Lillian McMurry Obituary (long)

[Brian Phillips <hagar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I didn't know who she was until now; I guess I should have!


Lillian McMurry, Blues Producer, Dies at 77 
By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.,NYTimes 
Lillian Shedd McMurry, who stumbled on a cache of old blues records in 
1949 and was so taken by the pure, haunting sound that within a year she had 
opened a recording studio, died on March 18 at a hospital near her home in 
Jackson, Miss. She was 77 and, as the founder of Trumpet Records, had been 
the first to record two giants of the Delta blues, Sonny Boy Williamson and 
Elmore James. 
Friends said the cause was a heart attack. 
It is a reflection of the way things were in the prewar South that a 
white woman from a musical family could grow up moving from Mississippi town 
to Mississippi town and never once hear the area's most evocative music. She 
became an unlikely pioneer in an unfamiliar field. 
It was also a reflection of the time and place that some of the 
century's most original and talented musicians could perform for decades, 
sometimes even on the radio, without being offered recording contracts. 
It was a tribute to Mrs. McMurry's character, vision and love of music 
and musicians that once she was exposed to the blues she began making up for 
lost time, recruiting and recording many leading figures, among them Willie 
Love, Big Joe Williams and Jerry McCain. 
A native of Purvis, Miss., who had a peripatetic, hardscrabble 
childhood, she became a state secretary in Jackson, Miss., took some law 
courses and in 1945 married Willard McMurry, who eventually operated several 
furniture stores, including one at 309 Farish St. in Jackson. 
While helping her husband clean out the Farish Street building in 1949, 
Mrs. McMurry came upon a stack of old records. Curious, she put one on a 
turntable and what she heard changed her life. It was a song called "All She 
Wants to Do Is Rock," by Wynonie "Mr. Blues" Harris, and as Mrs. McMurry 
recalled years later, the sound was as strange to her as it was thrilling. 
"It was the most unusual, sincere and solid sound I'd ever heard," she 
said. "I'd never heard a black record before. I'd never heard anything with 
such rhythm and freedom." 
Mrs. McMurry was so taken with the music that she opened a record 
department in the furniture store, specializing in blues, gospel and other 
black music. 
The department proved so popular, especially after she began 
advertising on the local 50,000-watt radio station, that it soon became a 
full-fledged store. 
Less than a year later Mrs. McMurry converted the store into a 
recording studio and created the Trumpet label, initially recording local 
gospel groups. 
Then after hearing about a blues singer who played the harmonica, or 
harp as it is known in blues circles, she got in her car, headed north and 
tracked him down in a small Delta town. 
He called himself Sonny Boy Williamson, and by the time Mrs. McMurry 
found him, he had been performing for almost 20 years and acquiring a 
devoted following through his regular radio appearances on "King Biscuit 
Time" over station KFFA in Helena, Ark. 
Mrs. McMurry, who signed him to a contract in December 1950, did not 
learn until years later that he was really Alex Miller, known since 
childhood as Rice. Typically, Williamson had appropriated the name of 
another highly regarded harmonica-playing blues singer, but only, 
apparently, because as an escaped convict (the story was that he had stolen 
a neighbor's mule and painted it white, and had gotten away with it -- until 
it rained), he needed a different name. 
Over the next few years, with Mrs. McMurry serving as a demanding, 
inspired producer, he turned out a string of blues standards, among them 
"Eyesight to the Blind," "Nine Below Zero," "Mr. Down Child," "Mighty Long 
Time," "Red Hot Kisses" (written by Mrs. McMurry) and "Pontiac Blues," a 
Williamson tribute to Mrs. McMurry's car. 
He also brought in his friend Elmore James, the slide guitarist, whose 
first, and only, Trumpet recording, "Dust My Broom," became a major blues 
hit and led to a career with a succession of other labels. 
Williamson remained loyal to Mrs. McMurry, perhaps partly because she 
was a reliable friend who regularly bailed him out of jail and gave him 
advances on his royalties -- more, in the end, than he earned. 
A hard-drinking, cantankerous man who tended to get into fights when he 
was drunk, Williamson, who carried a knife and a gun, also used a lot of 
foul language, but according to local legend only did so once around Mrs. 
McMurry. 
As the story goes, when Williamson began cursing at the studio one day, 
she chewed him out and told him to leave. When he refused, Mrs. McMurry, who 
had taken the precaution of making him check it, pulled his own pistol on 
him, marched him outside and ordered him not to come back. When he returned 
a couple of weeks later and apologized, she took him back. 
Mrs. McMurry, whose husband died in 1996, is survived by a daughter, 
Vitrice Rankin of New Orleans; a sister, Doris Wells of Sealy, Texas; a 
brother, Milton Shedd of Jackson, and a granddaughter. 
Partly because of unscrupulous competition from bigger record 
companies, Trumpet folded in 1955, but the McMurrys eventually managed to 
pay off its debts. (Always scrupulous about paying royalties on time, Mrs. 
McMurry, who was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame last year, continued 
to make sure her former artists got their due when collections of Trumpet 
songs were released over the years.) 
Williamson landed at Chess records after Trumpet folded, but continued 
to rely on Mrs. McMurry. After he died in 1965, it was she who paid for his 
tombstone.