Walkin’ in Memphis with Marc and Muriel

When “Muriel played piano every Friday at
The Hollywood...” and how it forever changed one artist’s life

by Hank Burdine

Webster’s defines graciousness as being marked by tact and delicacy, kindness and courtesy, charm, good taste and generosity of spirit. Muriel Wilkins was all of the above and more. She was a woman of the Lord, never missing an opportunity to grace the open doors of her beloved Pettis Memorial Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Helena, Arkansas. Mabel Pettis, whose father-in-law founded the church, recalls Muriel as the most Christian woman she has ever known. Muriel and Mabel met in high school and were best friends for life.
| Muriel was born into a preacher’s family in Forrest City, Arkansas, in December of 1923. She began playing the piano and singing in Sunday School when she was three years old. She continued to practice that never-ending love of hers for 64 more years.
|Educated in the Forrest City public schools, Muriel received her teacher’s degree from AM&N College in Pine Bluff and her master’s degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She taught elementary school in Helena for 33 years, retiring in 1986. Muriel considered her musical ability a gift from God and played free of charge for her church, weddings, funerals and many other community affairs. Friends recall how Muriel would pull children aside and scold them if she thought they were not attaining their full potential. “You must be ALL that you can be” was a quote I have heard several times from her friends and from Muriel herself.
In 1973, Bob Hall bought the Selden family plantation commissary/antique store/beer hall, circa 1856, and opened up the original Hollywood California. The wonderful old cypress building stood right across the railroad tracks from old Highway 61 in Hollywood, Mississippi, six miles north of Tunica. A musician and crooner himself, Bob had met a sweet black lady who was playing piano and singing at the Holiday Inn across the Mississippi River in Helena. Once his place was established, he asked her if she would consider coming over and playing at his dinner club. Thus began a relationship that would grow into a devoted friendship of almost 20 years. Bob’s spiritual life was enhanced by Muriel’s presence and he sang many times in her church in Helena as an invited guest. “She was like a sister to me and she was unshakable in her faith,” Bob says. Did Hall ever record Muriel during the many times she played at the Hollywood? “No, I thought it would never end.”
The original Hollywood Café burned in 1983. The Owen family bought the rights to it from Bob “Hollywood” Hall for one dollar and moved it six miles up old Highway 61 to Robinsonville. The new Hollywood Café opened up in another antiquated commissary building. The famous dill pickles were again being fried and the catfish and steaks were heaped on the platters as Muriel continued her piano playing and singing. People resumed their trek from miles around just to hear her and to enjoy the laid back atmosphere of the dinner club. (Bob Hall said that on numerous occasions when Muriel was ready to go home and the patrons wanted her to stay a little longer, he would whisper for one of them to ask her to play a spiritual song. Several hours later Bob would have to tell Muriel that it was indeed time to go home!)
Muriel’s son, Bobby Martin, recalls his mother being very stern in her discipline, but always extremely loving and jovial. Bobby would drive her when she went to play at parties and remembered her voracious appetite as she would lean back in the car and eat the heaped plates of food given to her for the ride home by the party givers. “Why, there’s enough chicken bones up and down Highway 61 to fill a basketball court!” Bobby says, while recalling their many travels together.
Anthony Herrera, aka James Stenbeck of the soap opera “As the World Turns,” came to the Delta to produce and direct a blues documentary. He was introduced to Muriel one evening as she played and sang at a party in Greenville. “When I heard Muriel play, I realized she had a wonderful gift of love and inspiration. Her voice and music inspired me to make the film. That moment was the beginning of ‘Mississippi Delta Blues.’” Anthony, from Wiggins, Mississippi, and Ole Miss educated, won five prestigious awards for the documentary including the CINE Golden Eagle Award. Muriel sings the background music to the tune of “Darkness on the Delta.”
“When it’s darkness on the Delta, that’s the time my heart is light...
When it’s darkness on the Delta, let me linger in the shelter of the night...”
As far as one can tell, that is the only time Muriel was ever recorded for the public.
I first met Muriel at the old Hollywood Cafe in the mid-‘70s. She was one of the most awe-inspiring and wonderful ladies I had ever been around. We became very close friends and she would often play New Year’s Eve parties at my mother’s house and for No Name Dinner Club parties. A certain charisma and aura surrounded her as she sang old-time big band favorites, blues numbers and gospel songs. She seemed to sing from the depths of her soul with a beautiful and husky voice that somehow enveloped you. She always wanted to know about you. She would answer brief questions about herself, but it was you that she wanted to talk about. And it was that personality trait that enamored her to a young fledgling singer/songwriter in 1986.
Marc Cohn, originally from Cleveland, Ohio, and living in New York City, had been going through a stage of writer’s block and was yet to be a recorded songwriter and singer. He had been invited by Dr. Frank Witherspoon, a long time friend of Muriel’s, to come visit him in Memphis and then go down to Robinsonville to meet a sweet lady that played piano and sang. That lady would forever change Marc’s life. And because of that meeting, Muriel would become known all over the world.
Marc Cohn remembers having to sit close to Muriel as she played that night in 1986 because she was unaccompanied by any amplification. During a break they began talking and she asked him to tell her about himself. He explained his life story and that his mother had died at an early age and how he seemed to be in a rut with regards to his writing. During her next set, she asked him if he would join her on stage. Muriel sang “Amazing Grace” a cappella and asked him if he would do the same. Then she asked him to sing some songs with her, whispering in his ear the lyrics that he did not know. Marc felt as if he had been transported to a place in his heart where he had never been and with a person that knew more about him than he did himself at that particular time. Marc recalls that before leaving around two a.m., Muriel “whispered things to me about my mother. Then she told me it was time for me to move on.”
Returning home to New York, Marc began writing the songs he had always heard in his head. He invited Muriel to come north and play at his wedding and she readily obliged. Later, Marc returned to the Hollywood in Robinsonville to play some of the songs he had written. One of the songs was a beautiful story about feeling in awe as he was “walking in Memphis, with my feet 10 feet off of Beale” and standing at the foot of W. C. Handy’s statue. And when he toured Graceland, he felt as if he were walking “with the ghost of Elvis.” But is was when he traveled south on old Highway 61 and into the arms of a gospel singer that they “asked me if I would do a little number, and I played with all my might.” Muriel was tickled that he would write about her and later that same evening, she asked Marc if he would “play that little song you wrote about me one more time.”
It was not long after that second visit that Marc’s first CD came out to great acclaim. But Muriel had fallen and torn her ankle apart. She had also become sick while attending a church meeting in Dallas and had to be hospitalized. Complications from ankle surgery and ongoing health problems set in and on October 6, 1990, she was dead at the age of 67. Several months after she died, Muriel became immortalized when Marc Cohn was the 1991 Grammy winner for Best New Artist. He had written a song about her and called it “Walking in Memphis.” That song was the title track on his first production, one of many to follow. As Marc walked across the stage, his Grammy award in hand, he looked up towards heaven and blew a kiss. I think I know who was on the receiving end.
Muriel had lived a life of deep and devoted Christian faith. Her church door never opened that she was not sitting at the piano. The God-loving spirituality that exuded from her was ever present. Over the years, many people have been asked the proverbial question by Muriel, “Child, are you a Christian?” But no one has ever given as world-renowned an answer as Marc Cohn did that night in Robinsonville, Mississippi, when he replied, “Ma’am, I am tonight!”