At the wrought iron gate of Gist Music Company, I wondered if I had gotten the time wrong.  It was around one o’clock, and the man on the phone had told me he would meet me “after the noon hour.”  He added “Depending on the Good Lord’s wishes.”  One Delta Bluesman told me Morse Gist is “just as important as the musicians like Sonny Boy Williams or Howlin’ Wolf.”  Others describe him more simply as “legendary.”  When he eased his SUV into a tight parking spot on the street, I marveled at the youthfulness of a man pushing ninety.  His white hair was short and spiked like a model or a fifties GI.  He walked easily, with the slight stoop of someone three decades younger.  “Do you play?” he asked me.  He words were curved with the genteel Southern accent that movie stars so habitually butcher.  I told him I didn’t and asked him the same question.  “Only the radio,” he told me, “and not very well.” 

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With a newspaper in one hand, Mr. Gist opened the doors for what could have been the fifteen thousandth time.  Hundreds of musicians have crossed that threshold; thousands of others have left with records that would fill their homes and lives.  People, unsurprisingly, “get a feeling” when they walk through the doors into this temple of American music.  The store still uses the same wooden furnishings of the general merchandise shop that were there when the Gists moved in (in 1953).  Cornet mouthpieces  and saxophone reeds fill small wooden cubes once meant for hardware, candy, or cookies. 

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But it’s not the appearance of the place that makes time cave in on itself.  It’s Gist, who slips between today and, say, a Saturday in 1934, seamlessly.  His office, which sits plum in the middle of the shop, semi-separated from its surroundings by a glass divider that comes nowhere near the thirty-foot ceilings above.  He leaned back in his wooden rolling chair and rested his long legs on a stool like a teenager as he told me “the long version,” going back to the Great Depression, to his family’s Victorian home full of kids, cows, chickens, and traveling hoboes who cleaned their barn for a plate of food.  His father was a low paid constable, and the family needed something else to stay afloat.

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“He heard about this idea of a juke box.  A Wurlitzer.  Do you remember that name, Wurlitzer?”  He turns around and digs in his desk drawer to find a photo.  “I’ve saved a lot of these old pictures, but I don’t know why – posterity I guess.”  And he tells me about the Ford Coupe whose trunk his father modified to transport the five foot machines.  The strong, crisp music of the jukeboxes increased a bar’s business by one hundred percent, he says, and Gist Music Company was born.

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People describe the Helena of old with an almost mythical wonder.  Helena was once one of the Mississippi River’s wealthiest towns and the largest port between Memphis and Vicksburg.  Steamboat traffic boomed, as did the cotton, timber, and trains afterwards, and the town gained a reputation for rowdiness.  The fields, streets, and docks were alive with music.  And Helena, throughout all the booms and busts, became an oasis of song.  Bluesman Ellis CeDell Davis was born in 1926, three years after Mr. Gist. He described a Helena of almost mythical proportions.  “Wasn’t no time,” he said, “Because the joints stayed open all night, all day.   Anything that you wanted to spend some money on or buy, it was there.  All them sawmills was open then; all them joints was open.”

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Gist Music Company was born in those joints – or “cafes,” as Mr. Gist calls them.  And it’s easy to see how closely and immediately Morse Gist’s life was intertwined with the surrounding musical story of Helena.  For a nickel a song, the 78 records spun, and people danced.  The most popular records, worn scratchy by play, often needed replacement.  Morse decided to start selling the used records, so he took to the street with a wind-up record player. 

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Asked which records were most popular, Mr. Gist responded quickly, “B.B. King was one.  Every, every time he came out with a new record we automatically ordered a couple of boxes….Because his record would wear out.”

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Mr. Gist is at ease talking about music’s commercial qualities.  He told me that in the early fifties, when the growing jukebox business had been moved to spot where we sat, he decided to sell music supplies in the vacant storefront of the building.  He wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Commerce to ask them for any help in opening a music store.  They sent a response that he keeps somewhere in his desk drawer. If you are not musically talented and able to play an instrument yourself, it would be a great mistake to open a music store.  “So I didn’t follow that advice,” he laughs. 

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When I asked him about his most memorable customer, he described the experience as “a commercial opportunity that I amuse myself with.” Elvis Presley walked through the glass doors, young and fresh, in the early days of the store.  “He was a nice kid.  He was very polite.  Truly polite.  And I guess he may have been…in his teens or early twenties, whatever that era was.”

