Local Treasures: Kurl McKinney

One musician’s journey from a hardscrabble farm near Jackson to the stages of Memphis and beyond.

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You wouldn’t guess it if you heard him playing the grand piano in the lobby of The Peabody every Monday and Tuesday, but the chief lesson from hearing tales of Kurl McKinney’s childhood is that “life is tough.” He’s looking dapper these days, and can tickle the ivories with remarkable dexterity, given the 86 years behind him, as he plays one standard after another: “Summertime,” “My Funny Valentine,” “New York, New York,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” or just some down-home boogie-woogie. A crowd has gathered around him on the chairs and sofas scattered around the lobby. “You’ve got to have something for everyone,” he tells me. “I just saw a guy from Canada,” he adds, then plays “Canadian Sunset.” A British couple chats with him between songs, and he launches into The Beatles’ “Yesterday.”

A onetime touring musician and retired music educator (he taught in the Shelby County Schools system for 41 years), McKinney’s command of the keyboard seems effortless, but he had to overcome daunting odds to get where he is today. As I sit with him before his Peabody set begins, he talks about his childhood, recounting one struggle after another as he tried to cultivate any talent that would get him off the farm.

“Back in the day, it was just surviving.”

“I was born in Houston, Mississippi, the youngest of 11,” he says. “When I was 7 years old, we left Mississippi and bought a 106-acre farm four miles west of Jackson, Tennessee. It’s tough work out there. Needless to say, we were poor, but we raised our own pork. We had beef. My dad would hit a calf in the head with a sledgehammer. He would shoot the hogs with a .22 rifle. And the entire family would gather around in cold weather and scrape that hog, to skin it. We all were working. Back in the day, it was just surviving, man!”

For McKinney, merely drawing the next breath could be a struggle. “I’m kind of sickly, too,” he notes. “I grew up with asthma. Some mornings the family would go out to chop cotton or pull corn or whatever, and my mama would tell my papa, ‘Kurl is not doing well today. He can’t go out there.’ If an asthma attack hit me, sometimes I’d have to be out of school two weeks.”

One bright spot in the farm life was music. “Sometimes, a man would come to our house, and he had a harp mounted up by his mouth with a bracket, and he played the guitar,” he recalls. “We’d all sit in a big circle and he’d sing and play for us. That was our family entertainment on a Saturday night.”

Despite his health problems, his earliest ambitions were athletic. “Back in elementary school, I thought I wanted to play baseball,” he says. “One time, somebody hit the ball, and I had my glove, and I was all set. Then that ball hit a piece of dirt and hit me in my throat. That ended my interest in baseball. Later, in high school, I thought I wanted to go for the Golden Gloves. Fighting and boxing. The teachers let me get in the ring with this old boy I didn’t like; they called him Hot Rod. He was hitting me in my eye and I couldn’t see a lick. That boy whooped me out. That was the last of my interest in boxing.”

Finally, he thought his voice could be his ticket off the farm. “I wound up singing in the old Merry High School choir. Mrs. Meachem was our teacher. She said, ‘If you can learn to sing the Hallelujah Chorus by George Frideric Handel, you can sing anything, all over the world!’ I asked her if I could sing for a scholarship to go to college. You know what that woman told me? ‘Your parents have that big farm out in the country.’ Basically saying, ‘Y’all don’t need money for a scholarship.’ And she let the popular boys in the choir apply instead. Well, it hurt me so bad, I decided I would never sing again.”

“If you majored in music, you didn’t have to take mathematics but one semester. Now, I knew I wasn’t any good at math, so I majored in music. And I minored in education. In case the bright lights and big cities didn’t call me, I could always teach school.” — Kurl McKinney

Yet McKinney was undaunted. “I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to learn to play an instrument.’” In fact, he learned two. “I picked up clarinet and piano about the same time. My first clarinet was $157. And my mother had started letting me take piano lessons with a lady who played for the church in the country. My mother bought me the little book called Teaching Little Fingers to Play. It was red and white. And she let me go up to the house every Saturday for the lesson, 50 cents an hour. But I told my teacher, ‘I don’t want to read these notes. Play me something that you play at church every Sunday. And don’t tell my mama, she’ll beat me.’”

When McKinney was in his teens, tragedy struck the family. “My older brother, Aaron, taught me how to hunt and fish, and he was the mechanic in the family. One Sunday morning, he wanted to change the transmission in the truck. He was 37 years old. Back in the day, you’d put the planks on the dirt in the garage and prop up the transmission. But the dirt caved in. Mama had my niece call me at church and say, ‘There’s been an accident.’ I went straight to the hospital and said, ‘I’m looking for Aaron McKinney, my brother.’ The nurse said, ‘Oh, you don’t know? He’s dead.’ That was pretty rough on me.”

“You’re going to Lane College.”

