next generation of Memphis musicians was clearly seen at a tribute concert at the Levitt Shell held that summer in his memory. As his guitarist son Steve Selvidge said, “It was an opportunity for everyone to play him home.”