The People’s Stage

How the Overton Park Shell won Memphians’ hearts and survived against all odds.

by

The Bell Ringers

It was 1933, and the world reeled from the Great Depression and portents of war. Chancellor Adolf Hitler had used a fire in Germany’s Reichstag to his advantage, gaining unprecedented emergency powers and suspending civil liberties; stateside, Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as the 32nd president of the United States. Meanwhile, in cities and towns across this country, life and the arts went on. Folks waited in line to see King Kong, or thrilled to Ethel Waters’ new hit, “Stormy Weather,” on their phonographs. And in Memphis, everyone was abuzz with news that The Mikado would be performed in Overton Park. The Gilbert and Sullivan comedy would use as its stage a natural dip in the landscape near the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery. This concavity had become a de facto gathering place for anything from anti-Prohibition speeches to theater.

Fifteen-year-old Marion Keisker, who would figure in a later chapter of Memphis’ and Overton Park’s history, was especially thrilled, for she was in the cast. Even though it was a minor role, she’d be mingling with real professionals. The production was being staged by none other than Ralph and Jocieta Howe Dunbar, who’d toured the vaudeville circuit and were now partnering with the Memphis Junior Chamber of Commerce. Ralph was the genius behind “Ralph Dunbar and His Bell Ringers,” a traveling musical act featuring a male quartet, a string trio, and “100 bells weighing from one to two-and-a-half pounds.”

Though the summer theater seasons ended after 1934, the Dunbars saw promise in the little hollow in the park. In 1935, Roosevelt initiated the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and one of its accomplishments was to build bandshells around the country, ultimately 27 in all. The Dunbars spearheaded a lobbying campaign to have one built in Memphis, and on September 13, 1936, Mayor Watkins Overton and an over-capacity crowd celebrated the dedication of the new concrete bandshell and stage, complete with benches seating 4,000. The bandshell’s motto: “A pledge to the future of music in Memphis.”

Nobody there that day could have guessed how prophetic the motto would prove to be, or the central role that the Shell, under various names, would play in the city’s musical evolution. Still standing 86 years later, the newly redubbed Overton Park Shell is one of only a few surviving WPA bandshells in the country, and a lightning rod for musical talent from around the world. But before we turn to this century, it’s best to look back to the last, as the Shell weathered decades of threats and neglect.

Being Elvis Presley’s first public appearance with his new band, he was nervous as he waited in the wings. Perhaps his jitters lent an extra urgency to the performance; his voice and gyrations drove the Shell audience crazy.

Within a year of its dedication, the Shell was hosting the Memphis Open Air Theater (M.O.A.T.) series. Keisker, now a student at Southwestern (later known as Rhodes College), popped up again, dubbed “one of the brightest stars in local theatrical circles” in the 1939 M.O.A.T. program. She would soon leave town, then return as a local radio personality on WREC in the 1940s, before her next brush with history.

Meanwhile, the M.O.A.T. series continued another 13 years with concerts and light opera, as World War II came and went, and in 1947 the Memphis Federation of Musicians began its 30-year “Music Under the Stars” series, which helped underscore the importance of music to the venue. Other concert events gathered momentum there, such as local WMPS disc jockey Bob Neal’s Country Music Jamboree. One jamboree from 1954 featured Slim Whitman and Billy Walker as the headliners.

Ellis [Sic] Has Left the Building

That was when Keisker’s boss, who ran a small recording studio on Union, was trying to promote a new act. Keisker had left behind her own radio career in 1949 to work at Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service in 1950. In the summer of 1953 a young man came through the door intending to record a one-off disc as a gift for his mother. For four dollars, anyone could do so. Keisker dutifully let him cut an acetate and he was on his way. When he returned to make another disc in January of the following year, she began pestering her boss about the teenager’s talent, until he finally relented and booked the kid for a recording session.

Now, trying to promote the up-and-coming singer, Phillips asked his DJ buddy Bob Neal to add the artist’s name to the Country Music Jamboree scheduled for July 30, 1954, and so it was that the ad in the Memphis Press Scimitar read, “In person, the SENSATIONAL radio-recording star, Slim Whitman, with Billy Walker, Ellis Presley and many others ... Tonight at Shell, $1.25 reserved.”