That must have only strengthened McKinney’s resolve to get off the farm, but his father had other plans. “He wanted me to study agriculture at Rust College,” says McKinney. “Of course, me being the mama’s baby, I could get in Mama’s ear but I couldn’t get in Papa’s ear. So I said, ‘Mama, I saw the college, but I didn’t like it. I don’t want to be a farmer!’ I told them I wanted to go to Tennessee State in Nashville, because I liked the way the college band was jamming — so good! My daddy said, ‘Nope, you’re going to Lane College right here at home. Because when your butt gets out of class, you’re coming straight back to the field.’” And McKinney’s father was used to having his way — or else. “My dad would whoop me ’til I fell on the ground if I messed up something.”

Meanwhile, McKinney says his mother was determined that he attend college. “Lane College sent a letter about the tuition, and my mother went up there and talked to the president, Dr. Kirkendoll. ‘Dr. Kirkendoll,’ she said, ‘this is my last child, and I want him to go to college, but this money y’all are talking about for his tuition … we’re just poor people and we don’t have that kind of money, but what I do have is chickens out there in the incubator. Their feet have never been on the ground. They average two pounds apiece.’ So the president said, ‘Mrs. McKinney, we’ll take all you can bring.’ That’s how she paid my tuition. Back in 1955, I think it was about $2,000 a year.”

Though not his first choice, the Jackson campus was good for McKinney. “If you majored in music, you didn’t have to take mathematics but one semester,” he recalls. “Now, I knew I wasn’t any good at math, so I majored in music. And I minored in education. In case the bright lights and big cities didn’t call me, I could always teach school.”

Meanwhile, McKinney was broadening his horizons dramatically. “I was so glad to get off the farm, and I was learning to play every instrument. Every semester at Lane College I’d have to learn different instruments.” And while his primary instrument was the clarinet, he found his piano lessons came in handy. “I started in 1957 with the Phillip Reynolds Band in Jackson, an 11-piece rock-and-roll dance band. They needed a piano player, and I told the saxophone player, ‘I don’t know that much on piano.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re playing that boogie like that! You’re the only one in Jackson who can do that much.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll ask my mother if I can come to practice with you all.’

“We finally learned the songs pretty well. Then they called me out to my first gig: The Supper Club out there in Jackson,” McKinney continues. “It was a white party with a Black band playing. They told me, ‘We’ve got to play from 9 to 1 every Friday and Saturday night.’ Man, I couldn’t wait to get out of the field, to head uptown and go play with the band! Even when they said, ‘We’re just going to give you $5, since you don’t know all the songs.’ I’d come home and my mother would put that $5 in a fruit jar, and hide it in the chicken house. She was saving it up for me. And that helped me pay for my first clarinet.”

The group even recorded for Sam Phillips in Memphis in 1962, released as Rhythm Blues Party on the Phillips International label (and re-released by Sun Records last year), and while the band shines throughout the album, and McKinney’s piano takes the lead on two instrumentals, it was released under singer Frank Ballard’s name. “Merry High School was perhaps the greatest help of his singing career,” the liner notes say. “His music teacher, Mrs. Meachem, gave lots of her time and knowledge.” Of the band, the notes say, “They grew up together in the same community, that’s just how close and tight the ‘cats’ are. The aggregation has been called the ‘Band of Teachers’ as each musician is a public school music teacher.”

“I enjoyed working with children, and I was so glad to get off the farm.”

Those last words on the album’s back cover were significant, as McKinney was already settling into the career that would define the rest of his life after college. He had also settled into domestic life, as his college girlfriend, Ruth Bryant, became Ruth McKinney. “We were at college at Lane. She finished in ’58, and I finished in ’59. She was in the choir and I was in the band, and I like to say that’s how we made musical children. But we got married in Alabama in 1960, in her daddy’s yard, near Dothan, a little town near Abbeville. Her father was the principal of a school, her mother was a schoolteacher.”

Teaching seemed to be McKinney’s destiny too, eventually leading him to Memphis. “They needed a roving music teacher in Shelby County,” he recalls. “That happened after I’d been teaching in Trenton, Tennessee. I had signed a contract to teach there, but they wanted me to leave the contract and come to Memphis and teach in Shelby County. Everybody was noticing how good I was getting at music.”

After finishing his contract, he headed to the big city. “My wife had already gone to Shelby County as a choir director. I wanted to come to Memphis anyway, so I started teaching here too.” That move was to have a sizable impact on both McKinney and the youth of Shelby County, as he dedicated the next four decades of his life to his students. “I enjoyed working with children, and I was so glad to get off the farm,” he recalls.

His work yielded trophies for the marching band, but he prided himself on instructing students in all of music’s possibilities. “I taught it all: marching band, orchestra, and I even had a little ensemble, which was playing blues, and we got close to some jazz.”

