Official shout-out for Lowcountry pioneer

A quiet but significant event took place March 19 at the State Capitol.

State Rep. Wendell Gilliard presented to Charleston musician Anthony McKnight a South Carolina House of Representatives resolution honoring McKnight's late cousin, James Jamerson, an American music innovator.

The event went largely unnoticed, but it was a landmark one in the cultural history of the Palmetto State.

Jamerson, who lived from 1936 to 1983, was a jazz musician born on Edisto Island and grew up in the city of Charleston. Before he finished high school he moved to Detroit, Mich., to join his mother who had gone there seeking a better life.

Like many other jazz players, Jamerson, a bassist, took to playing pop music to earn a living and he ended up a charter member of the Funk Brothers, the legendary house band for Motown Records, the sound of young America, as it called itself, during the 1960s and 1970s. That period was its prolific heyday.

He took the rhythm and aural textures of the Lowcountry to Detroit and made major contributions to one of the greatest phases in the evolution of American music.

Jamerson played on virtually all of the hits by acts such as the Supremes, Temptations, Four Tops, Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Martha and the Vandellas. He played on more No. 1 records than the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Beach Boys combined.

Jamerson's role model was the iconic jazz bassist Ray Brown.

Jamerson is considered to be the father of modern bass playing by many pop bassists, including Paul McCartney and Phil Chen. Jamerson was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, the first sideman, nonbandleader, to be so honored.

Shortly after the ceremony, Jamerson's son, James Jr., visited Anthony and other family members here in Charleston. I went over to a relative's house on Rutledge Avenue to hang out with them and to gather some information for a Post and Courier story I was planning.

Jamerson's achievement was spectacular and hardly anyone here in his hometown knew about it.

Like other jazz musicians had done, he took a Carolina aesthetic with him to his eventual destination.

His art and craft were fully formed here. This is not a case of a small town claiming a giant who was born there and then left as an infant with his family.

The opening scene of "Standing in the Shadows of Motown," a Grammy-winning film produced by Jamerson's biographer, Allan Slutsky, has a youthful Jamerson kneeling on the ground playing a makeshift bass that comprised a stick and rubber band. It was filmed in the place where Jamerson learned music.

As a child on Edisto, Jamerson, according to later interviews, said he "wanted to make the ants dance."

As an adult, he made millions of people dance to his intricate, throbbing bass lines.

He was also a first-call bassist for jazz and blues Detroit, a mid-20th century jazz cradle. Jamerson was the heart of the Motown sound, putting a distinctly jazz feel to popular music. Motown recording dates and tours were scheduled around his availability.

Slutsky, also known as Dr. Licks, was so taken with Jamerson's art he titled his seminal 1987 Motown history book, "Standing in the Shadows of Motown: The Life and Music of Legendary Bassist James Jamerson."

The book, the basis for the movie, went on to win the Rolling Stone/BMI Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award in 1989.

Slutsky has worked diligently to reveal Jamerson's work to the world. He has told me over the years in conversations that he thinks no one is more important than Jamerson to the success of Motown.

Anthony has been working just as hard here in Charleston. I've known his musical family all my life. He and I reconnected in the late 1980s when he began to work in earnest to get Jamerson known in his hometown.

We finally got the opportunity to make a major, formal push in 2003 when he was the lead consultant when the Charleston Jazz Initiative put on a two-day tribute to Jamerson, "Return to the Source, Remembering Legendary Bassist James Lee Jamerson."

CJI brought in Jamerson's widow, Annie, and his mother, Elizabeth Bacon, from Detroit for the occasion.

To give fans, bassists from around the country, historians, music buffs and lovers of things Charleston an inside look into Jamerson's work, I moderated a discussion in front of a live audience with Anthony and Bob Lee on the first day of the tribute at the Avery Research Center.

Anthony was not just a relative. He was one of Jamerson's favorites as a child and he used to visit him in Detroit during Motown's glory years, hanging out at recording sessions with the greats and living in Jamerson's home. Lee, a Los Angeles-based bassist, is a world renowned Jamerson scholar.

On the second day, CJI held the Charleston premier of Slutsky's film at the Sottile Theatre. Before the screening, Anthony's singing group, the Black Velvets entertained. Mayor Joe Riley read a proclamation in honor of Jamerson.

Sept. 19 is James Jamerson Day in Charleston.

So, Gilliard's gesture from the Statehouse last month is another major step toward us Sandlappers publicly respecting and acknowledging the work of a native son. It's been long, long overdue.

Meanwhile, Anthony continues his 20-year quest as he works to get Jamerson into the South Carolina Hall of Fame and to get a monument to him built and installed in Charleston.

The next time you hear the soulful bass introduction to "My Girl," the thunder-and-lightening licks to Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On" or the rollicking romp of Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," President Barack Obama's campaign theme song, remember Jamerson and the pulse of the Lowcountry.

Jack McCray, author of "Charleston Jazz," can be contacted at jackjmccray@aol.com.