It was likely the first and last time any newspaper misspelled the name “Elvis.”

Being Elvis Presley’s first public appearance with his new band, he was nervous as he waited in the wings. Perhaps his jitters lent an extra urgency to the performance; his voice and gyrations drove the Shell audience crazy. In Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll, Peter Guralnick quotes guitarist Scotty Moore as saying, “With those old loose britches that we wore, it made it look like all hell was going on under there. During the instrumental parts he would back off from the mic and be playing and shaking, and the crowd would just go wild, but he thought they were actually making fun of him.” They weren’t; dozens of teens rushed backstage for autographs after the show.

Noel Gilbert was a central figure in the Shell’s history. When the Memphis Art Center proposal became public, Gilbert gathered 6,000 signatures in a petition to save the Shell. It worked.

Keisker must have been proud to see the young man she’d first recorded dominate the stage where she herself had appeared 15 years earlier. And for some, of course, the history of the Shell begins and ends with that moment. Elvis appeared again a year later, and his association with the Shell was forever enshrined. But even as he moved on to bigger stages, the Shell endured.

Power to the People

Today, it’s hard to fathom that hosting the King’s first performance didn’t immediately grant the Shell status as a National Historic Site. But as the 1960s rolled around, Elvis was just another pop star, at least as far as urban developers were concerned. And that decade proved to be the first of many times when the Shell’s place in the hearts of Memphians saved it from destruction. With the construction of the new Memphis Academy of Art in Overton Park, city planners hoped to follow through on ambitious visions for a Memphis Art Center, first suggested in 1955, which would combine the new school with Brooks Memorial Art Gallery. As part of that plan, they proposed razing the Shell to make way for a two-million-dollar theater.

Enter Noel Gilbert, a gifted violinist and member of the Memphis Federation of Musicians since 1926. As Roy Brewer writes in the Tennessee Encyclopedia, “Beginning in the mid-1930s, Gilbert organized and conducted small orchestras for local hotels and led both the WREC and WMC radio staff orchestras. From 1947 to roughly 1980 he led an eight-week summer season at the Memphis Overton Park Shell, playing light classical and popular music.”

A pillar of the local arts community since before the days of the Memphis Sinfonietta (which became the Memphis Symphony Orchestra in 1960), who also led string sections on many pop and soul recordings of the 1960s and ’70s, Gilbert was a central figure in the Shell’s history. When the Memphis Art Center proposal became public, Gilbert gathered 6,000 signatures in a petition to save the Shell. It worked.

But the music of the Shell was not always so refined. The 1960s also witnessed a new milestone in its history, centered on the blues. (Typifying the open-ended policies that governed the Shell at the time, the event held the week before the first Memphis Country Blues Festival was a Ku Klux Klan rally. As recounted in It Came from Memphis by music historian Robert Gordon, at that time a $65 deposit was all that was required to reserve the space.)

The Country Blues Festival was organized, almost miraculously, by a rag-tag group of beats and bohemians that included Lee Baker, Jimmy Crosthwait, Jim Dickinson, and Sid Selvidge (a group that eventually coalesced into Mud Boy & the Neutrons), along with other associates like John McIntire, Randall Lyon, Charlie Brown, and Chris Wimmer. Starting in 1966, the Shell hosted the first of a series of festivals that would run three more years before fizzling out. The Country Blues Festival’s focus was originally the obscure local blues players — Sleepy John Estes, Furry Lewis, Bukka White, and Son Thomas — whose work inspired the artists behind the event. From there, the festival gained a higher profile each year, and a recording of the 1968 event was even released as an album on London Records.

In 2019, Fat Possum Records premiered a film compiled of footage shot during the final festival, Memphis ’69, that fully captures the unique blend of rural Mississippi and urban hippiedom that the Country Blues Festivals embodied. As Bruce Watson, the film’s co-producer, noted at the time, “The audio engineer was tripping on acid, so the audio is kind of hit-and-miss. The solo performances with the blues guys sound pretty good, but when you start getting Johnny Winter and Moloch and that stuff, it’s really overdriven.”

