Huey Memphis

Huey Memphis

Huey Memphis possessed a certain on-stage composure, a good-natured nonchalance that intrigued audiences. “Subtle, muted, understated, darkly passionate yet almost indifferent. A weird delight to behold, a master of guitar with a raspy voice, like gravel infused with a rare sparkle. There is very little else like the whistling and fingerstyle guitar of Huey Memphis.” — The Texas Music Gazette, 8 June 1976.

He was tall, dark, swarthy and angular; one of those performers you like to study, alien almost. He always wore shades, regardless of the venue, light or time of day. The ebony reflectivity of those sunglasses deepened his mystery; emotionally opaque, he seemed a blank slate channeling something from somewhere else when he sang, and even more so when he whistled.

Memphis’s 1974 album, A Sirius Business (an astronomical pun on “serious”), sold twenty-seven thousand copies and won him a loyal, if small, following. He played a beaten-up 1952 Martin acoustic in a shifting array of altered tunings that lent his orchestrations an exotic unpredictability. The right-hand instrument was played south-paw, its unique aftermarket cutaway glaring at the wrong end. It was as if nobody had ever told him how to hold a guitar. He strung it oddly too, thick and thin wires interleaved rather than ordered by gauge. He played finger-style, thumbnail grown long for clarity, and used the soundbox as kick, snare or rimshot whenever the mood took him.

Few of his songs were in 4/4—something most listeners noticed only when they tried clapping along. He didn’t sound much like anybody else I could name. Often he added slide, and on occasion he whistled in unison with the high-register notes, hitting them dead on.

Beyond the six-string virtuosity, Memphis’s real gift lay in his prodigious whistling. It was more than gimmickry. On most tracks he improvised solos that floated above his intricate guitar parts like whale song: notes glissandoing, slippery, smooth, buttery—what one enraptured critic christened “sonic air.” With permission Huey wrote a piece of the same title; it became his biggest hit, peaking at 23 on the Country Charts in 1978.

“Nothing moves through space and time quite like sonic air…”

In May 1979, during a set at the Green Line Club in downtown Austin, he collapsed and died, folding over the mic stand, fragile as wet paper. Presumed heart attack, age 51. The cigarette wedged between his tuners kept smoking for a minute or two longer. It was a sad thing to see, sure enough.

He never got the breaks he deserved. Like most of the talented many, he missed the right place at the right time and lacked the instinct to schmooze agents or press.

Yet the record found its way onto the turntable of a young NASA aero-acoustician, Dr Timothy Hirsch. He evangelised Sonic Air to his workmates. They listened, formed the Huey Memphis Appreciation Society—a drinking club—and met after hours at Hirsch’s apartment for beer-soaked listening sessions. Huey would have approved.

Hirsch, intrigued—possessed even—lifted short samples of Memphis’s whistle and ran them through the lab, initially for fun. It was beyond curiosity, it was fevered.

What he found both perplexed and delighted him. Buried in the tones were harmonic structures he had never encountered in human speech, song, or rocket roar. The overtones revealed Fibonacci-like resonances, perfectly choreographed and tightly woven, masked even from the keenest ear. No synthesiser in the lab could duplicate them. Oscilloscopes that normally plotted neat sinusoids now traced luminous spirals, kaleidoscopic phosphenes that bloomed and faded with impossible precision. Hirsch’s jaw stayed slack for weeks.

When his drinking buddies heard, they assumed cabin fever from too many windowless, foam-walled hours. The club drifted away, cautiously dissociating themselves from any potential reputational damage.

Acting on a hunch, Hirsch piped the samples into a wind tunnel, expecting the shriek of high-speed air to bury every trace. To his astonishment the note arrived intact, a lucid foreground amid the roar of white noise. Other samples behaved the same, resistant to decay, slipstreaming and forming its own peloton, as though composed of sonic air itself. Memphis had discovered a new form of sound: incorruptible, indefatigable.

Next Hirsch booked the adjacent vacuum chamber for two solid weeks. According to every textbook the chamber should remain utterly silent, yet the whistle persisted, racing through the airless space unhindered by the lack of medium. Hirsch dismantled the apparatus—flanges, seals, roughing pumps—checking each part twice. Sound should not propagate beyond those walls, yet Hirsch could hear it from outside the glass.

More disturbing was its observed capacity to travel at hypersonic speeds, far beyond the limits of known acoustics. Like light in the double-slit experiment, the sound wave seemed to possess a dual nature—both fixed and fluid—its behaviour shifting not only with the expectations of the listener but with the attenuative nature of its surrounding context. It accelerated or decelerated as if aware of how and where it was being heard. Its odd plurality imbued it with this invulnerable resistance to any kind of degradation or decay.

Layering tone upon tone made things stranger still. Even when a clashing C against C-sharp should have produced beating, the waves disentangled themselves, resolving the dissonance. The whistle seemed alive—as though it had wants of its own. Harmony.

Hirsch buried himself in weeks of speculation. Did the sound hitch rides on gravitational waves? Were photons involved? Should he repeat the tests in darkness? Was some aether involved? Christ, ‘aether’—listen to yourself, Hirsch!

More and more he suspected the answer lay not in the sound but in the breath that created it. Perhaps Huey’s lungs produced a unique substrate—a medium in which sound could be born differently? Sonic air, from the smoke-husked, tobacco lacquered lungs of Huey Memphis.

Hirsch began sleeping in the lab, terrified he had slipped into error…or psychosis. Re-checking gear, swapping microphones, he found no mundane explanation. Eventually his associates were convinced and a dedicated, classified group within the Agency was conceived. Hirsch headed it.

At 16:42 on 28 June 1983, Hampton, Virginia, Jet Noise Lab: Senior Aero-Acoustic Engineer Hirsch transmitted what became the Memphis Signal: three consecutive samples from bar 8 of the Sonic Air solo, beamed into the sky as a classified side-project. Off it went into the cosmos where, presumably, it travels still. Receivers in Houston await its return. The team speculated that it may return to earth in eight to twelve years time. If Hirsch was right, the signal represented a wholly new kind of sonic waveform—both a medium and message—capable of travelling interstellar distances and calibrating its own velocity and amplitude, moving through spacetime as one might flick through a book. If Hirsch and his colleagues were correct, and indeed they could see no alternative, the sound wave showed properties that would suggest temporal aberration; time travel. It could leave its departure point and arrive with a receiver at any given point in time, undamaged.

“You’re saying this, Sonic Air—it goes back and forward in time, Hirsch? This is what we pay you for? Are you goddam crazy?”

“Yes, Sir. I am saying that. Nothing moves through space and time quite like sonic air.”

Memphis was dead and cremated, but his guitar survived and was with his surviving sister, Evelyn. Once she consented to an examination of the instrument, swabs from the strings yielded genetic-like material—neither fully human nor fully intact—“denatured by time, degraded presumably by bronze and phosphor - and unclassifiable.”

Appendix:

West Texas Children’s Hospital, 11 May 1942.

Mstr Hubert Cage, age 14. Found by his mother at 2pm in a field near his home. Admitted unconscious by ambulance.

Regained consciousness two hours later, 4pm approximately. Delirious and dehydrated. Reported he had been playing in the field when he heard music playing, like that of a flute or tin whistle. The child described how the music made him feel dizzy and unable to breathe for a time. His voice was unusually husky. He had developed a nystagmus for which no cause has been found. Oddly he reported being able to whistle. Neurological testing, inconclusive.