Guitarist James Bonner, 56, was born and raised in Memphis,
Tennessee and played blues and soul music there since childhood. He grew up in
Clayborne Homes, a housing project, at the corner of Vance Avenue and
Lauderdale Street. His family moved out to the country when he was a
teenager. Today he lives in South Memphis and plays in the current
incarnation of the legendary Memphis juke joint band The Fieldstones,
along with his bass-playing brother Harold, rhythm guitarist Houston
Ross, drummer William Faulkner, and the patriarch of Memphis juke joint
blues, Wilroy Sanders. The group plays Saturday nights at the Blue Worm
lounge at 1471 Airways Boulevard in Orange Mound. His story, in his own
words, follows.
My story is my love for the music. I'm
not in it for the money. I just want to satisfy a few people and make
them happy doing what I do.
It's a heritage thing. It's
something I grew up with, and was exposed to my whole life - the blues.
It took a hold growing up in this town. That's all we heard growing up
was this type of music. We tried to get away from, we tried to go this
way, or that way, but we always end up back with it. It all gets back
to the same thing.
We were too young to go into the club
[Paradise at 645 E. Georgia Avenue], but it would be hot inside there,
and they'd have the doors open. My mama would let us sit on the porch
and listen to people like Albert King, B.B. King, Bobby Bland. We had a
chance to listen to those people when we were kids, performing over in
the club. Mama let us stay up and listen until 10 o'clock, and then we
had to go to bed.
Got my first guitar when I was about 14 - I
got four other brothers, Harold plays bass with me now. My dad worked
for a guy who had four boys too. Every year, they would get something
for Christmas, and my dad would get it from them for us for the next
Christmas.
They wanted to play music, so their dad bought them a
bass guitar, a lead guitar, one snare drum, and a trumpet. The next
year my dad bought all of it from them, and that started us. We never
did jam with that other family.
Before that, we made guitars,
took paint buckets and made drums. We were out in the county then, out
Winchester Road after we left Clayborne Homes. We used to look at the
Little Rascals all the time. Everything they used, they made. That's
where we got the idea from. We had garbage can lids for cymbals,
everything. We stayed right on the road in a big house with a big
porch. Fifteen or 20 kids could get up there at one time. We'd be up
there jamming, a lot of noise going on, a lot of racket. Every once in
a while Elvis and his crew would come down the road on their
motorbikes. They would stop and listen to us jam, man, and then he'd
give us the "hi" sign. It was amazing.
Once we got into high
school, we had a hell of a band director. He didn't just want to stick
with traditional band music, he wanted to play top-40. Charles Keel. We
had a horn section, me and my brother had the rhythm section.
He said ‘Look here, we're going to put together a band that isn't like
the traditional school band.' He added electric bass and electric
guitar. We played ‘Jungle Boogie' and ‘Soul Finger' when other bands
were playing marches, and we ate them alive.
He opened up a
club on Airways and Park in Orange Mound called Keel's Lounge. We were
too young to play the club, but he let us come in to rehearse. People
like Emerson Able were in his real band, they'd put on big shows.
We started playing talent shows at high schools and getting more
serious. There were big rehearsals at Gaston Community Center, they'd
open it up and Harry Winfield [Bar-Kays mentor and Porter Junior High
School band director] would have all these guys up there to try out and
play behind the Temprees, the Newcomers, and groups at Stax. All these
girls would come up and we'd say ‘We're with the Temprees.' That made
it real good!
By that time the Fieldstones was already rolling.
They'd tell us to come open for them since they would do blues, and we
did more pop. That's how everything [with Wilroy] started.
First chance I got, later on when we got our bands rolling, first place
I wanted to play was the Paradise. Club Paradise, it was great. We got
to be the Paradise house band, with Jesse Dotson, Howard Grimes,
Charley Williams. We needed somebody who knew what to do, so we got
Howard. We opened for Shirley Brown, Johnnie Taylor, and acts like
that. 1985-86, that was our time, right before it closed.
I
also played out at the Big Wheel Lounge out on Third. We played there
about four years, then another club called the Cobra Bite opened up
down the street. We also played the Red Carpet out on Third. We had a
pretty good crowd in that Westwood area.
Disco came in and the
clubs changed. The idea of the people changed. Clubs stopped dealing
with bands and went straight DJs. It killed the bands and the clubs.
They died. But we never gave up.
Recently everybody seems like they want to get back to bands.
Wilroy's
a cousin of mine. My grandmother used to say, ‘If I could get rid of
them old Sanders boys I'd be alright.' Wilroy lived on Buster Road out
in the county where we lived. That was
a place you could go and get your ass kicked, your money took, and your
name written down in the undertaker book.He lived on that
street! Bootleggers, prostitutes, it was so cool. We had a back
entrance we could go in when the police set up a roadblock. Wilroy
lived down there and picked guitar. He ain't no good in the daytime, he
just sleeps. He's a night person.
I ain't making that much money, but the fun, that's my payment.