photograph by dan ball
Beneath the seven-story vaulted ceiling inside the Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Central Gardens, the altar was resplendent with green fir Christmas trees and red poinsettias. Small white lights dotted the plants, each bulb appearing as its own star. Gold and silver sparkled on the walls, glimmered from the mosaics and the dome above, gleamed from the chalice. A years-long renovation has recently given this century-old sanctuary new life.
There, a few days after Christmas 2024, the soul of writer Stanley Booth transmogrified from this life to the next. He’d selected this setting for his funeral. It was a far cry from the funerals he chronicled. Of blues great Mississippi John Hurt’s, he wrote, “We followed [John Hurt’s nephew] T.R. through the dried, weedy grass. Cockleburs stuck to my pant legs, and when I bent to brush them off, T.R. went almost to his knees, plucking the spiny burs with his thick fingers. ‘Hey, let me,’ I said. ‘I can —’ but he would not stop.”
When pioneering Memphis soul guitarist Charlie Freeman was dead at 31 in 1973, Stanley wrote, “There were sprays of flowers, all kinds, all colors, along the walls and in great banks behind the steel-gray coffin, where Freeman, dressed in the gold-embroidered blue robe he’d worn onstage at the Albert Hall, was laid out on white satin. There were flowers from all the studios and record companies that had not been able to give Freeman any work toward the end of his life.”
Here, there were no burrs, no dazzling robes, no banks of flowers, no unkempt lawns or unkept record company promises. There were about 40 people in attendance, which was impressive for a man who’d outlived many of his friends and spent much of his lifetime spurning those who sought his friendship.
photograph by dan ball
I’d known Stanley about 30 years. I’d not spoken more than ten words with him since he moved back to Memphis a decade or so ago. Though I also live here, I did not visit him at his home when he was well or when he was sick, nor in the nursing home where he wound up to wind down, though through acquaintances I knew his health was in decline. I had enough scars from previous encounters. Over the years, Stanley had devoted some of his considerable talent and creativity to fomenting animosities and inventing smears. I was a favorite target, which both saddened and angered me. Apparently our paths were too similar, especially our interests in roots music and most-things-Memphis, and he perceived me as either a threat or an unpleasant reminder of the work to be done.
He’d converted to Catholicism many years back, “which has freed me,” Stanley told The Vinyl Press in 2015, “from being an animal.”
Still, his art always inspired me. When I was writing It Came From Memphis, I would, seated at my desk, read passages from Stanley’s books until I felt a communing of the spirit; when that came over me, I’d drop the book in my lap and begin immediately writing, ignited by his prose. It was a transmogrification of a different sort. (I did the same with the work of Peter Guralnick and Greil Marcus; also with Wim Wenders’ movie The American Friend.)
Now Stanley was too dead to insult me, and I could pay my respects.
Stanley was an elegant writer with a keen sense of craft. His only completed long-form book, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, is a masterwork of journalism and prose. His magazine pieces, compiled in the (intentionally misspelled) Rythm Oil, find him at many crossroads of Memphis music — Otis Redding’s final recording session, sweeping Beale Street with bluesman Furry Lewis, in the hospital with Phineas Newborn after the piano genius had his fingers broken in a mugging.
Stanley looked like a star, and in his own pieces he could compete with his subjects for attention. He’d established himself when gonzo journalism — inserting oneself into stories — was the new trend. His Rolling Stones book opens at the Altamont Speedway, December 1969, a night of rock-and-roll and murder that ended any illusions of a Woodstock nation. Stanley describes his arrival, getting out of a van to walk the last leg, not alone but with “of course Mick and Keith, Rolling Stones.” In documentary footage with the Stones, Stanley is as dashing as anyone in the band.
At his own funeral, however, “Stanley” was the answer to a Mad Lib: Insert name of dead person here. There was no mention of his writing career, no citing of his true adventures with Stax greats, nor the world’s greatest rock-and-roll band, nor confidantes in Elvis Presley’s world. Not a mention of his home in Georgia or his hometown soul brother Gram Parsons. All the words spoken at Stanley’s funeral were impersonal — the time-honored template, devoted to the liturgy and indifferent to the subject. I don’t think his full name was even spoken, only seen on the cover of the photocopied funeral program. Otherwise, he was just two syllables recited by priests who did not know him: “Stanley.”
He’d converted to Catholicism many years back, “which has freed me,” he told The Vinyl Press in 2015, “from being an animal.” Throughout the service I contemplated why Stanley had chosen a farewell that lacked any personal connection to his actual life; he’d lived an unusual one that warranted remarks. And humility was not his nature.
Then, called to stand, I shifted my position and noticed the urn for his ashes, front and center of the room, on a table with a tall cross. Whenever the three priests would shift roles on the pulpit, they’d pause to bow to that cross. When one would finish his words, he’d turn and bow to that cross. And — I realized, each was also bowing to Stanley.
In his writing, Stanley made himself integral to the story. The Stones were the spectacle and his telling made him an essential element of their light. And here he was in a room that itself was a spectacle, and robed men were going through a ritual that had survived for centuries, and a crowd had come to observe it, and at the center of it all was — well, yes there was a cross, but below the cross, also reaping the glory, accepting the nods, was what remained of Stanley himself. Intentional or just life’s way, he was again adjacent to the Star, receiving the bowing gestures from the priests, the curtseys from the congregation. He was again written into the text — even upstaging the Star a bit, Stanley’s two-syllables getting so much attention in the Star’s home during His birthday celebration season.
Stanley’s conversion was genuine, so he likely pursued this service for its single-minded devotion to a higher power, the acknowledgement of human frailty, and the yielding to the final, prevailing narrative for all mortals. But in death as in life, Stanley drew the light.
Memphian Robert Gordon is an award-winning writer, producer, and filmmaker. His documentaries have focused on Beale Street, B.B. King, Stax Records, Big Star, and many others. Books include It Came from Memphis, Can’t be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, The King of the Road: Elvis on Tour 1954–1977, and The Elvis Treasures.
