Local Treasures: Earl the Pearl

For decades, singer/songwriter Earl Banks has been the heart and soul of the local blues scene.

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Though he wasn’t any older than four, young Earl Banks surely sensed something big was up that day. His mother must have been agitated, pacing through the Rossville, Tennessee, home that Banks’ father had just recently moved the family into. “My mama didn’t like that man,” he recalls. “There was no fighting or arguing about it. She just didn’t like it up there. So one day she grabbed her suitcase, threw her clothes in it, grabbed my hand, and we took off walking. We walked right by the field where my daddy was planting cotton, and she didn’t tell him goodbye or nothing. He didn’t even know we’d left till later. We walked nine miles from Mt. Zion Church in Rossville to Germantown, to live with my grandmama and granddad on the Joe Kirby plantation. About six or seven of us living in one room and a kitchen. I’ve come a long way, man!”

That’s an understatement with a twist of irony: Banks has not strayed far geographically. But he has come a long way indeed in his artistry and influence. One might consider him the very heart of Memphis’ music beat, always pumping the life blood through the local blues scene, regardless of how popular Memphis music might be elsewhere. Banks has always been here, working the clubs. Now living in Memphis, he still frequents the New Bethel M.B. Church in Germantown that he, his three sisters, and one brother attended in their youth. That a musician of his caliber has remained planted here most of his life is no small statement. The guitar-wielding soul-blues singer we know as “Earl the Pearl” has played a pivotal role in the local scene for decades. Just don’t ask him to fly.

“Long about 1955 or ’56, I went to O.K. Houck [Piano Company] and bought a guitar and an amplifier. It cost $315 in those days. And I learned how to play it. I’ve been messing with guitar ever since.” — Earl the Pearl

However crowded it may have been, his grandparents’ home was where music really came into Banks’ life. “My grandfather was a ‘violator,’” he says, using a Prohibition-era term for moonshiners. “A lot of people would come out of town on weekends to get some moonshine.” The extra cash provided some of life’s finer things. “When I was five, my grandfather bought this piano for my auntie. He paid $100 for it, back in the day. We went and picked that piano up on a wagon, and brought it to the house. My auntie never did learn how to play it, but I sure did. This guy called Buddy Grimm used to come to visit. He could really play a piano! And I stood there and watched him.”

In the sleepy country lanes of 1940s undeveloped Germantown, a piano must have sounded enchanting among the crickets — and soon, the one at home wasn’t enough. “I’d go to school and try to be the first one to get there, to get to the piano in the chapel,” says Banks. “There were about three or four guys trying to play at that time, and we would all race for that piano.”

Such was his early devotion to the instrument that by the age of ten, he concocted a plan to take it a step further. “I used to listen to WDIA. Nat D. Williams was the main disc jockey, and Joe Hill Louis would come on every Saturday for 15 minutes. He was the ‘Be-Bop Boy’ — ‘Joe Hill Louis the Be-Bop Boy’! He was a one-man band.”

A singular talent of the time, Louis not only achieved some of the rawest, most distorted guitar tones of the era, but did so while seated behind a custom drum kit he’d play with foot pedals. Hearing him on the radio every Saturday, young Banks soon realized he could see Louis perform live only a few miles to the east, in Moscow, Tennessee.

“When I was ten, I started telling my mama I was spending the night with a school friend. But I’d be headed to Moscow. There was a juke joint there called Sam’s Place. It was nothing but cornfields and corn liquor. And Joe Hill Louis would come around about 6:00, just about dark, driving an old Studebaker. They’d be drinking whiskey and shooting dice. And courting women. It was a nice crowd. People from Brownsville, Covington, Somerville, Bolivar, they would come down. And so I ended up playing piano with Joe Hill Louis. He didn’t pay me, but I was helping him sound good.”