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I slowly realized that not ten feet from where we sat, Elvis Presley walked.  Tingles rose up my spine.   “He had a glossy and signed it, and it’s up there now,” Mr. Gist says casually.  On the wall beyond his glass office, I see Elvis’ smiling face against a pink backdrop.  “But then all at once, people started admiring that thing.  And I found that there was a certain value to it.”  He told me he regrets not having the nice, young kid sign every single guitar in his shop, and he smiles.

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The front door opened, and a double chime rung out.  Mr. Gist walked to the front and greeted a man wearing fit-over sunglasses, “Well, come on back, C.W.”  The man joined us without removing his sunglasses.  C.W. and The Band drummer, Levon Helm, grew up together and played regularly when Levon came home to Phillips County.  Shortly after, the door chimed again, and a Helena police officer, Charles Garrison, joined us, “to soak up a little of the cool air,” and I realized I was sitting in a sort of papal audience chamber, chairs provided by RCA Victor.  They discussed a friend who was sick.  Mr. Gist picked up his telephone to call the family, and C.W. used the opportunity to tout the famous customers and feats of the business, most notably, he says, the first ever Fifty-four Telecaster sold in this country.  The telecaster changed popular music by giving the guitar enough pickup to rise above the other instruments of a band.  It was the birth of rock. 

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“Mr. Gist sold it to Thurlow Brown.  Good guitar player,” C.W. told me, in gruff old twang.

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“Now Thurlow died, didn’t he?” Mr. Gist said.

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“He died back in seventy.”

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Brown, I later learned, was Levon Helm’s mentor and inspiration.  The feral/bohemian cotton farmer from nearby Elaine, who had a pet monkey as well as a South American Python, was, in Helm’s words, “the best electric-guitar player we had, an incredible musician.”

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Helm also talked about other influences.  He wrote in his autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire, “When I was fourteen, my daddy took me back to Mr. Gist’s music store in Helena to get a real guitar.  It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and the streets were packed with people from the farms, migrants, and local people…Daddy and I went up to the counter, greeted Mr. Gist, and I heard J.D. say, ‘Morse, we’d like to see the Martin guitar there for my boy Lavon.”

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The story of Gist Music Company has all of the celebrity and lore you would expect from a music shop with an eighty-year history in the Arkansas Delta.  But as Mr. Gist talked, the great bluesmen, Robert Lockwood, Sonny Boy Williamson, even Elvis, fell back into supporting roles behind an even richer story of a family, its shop, and the ever-changing town of Helena.  Tacked up on his walls, next to yellowing type-written paper and black and white photos of musicians, family photos are everywhere, in bright color.  “Now it’s served its purpose,” he says of the business, “It’s carried all my kids, my family through.  It was a highly profitable enterprise at one time, see?”

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Gist Music sits right in the middle of Cherry Street, Helena’s downtown commercial corridor.  As you walk the sidewalk away from the shop, there are signs of the same crumbling mortar and darkened storefronts that plague many of industrial America’s main street communities.  On one side of Gist’s store are the dusty display windows of an old department store, its walkway flaked with the loose tiles of “J.C. Penney and Company.”  On the other side, however, is a music hall, its piano covered with burlap.  The town has declined with the same pomp that it was born into, still tinged with the familiar flatted notes of the blues.

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He sold the juke box business when the crack epidemic overtook urban America, including Helena.  He could handle drunk people during repair jobs in the middle of the night, he told me, but dope did something different.  It turned people violent.

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He tells me that his family wonders what to do with the store, now that the internet and big box stores have overtaken his business.  There hasn’t been a consensus.  Someone jokingly suggested sealing the front and back of the building with bricks and turning it into a time capsule. 

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“The people who have been gone for forty years, they come back and they remember their childhood when they used to buy records.”  He adds, “There’s a certain sense that stimulates memories.”

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Sean “Bad Apple” is a Clarksdale musician who felt that “certain sense,” when he walked through the doors of the shop for the first time.  “I happened to look and thought I saw a light on in Gist Music, and I said Man it’s my lucky day.”  He had been on his way to a meeting with some local businessmen but couldn’t resist the chance to meet a hero. “I left all the folks in the meeting waiting about forty five minutes while I talked to Mr. Gist,” he says, with no remorse.  The meeting was to plan the opening of Apple’s new blues club, which, many hope, will help revitalize Helena’s ailing downtown.  The club’s future home is a building once owned by Morse Gist.