For most of his tenure as a band director, he was at Lincoln Junior High School, where he was named Teacher of the Month, as his reputation for dedication and versatility spread throughout the Memphis school system. Studying multiple instruments at Lane College was now paying off.

“When a kid who went to Bellevue Junior High School wanted to enroll in the string program, they said, ‘We don’t have room for another student. Send him down to Lincoln Junior High School where McKinney is!’” he says. “It had been years since I touched a stringed instrument at Lane, but I took one home and started going over it. By that Christmas, I put that kid on the stage with his violin, at a predominantly Black school, and I let him play 'Silent Night.' He was accompanied by four of my flute players, and I got on the piano. That was the first time I’d ever seen a kid get a standing ovation.” Many ovations would follow over the years, as several of his students would go on to professional careers in music, including saxophonist Sweet Angel and rapper Gangsta Blac.

His wife, Ruth, was also teaching most of that time, sometimes at schools in Arkansas or Mississippi. Occasionally she’d help her husband out. “When the children wouldn’t practice, I’d have my wife come over and make a motivational speech to them,” McKinney says. “She’d say, ‘Boys and girls, Mr. McKinney loves you. Because when he comes home from school, all he does is talk about those band students. Y’all just got to practice and do better.’”

And do better they did. His work yielded trophies for the marching band, but he prided himself on instructing students in all of music’s possibilities. “I taught it all: marching band, orchestra, and I even had a little ensemble, which was playing blues, and we got close to some jazz.”

“We ended up doing a lot of gigs.”

Meanwhile, he and Ruth raised two sons, Alvin and Paul, who have become respected jazz players and educators as well. As they grew up, they saw their father distinguishing himself as a gigging musician as well, first playing around Memphis clubs, and later touring the world. “A guy by the name of [Gene] ‘Bowlegs’ Miller, who played at the old Flamingo Room heard me play, and said if I came down to play for him, he’d pay me $12 an hour,” McKinney says, with a hint of pride: Miller was a huge presence in the Memphis R&B and jazz scene at the time.

“Then we wound up playing a place in North Memphis called Johnny Currie’s. And he was paying $15 an hour. Later, I played with the Ben Branch band. He was a tenor saxophone player. After that, we formed our own band, the Memphians. We patterned ourselves after the Willie Mitchell band from Hi Records. Because they dressed well, and they didn’t hurt nobody’s ears while they were playing. And we ended up doing a lot of gigs.”

It was with the latter group that McKinney would occasionally take up the touring life, often backing the Chicago-based singer and guitarist Syl Johnson, who eventually came to Memphis to record with Mitchell and had a hit with his own version of “Take Me to the River.” That wasn’t always a satisfying experience. “Syl Johnson didn’t pay us hardly anything,” he says. “After you’d get back from being on the road, you didn’t have hardly nothing, man!” The Memphians did end up recording with Mitchell on their own, releasing a single on the Hi subsidiary, Pawn Records. Ultimately, they stayed together for 12 years, a mainstay of the local scene, ultimately recruiting a young guitarist named Preston Shannon, who became a major draw on Beale Street and a recording artist in his own right.

In 1999, both Kurl and Ruth retired from teaching, and a relatively quiet period of his life settled in. But he didn’t give up on his playing. Nowadays, he can be heard every Sunday in the band at First Baptist Church Chelsea on North Fourth Street, and, for the past 12 years, playing the beautiful grand piano in the lobby of The Peabody, where he’s rubbed shoulders with the likes of Cybill Shepherd and Bill Clinton.

As he entertains the hotel guests, McKinney’s clearly in his element, and he keeps a small collection of photos from his past to show fans as they stop to chat. “I tell people jokes, and then I show them pictures,” he says. “I made out a song list; I show it to them and say, ‘Here are 150 songs, there’s got to be something on here you like.’ And the tips here are really good on some nights. The man who owns Tyson Chicken came through here one night and said, ‘Young man, do you know any Ray Charles?’ I said, ‘I sure do.’ He laid a hundred-dollar bill on my piano. He came back 40 minutes later and said, ‘Do you know any Christian music?’ I said, ‘Yes I do.’ He laid another hundred-dollar bill down. That was four years ago — I’ve been looking for him ever since!”

As McKinney speaks, a voice booms through the hotel lobby. “‘Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the South’s grandest hotel, The Peabody in Memphis! Let me take you on a journey. It is said that the Delta begins right here in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee ...” A crowd has gathered around the fountain, where the hotel’s resident mallards are about to make their nightly march to the elevator and thence to their roost on the roof.

“That’s the Duckmaster,” McKinney explains, rising up out of his chair. “I have to play when the ducks get out of the water!” He moves behind the piano with ease and, after the ducks start moving, he launches into “Satin Doll.” With his seafaring cap and blazer, you could almost believe Count Basie himself was playing for you. But this cat is more modern, more funky. This is Kurl McKinney of Memphis, Tennessee.