Playing piano with Louis and others (including a young B.B. King, circa 1950) kept Banks busy well into his teens, but he had chosen a distinctly inconvenient instrument. “After I was a certain age, I got in a lot of bands and they didn’t have a piano sometimes. I had to go over in the corner and sit there and just look. I said, ‘All right, I’m gonna play guitar.’ Long about 1955 or ’56, I went to O.K. Houck [Piano Company] and bought a guitar and an amplifier. It cost $315 in those days. And I learned how to play it. I’ve been messing with guitar ever since.”

Somewhere between having a teacher and being his own, Banks developed a unique approach to tuning. Memphis session guitarist Eric Lewis, Banks’s sideman for the last 15 years, spotted it the first time he saw Banks play. “I noticed straight away that he was not tuned like the other guys in the band. It’s standard tuning, but it’s up a half-step. The first time I met him, I asked him, ‘How long have you been tuning up a half-step, to F?’ And he gave me this crazy look, like, ‘How in the heck did you know that?’

“I don’t know, I just started tuning up when I was first playing,” Banks laughs. “Fred Ingram’s guitar was tuned standard, like it’s supposed to be. I don’t know why I tuned mine that way. I’m still using standard, but I’m a half-step off.”

Banks’s approach — learning music on piano, then favoring chords based around F when switching to guitar — makes a certain musical sense. Piano blues tend to be in the keys of F, C, G, and the flat keys. Perhaps he tuned to a key that was familiar to him. Alternatively, Lewis adds, “I have this theory: Earl played with horn players for many years, and horn players tend to prefer flat keys like B♭, A♭, and E♭. With the guitar tuned up a half-step, your standard positions for the guitar will be better keys for horns.”

Whatever the reason, the novel tuning did not slow Banks’ grasp of the instrument, and he soon formed a group which sealed his relationship — and shared musical destiny — with a family by the name of Hodges. Boogie-woogie pianist Leroy Hodges Sr. was driving a cement truck and raising a family on his grandfather’s farm not far from where Banks lived, and his gift for music rubbed off on several of the 12 Hodges kids early on. Leroy, Jr., or “Flick,” favored the bass; Charles and Fred played piano; and Mabon, nine years younger than Earl and known as “Teenie,” took to the guitar. “Then there was a boy named Leslie — he passed away in the ’60s or early ’70s. He played keyboards, too,” adds Banks.

By the late ‘50s, Banks had taken his guitar-playing far enough to lead a band. Along the way, he’d started teaching Teenie a thing or two. “I took Teenie Hodges when he was 12 years old,” he says, “and taught him how to play the guitar, then put him in my band, Banks and the Blue Dots! I formed that band: Teenie Hodges on guitar; Leroy Hodges, his daddy, on piano; and Willie Moody, who sang and played the drums. Later, Oddie Golden played the drums and sang, but Moody still did a lot of singing. Oddie Golden, he’s still living. I talked to him about three days ago. But all the rest are gone.”

Banks and the Blue Dots, the first of many groups Banks would form over the years, began working the local circuit around the time that Banks was first married. “I must have been 21, 22 years old, and I met my wife through her cousin,” he recalls. “I was running around with him, and she was right outside of Collierville, in Piketon. Her name was Sterlene. Boy, she was a pretty little thing. I’m the one that messed that up. I started playing music around Somerville, at the Greenville Inn. And I ran into a girl I always admired and cared for a lot, before I even knew my wife. Archie Mae Lewis. She put her arms around me and said, ‘Hey, Pat!’ A lot of people called me Pat. That was my nickname because I was born on St. Patrick’s Day. ‘Hey Pat! How ya doing? Come up to my house sometime.’ I started going with her. I got a taste of her love and just ran off and left my wife. I wasn’t married to Archie, but I got a divorce from Sterlene.”

Other romances (and eventually three sons) would grace his life, until they didn’t. “I married again,” he says. “I met a schoolteacher, Willie Ruth Wilson, and we had a pretty good relationship. I never caught her at nothing, and she never caught me at nothing. But I went to Jackson, Tennessee, to play a club one Saturday evening, and when I got home the next morning, man, everything was gone out of that house except the bedroom suite. She took the stove and every damn thing. Now she’s got a house probably big enough to put my house and yours in it.”