Indeed, overdrive marked the next stage of the Shell, as the ’70s set in. But it almost got driven through. A planned extension of Interstate 40 through the park during this period was halted by the nonprofit Citizens to Preserve Overton Park. The grassroots movement, which won the landmark 1971 Supreme Court case Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe, has been a model of such popular resistance ever since.

And so the Shell rocked on. David Leonard, a native Memphis videographer and photographer who later played a pivotal role in the Shell’s history, was there to witness it.

“The Shell had this crazy thing going on in the early ’70s where any private promoter could rent the stage for nothing — a couple hundred bucks or something — and put on shows. So these huge shows happened. Leon Russell and Freddie King on the same bill! The Allman Brothers. Black Sabbath. Mountain. And when those shows happened, people were freaking out. It was sure enough culture war stuff. Like, ‘What are all these hippies doing in my neighborhood?’ And they had this stupid, ugly chain-link fence, with turnstiles. I remember I had a friend from elementary school whose dad was kind of a hippie, and he promoted one of those shows. So we went! They were only charging three or five bucks. And that got to be a problem. The neighbors didn’t like it, and I’m sure the [Brooks] museum didn’t like it.”

As it turned out, the crew that eventually formed Save Our Shell, Inc. came up with a lot. With David Leonard as the first president, and many others thereafter, the nonprofit carried on for 18 years, staging hundreds of free shows during that period.

Being somewhat countercultural himself, he pauses and lets out a laugh. “Finally, around 1975, the Park Commission said, ‘We’re going to tear down this fence and stop letting private promoters do these shows. So the freaks tore down the fence for them at the last show that happened, which was Seals & Crofts. There were thousands of people, and they climbed the trees and broke down the fence.”

According to Leonard, getting “the freaks” out of Midtown became a priority. “Roy Harrover, the great architect who designed the airport and the College of Art, told me that when he got the job to design Mud Island, Mayor Wyatt Chandler told him, ‘I don’t care what you do out there, but you need to build an amphitheater so we can get the freaks out of the park.’”

Save Our Shell

To be sure, many pleasant evenings were no doubt still available at the Shell. With the incendiary tonal onslaught of Seals & Crofts now safely in the past, free, fence-less shows continued.

“A stigma still hung over the Shell,” explains Leonard, “but the Memphis Federation of Musicians had a fund that would pay union musicians to do free shows. And for a while, those few shows were the main events at the Shell. Not much else would happen. Then there was Arts in the Park, started by Martha Ellen Maxwell. That went on for a few years, and then moved to Audubon Park.”

It wasn’t long after that that Leonard and many others became involved in the Shell on a deeply personal level. And the catalyst was a remarkable person named John Hanrahan. Or, as Leonard says, “Save Our Shell really got started in 1985. It began as an Irish wake that lasted for 18 years.”

Hanrahan was a video artist who was fired by a strong activist streak. “He didn’t have a car,” Leonard recalls. “He rode a bicycle and lived in a little back house in Midtown. And he was certain that they were about to tear down the Shell. As far as I know, 1985 was the only year when not a single concert happened on that stage. The city had run out of any kind of vision for what to do with the Shell. And, because they were initially looking at doing the Ramesses exhibit at Brooks [the first show in the city’s “Wonders” series], there were a few months when they were seriously considering tearing down the Shell. Because they needed parking!”

This gave Hanrahan a goal. “He got on this mission to save the Shell,” says Leonard. “He would talk to anybody. He got petitions printed, he got bumper stickers printed, he got T-shirts made. And that went on for months. But the first press we got — which, amazingly, was on the front page of the Sunday paper, back when that was a big deal — came on the weekend that John Hanrahan died.”

He was killed in a construction accident on November 5, 1985. “The funeral was on a Friday,” says Leonard, “and that day, his brother took a wreath from the funeral and put it on the stage of the Shell, which was absolutely a wreck at that point. There was graffiti all over the stage. And the old benches, you could just kick and break. It was totally neglected. But spontaneously, that day, people gathered there, because we had all heard about the wreath. We were there telling ‘remember John’ stories. But also making plans. ‘We’re going to do this.’ Now, John had a big family, and also he knew a lot of construction guys. They weren’t afraid to just do it. So the next day, we were out there painting over the graffiti. And the day after that, it was on the front page of the Sunday paper. And Mayor Dick Hackett told us that was what made him say, ‘Hold on. Wait a minute. Let’s see what these guys are going to come up with.’”

