It's been a good and bad year for the memory of Jimmie Lunceford in his adopted hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. Sixty years after he died on the road and came back for burial, he's received some slightly overdue media coverage, been the subject of an educational symposium, and will receive a W.C. Handy Heritage Award this Sunday, November 18.
Lunceford introduced music education to black Memphis schools- a legacy that looms large in the city's history, considering how many prominent musicians later learned their chops in the public schools. He built his first band here, and after they proved road-ready, he never lived anywhere else. Oh, and then he thought enough of the place to spend eternity here in the ground.
His final Memphis residence at 685 E.H. Crump Boulevard met the wrecking ball after a crackhead fire tore through the abandoned structure a few weeks ago. Here's a shot of the place back in September.
Here's the same view this week:
Here's the lot looking back across E.H. Crump Blvd.
The only thing worse than losing a piece of history like this is the fact that it could sit there, rot, and ultimately have to be bulldozed without the significance of the place ever receiving recognition. Meanwhile, the dorm room Edgar Allen Poe spent a semester in at the University of Virginia has been sealed off and preserved. Louis Armstrong's New York home is a museum, looking just as it did when he died over three decades ago. I could go on. W.C.Handy griped in his memoir, published in 1941, about how Memphis doesn't appreciate its artists. This latest set of steps to nowhere attest to how little that's changed. So 685 E.H. Crump joins addresses like 500 Beale as the silent, invisible witnesses to the glorious genius that make the city known around the world, and fails to get much local notice. 