Meanwhile, he marched on with soul and the blues. “In the 1960s, I moved to Memphis and I got a group together called the Soul Soothers,” Banks explains. “That’s about the time I got the nickname, Earl the Pearl.” As the decade progressed, Banks was stepping up to play Beale Street, “that place that was upstairs, the Flamingo Room. We played there on Wednesdays. I had a manager, Professor Maurice Hubbard. He was a pretty powerful man around here in Memphis, in music.” As he moved to embrace soul as well as blues, his experiences grew more diverse.

“Old age is hell, but it’s good to be old. All the stuff I’ve done in my days that I can remember, I have asked the Lord to forgive me for. I pray every night, and in the morning when I get up, I tell the Lord, ‘Thank You.’”

“I’ve created a lot of bands and played with a lot of people,” says Banks. “You know, I booked Al Green and played behind him up in Covington, Tennessee, when I was playing up there. That was before he got real popular. I think he had ‘Back Up Train’ out or something.”

Green had enjoyed his first flush of success with that single, recorded in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where “Albert Greene” had moved with his family as a child. As Jimmy McDonough writes in Soul Survivor: The Biography of Al Green, after the March 1968 single went to #5 on the R&B charts, “Green wandered the country singing his one hit, supported by pickup bands, sometimes not even getting paid.”

The way Banks remembers it, that wasn’t a problem. “We made $200 and Al Green made $250. But then Al Green went on without me, I think!” Before long, Willie Mitchell, the celebrated producer at Hi Records, would discover Green and bring him into the studio — with none other than the Hodges brothers.

Working under Mitchell’s guidance, the group collectively created a signature style, a new Memphis sound that would sweep the world through the 1970s. Or, as Banks puts it, “Willie took them boys, put ’em in the studio behind Al Green, and they got over like a fat rat in a cheese factory!” And they got over with more artists than Al Green, backing many of Hi’s stars.

Meanwhile, Earl the Pearl stayed focused on the clubs, not the studio. In doing so, he worked with many luminaries: “I played with Syl Johnson, O.V. Wright, Etta James, Carla Thomas, Albert King, Little Milton, Little Johnny Taylor, Koko Taylor — oh man, all them Taylors! I played with a lot of bands,” he says, even as he notes that his reluctance to travel and his fear of flying prevented him from achieving greater fame. He stayed put, keeping the local lifeblood flowing.

The Hodges brothers never quit making gigs with Banks entirely, when time allowed. After Hi Records folded, their time increased, and Howard Grimes became a fixture in Banks’s bands as well. The names have come and gone, from People’s Company, Inc., aka P.C.I. (“or Pie, Cake and Ice Cream,” Banks smiles), to The People of the Blues, to the Blues Busters. In 1986, under the latter name, then-Memphis State University’s High Water Records released the album Busted!, and he’s done others since, including 2003’s Why Don’t You Do Right?, not to mention cameos on albums by the likes of guitar whiz Robert Allen Parker.

Locally, his talents have been celebrated, including a Beale Street Entertainer of the Year award in 2004, a W.C. Handy Award in 2009, and a Beale Street Brass Note in 2013. The note sits close to the club Earl the Pearl has played regularly since 1989, the Blues City Café, where he can be heard most Tuesdays and many weekends with a rotating group (including this writer from time to time), once again dubbed The People of the Blues.

Back home, Banks is surrounded with photographs from each chapter of his life, his living room a veritable blues museum. At 85, making ends meet is not easy, but Banks knows what he’s accomplished and takes pride in it — pride cut with his trademark down-home modesty and wit.

“I wrote a song called ‘Old Age is Hell,’ and that’s a true song, you know,” he says. “Old age is hell, but it’s good to be old. All the stuff I’ve done in my days that I can remember, I have asked the Lord to forgive me for. I pray every night, and in the morning when I get up, I tell the Lord, ‘Thank You.’”