As it turned out, the crew that eventually formed Save Our Shell, Inc. came up with a lot. With Leonard as the first president, and many others thereafter, the nonprofit carried on for 18 years, staging hundreds of free shows during that period. One of the most determined members was stage manager John Larkin, who had attended the first Memphis Country Blues Festival as a 13-year-old and embodied the can-do, D.I.Y., “let’s put on a show” spirit that fueled Save Our Shell. And yet, having never been granted a full management contract by the city, and with funding dependent on annual grant cycles, the nonprofit was always on precarious footing.

Metamorphosis and Rebirth

Leonard recalls the malaise that set in during the final years of Save Our Shell. “I had a meeting with the Park Commission and said, ‘Look, this unofficial status is giving us just enough rope to hang ourselves. We cannot really apply for capital improvements money to fix this place if we don’t have authority to run the place.’ But we were told that the city didn’t want us to compete with the Mud Island Amphitheater. At that point, a bunch of the original board members lost their enthusiasm. Nothing officially changed. And there were a lot of great shows during those years, when John kept it going. But we were burnt out, man! So when we found out that there was this foundation that was devoted to preserving or building amphitheaters, we wanted to hear more.”

The Levitt Foundation, formed as the result of New Yorker Mortimer Levitt’s passion for outdoor concerts, had already been financing new band shells, or renovating older ones, around the country when they learned of the situation in Memphis. In 2005, they fairly leapt at the chance to save it, with a local board helping to steer the process and local matching funds helping to subsidize at least 50 free shows every year, from 2007 through 2021. Annie Pitts served as executive director during this period, and over the years, an impressive list of local movers-and-shakers joined the board. Among them: Thomas Boggs, Jeff Goldstein, Deanie Parker, Blanchard Tual, Barry Lichterman, Martha Ellen Maxwell, Christine Todd, Jeff Nesin, Katie Smythe, Lee Askew, Mimi Phillips, Joyce Cobb, and David Leonard.

Natalie Wilson became executive director of the Memphis Levitt Shell nonprofit in 2019 and sings the praises of the Levitt Foundation, now based in Los Angeles. “I told Liz Levitt Hirsch [board president of the Mortimer & Mimi Levitt Foundation], ‘You helped save the Shell. You will always have that legacy. And we’ll always have a special marker on the lawn that speaks to the Levitt era.’ They started with two years of renovation money. A million dollars. And then 15 years of programming support. If it wasn’t for that support, we wouldn’t be able to create what we do today. The Shell would not be here.”

But by 2022, the goals of Wilson and other Memphians shifted to a desire for a more locally grounded organization. That was due in part to the Shell being nearly a century old, and needing renovations.

“We were the only historic venue [supported by the Levitt Foundation],” says Wilson. “The other ones were all built in the past 16 years, but we have major deferred maintenance that I have to continue to focus on, on behalf of the citizens of Memphis. We’re owned by the city, by the citizens, so we have a responsibility for the continued preservation of the Shell. So on top of managing it and the mission, I’ve got to renovate it. I’ve got to preserve it.”

If Wilson frames the work as a personal responsibility, she also takes some pride in announcing that, due to a complete restructuring, on March 3, 2022, what was until recently known as the Levitt Shell is once again the newly independent Overton Park Shell.

“We had a current contract with the Levitt Foundation that ended in 2021,” she says, “and after a lot of research, the board made the decision that we could truly lend more sustainability to the community by bringing in more local investment. With local partners supporting us. Families. Foundations. Individuals. Businesses that believe in the work we do, from outreach and education to the Shell on Wheels, a mobile shell stage. Since I came in in 2019, we’ve been working to find local sustainability, and we have it now. We’re grateful for it.”

And so the Overton Park Shell has endured since it first opened more than eight decades ago, created and then saved many times through the grassroots efforts of the Memphians who love it most.