Hello, hello!
I’m here to introduce my little sister. Her name is Oreo Princess, but we call her Baby Girl. She’s a little puppy doll! You can see that she has my eyes and my coat for the most part. At some time or the other, she slipped into a bucket of white paint and made her belly and inner legs white! When she runs, you see white leg, black leg, white leg, black leg! She’s worth a woof! or two!
A photo of her chewing on a little bone is posted in facebook.
Tonight’s blog is an article my lady published a few years ago about a gentleman from Holt, Alabama: Jack Marshall. I think you’ll find this article fascinating! Mr. Jack is one of the most talented musicians to come out of Tuscaloosa. He still lives here, but his Alberta KFC home office blew away in THE tornado, along with walls of autographed photographs and magazine articles featuring Mr. Jack.
This article was first published in Longleaf Style magazine out of Anniston, Alabama, through The Anniston Star.
I’m out of here so you can paws a bit and read.
Woof! Woof! Have a good week, and I’ll see you next Tuesday!
As always,
Cooper the Cocker
Fried Chicken and Gospel Music
Buckets of fried chicken and Gospel Music. Makings for a relaxing weekend in the Deep South, especially in Alabama.
In the 1950s and 60s, in a country more rural and church-going, Jack Marshall’s name began to resonate among multiple music circuits and around cloth-covered kitchen tables. “Jack Marshall,” painted on apple-red signs, appeared on Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants he owned throughout four states. Posters announced Blackwood Brothers Gospel quartet performances with Jack Marshall at the piano in bold black letters above a small bottom line mentioning new-comer Elvis Presley. Jack Marshall was making his place. Not yet in his twenties, he was about to change cooking habits and Gospel piano technique throughout the South.
Marshall, native of Holt, Alabama, was born with music waltzing through his veins. By age five, he was picking guitar strings. Next he set out to conquer the violin. Though he played both instruments well, his hands spoke to him of a new music within that no one had ever heard. They knew this music was good. Really good. So Jackie tried piano, listening to and mimicking, at first, his self-taught aunts.
Before this child reached nine years, he was playing piano for the Stallworth Family in Tuscaloosa. So impressed by the quality of his performance, they recommended little Jackie, whom some would call a prodigy, to the classical pianist and instructor Arnold Denson, a blind musician from the Virgil School of Music in Philadelphia. Denson accepted. They toured the country as Denson trained Jackie in various musical styles. Denson taught. Jackie performed. By age 12, he was performing solo classical concerts.
Back in Holt, Jackie moved through his high school years playing piano with the Alabama Cavaliers Orchestra and a jazz group at the University of Alabama. Master pianist Dr. Roy McAllister, head of the piano department at the University of Alabama, heard Jackie play and asked to take him as a student. Jackie continued to absorb every beat, every note, every innuendo he heard, tweak each and make it his own.
But Holt could not hold him. Alabama could not contain the music that pulsed heavier and heavier through his body. The road beckoned.
By 17, Marshall’s forte began molding him into the foot-stomping, leg-jerking piano showman whose name would solidify with the Blackwood Brothers Quartet. He embraced all music genres, but his love became Gospel, a music he infused with jazz and the new “rock and roll.” Through syncopated improvisations, he developed the power to shoot pumping rhythms straight into the heart of his audience. Music had not only called Jack Marshall, it now possessed him. This music, Jack Marshall’s music, would soon elevate his name to that of national legend.
Mr. Jack and I met in physical therapy, spring 2007. I was grumbling about the fact that, since my surgery, two fingers on my left hand refused to spider-walk across the table. Taunt tendons shot that music degree.
Mr. Jack was wheeled in and parked next to me. His left arm, shoulder to finger tips, was locked in place.
To avoid staring, I talked. First, about his work.
He told me he never really worked. He spent his life doing what he loved: seeing that people had plenty of Kentucky Fried Chicken and playing Gospel music. Ten years for the Blackwood Brothers.
Now I did stare. But not at his frozen arm. I had listened to the Blackwood Brothers throughout the 1950s and 60s. As a teen, I had seen them perform in Jasper. Their life-long fan and a musician myself, I respect the hours of practice and discipline necessary to produce music. I know a sheet of Gospel music is a simplistic harmony guide with words. One thing that makes Gospel Gospel is improvisation. I knew nothing of his traveling years, weeks on end, so people like me could clap joy-filled tempos and wipe away open tears.
But he told me. His family, co-workers and friends told me. He spoke of his medical diagnosis sometime around 2002. Of Parkinson’s Disease that had taken his left arm and hand. Of how he grieved over that loss most of all.
We talked through our PT sessions. I had not comprehended this man’s far-reaching talent. The more I learned the more I recognized how legendary Jack Marshall is.
I was a late learner. People throughout the country, people like Johnny Cash, Porter Wagoner, Chet Atkins, Elvis Presley, recognized his abilities to arrange and play music, even when Mr. Jack was no more than a teen.
Jack Marshall could have stopped with classical music, but he had yet to find the genre that would satisfy the sounds within his head, music that would make his name a household word. He had not yet found that musical world that would close the Big Band Era and open into a combination of jazz, Black spiritual and Country-Western: the world of Southern Gospel. His hands would help create that new world. Freeing his originality, he would reform the music that captivates listeners even today.
Early in his career at 19, he met the Blackwood Brothers and moved to Memphis where they all attended the First Assembly of God Church. Here he would become friends with Elvis Presley.
Growing more comfortable with his music, he saw an opportunity to expand his expertise. During his 20s, he created a piano course, “The Marshall Plan,” from which over 10,000 pupils in 28 countries studied. He also helped design a typewriter that types musical symbols and used it in writing his piano course.
Think Mozart who crashed in his mid-30s. Think Marshall. Fame found both while they were children. But unlike Mozart, Mr. Jack’s career rose higher and higher, establishing national prominence with his performances on the 1950s televised “Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts.” He and the Blackwood Brothers were the only performers to be invited to compete twice. They won resoundingly both times.
Southern Gospel music is unlike any other. Its core comes from the piano showman. Without a steady rhythm and flawless progressions from one chord to the next, quartet voices can waver. Jack Marshall’s music directed vocalists so accurately they sang as one voice.
Marshall did not simply vamp out a bass beat. He formed impromptu interpretations between each chord, with runs and tinkles and arpeggios, so no moment of the song stands empty. No gaps exist. His music binds listener to piano, to vocalists, as surely as if Fate had made them one.
Marshall’s proficiency and innate talent has provided opportunities for him to perform from Congress to Las Vegas. He played at frequent parties Elvis gave and at the funeral for his mother Gladys.
James Blackwood, in Elvis Presley, remembers that Elvis sent a plane to North Carolina for the Blackwood Brothers, Elvis’ friends. His mother’s favorite quartet. Her favorite pianist. They were to perform three songs, but Elvis sent request after request back asking for more. They stopped after 12 songs.
Mr. Jack knows his pianos. A Knabe, he knew, like all concert grands is handcrafted, and he wanted this particular one, the one he often played behind the Blackwood Brothers at Ellis Auditorium in Memphis. He bought it for he loved its rich resonating bass, but he sold it to Elvis, who was furnishing Graceland, in 1957.
After having it refinished to a glistening white with white vinyl bench seat and gold-colored bench legs, Elvis moved it into his Music Room. Mr. Jack’s Knabe became the site for all-night jam sessions with musicians who wandered in such as Jerry Lee Lewis and the Blackwood Brothers. Elvis kept the piano tuned for play until Priscilla Presley replaced it with a gold-leafed grand on their First Anniversary in 1969.
The Knabe, Elvis’ most beloved instrument, came up for auction at the Peabody Hotel August 13, 2010, to honor the 75th Anniversary of Presley’s death. The auctioneer called for an opening bid of $1,000,000. Though the piano did not sell, Heritage Auctions is currently discussing a possible post-sale with several buyers who will be willing to pay for this piano’s unqualified tone and history.
The Knabe was just one of the pianos at which Mr. Jack perfected his Gospel technique. YouTube offers over 40 videos of the Blackwood Brothers, many which show Jackie Marshall as the young piano showman performing sometimes on old studio uprights.
Don Frost, creator and producer of the “Music City Gospel Showcase” television show and Frost Bite Records, says, “Jackie Marshall’s music has never been duplicated. His music is on every Blackwood Brothers’ recording RCA Victor cut in 1952. Nobody even came remotely close to his speed and technique. No one would ever second guess that he was the world’s greatest.” Frost is, indeed, correct.
Elvis, his Mama and it seems everyone knew Marshall as the “World’s Greatest Gospel Pianist,” evidenced by the fact he was once a final Jeopardy answer in the “Who is the world’s greatest Gospel pianist”question. He also received the Gospel Music Living Legend Award in 2006 and is an inductee in both Country Music and Gospel Music Halls of Fame. Former wife Barbara says that his most treasured award is perhaps his 1986 induction into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.
Only two of the original Blackwood Brothers Quartet are still living: Jack Marshall and Bill Shaw, who at 86 still sings tenor. Shaw remembers that the group won eight Grammies and six Dove Awards. He is not clear on how many Mr. Jack was part of, but he knows the quartet received “several with Jackie on the piano.”
Mr. Jack plinks now. He picks about on his nine-foot concert grand at home. For years, he played at his KFC franchise headquarters from where he directs his 25 restaurants and catering business. In time, he used only his right hand. Later, his brother Sam moved the office seven-foot concert grand to his own residence because seeing it saddened Mr. Jack so.
To maximize a piano’s potential, the player must utilize a strength that spreads from shoulder to fingertips. He must use all ten fingers simultaneously. Mr. Jack once had that strength, one that burst forth in masterful agility. No more. His music, nonetheless, continues to radiate from within.
No more can he run a double-time arpeggio from booming bass notes, hand-over-hand, to the opposite end of the keyboard and close with a tingling falsetto ping. Loss of flexibility and strength has made him no less the legend. He perseveres. And, through technology, his music breathes still.
Laura Hunter is an author and freelance writer from the Northport, Alabama area.
Jack Marshall, CEO KFC, Gospel Pianist
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