Nashville is not the only Middle Tennessee town steeped in rich music history. During much of the 1950s and continuing through the 1970s, well-known and in-demand Murfreesboro saxophonist Raymond Summerour was making music history of his own. His style, energetic and soulful, figured into the sound of such jazz and R&B greats as Bobby Byrd, Nobel ‘Thin Man’ Watts, Little Willie John and Roscoe Shelton.

With many of his contemporaries having already passed, Summerour decided he wasn’t ready to close up his sax case just yet.

“I just felt like I had a story to tell,” he said, sitting in the music room of his Murfreesboro home, lounging in jeans and a brown and beige striped shirt. He has the sly smile of a man who might be keeping a secret and possesses a raucous laugh

Summerour’s story began in the northeast Georgia town of Gainesville, where at 14 years old he played the trumpet in the Fair Street School marching band. But he said his horn was too hard to blow. One evening after band practice, he heard his band director playing the sax and, he recalls, “My eyes got as big as saucers! I said, ‘That’s what I want.’”

He spent that whole summer working odd jobs around the neighborhood to save up enough money to buy his first sax. He soon joined a jazz band at his school that played its first gig for .88 cents per member.

Summerour moved to Murfreesboro in 1960 at the age of 19, following another musician named Sonny Boy Williams who came to Tennessee to record in Fayetteville, Tennessee. Together they formed a band named “The Dukes” and regularly played at the Eldorado Club, a Middle Tennessee jazz spot.

They played with artists like Earl Gaines, Gene Allison and William Bell, and many of the Nashville greats. “There was a guy named Elmo Gaines,” Summerour said. “He was a music promoter. He used to bring all these guys in and our band would play behind them. That’s how I got to play with all these people.”

Then there was Clifford Curry, from Knoxville.

“I played sax on two numbers on his CD, Shagadelic,” he said. One was ‘Shag Beach Party’ . . . back then [in the 1960s] they was all doing the Shag dance. Then the next one was ‘Doing the Best I Can.’”

During his 53-year career, Summerour has played with many established stars.

In 1960, legendary blues artist Bo Diddley was scheduled to appear at Club 51 in Columbus, Ohio on Labor Day, and Summerour’s band happened to have played there the night before. Diddley, still in town, walked in the club and wanted to play with them. Laughing, Allen said that when he tells that story he always notes that “Bo Diddley came in and played with us.”

Another guy, Bobby Byrd, used to play piano for rhythm and blues great James Brown but the two parted ways right after Brown wrote “Please, Please, Please.” Byrd traveled to Gainesville, and met up with them at a night spot called Martar’s.

“The last time I saw Byrd,” he recalled, “James Brown was playing in Buford, Ga., at the Elks Club in 1957. We were standing by the stage watching and Brown goes, ‘There’s one of my old band members from ‘The [Famous] Flames,’ and he called him up to sing.”

Summerour has performed alongside many great musical artists over his career, Bo Diddley, Clifford Curry and Jimi Hendrix, just to name a few.

Then there was the time he shared the stage with Jimi. Before Woodstock, there was Murfreesboro.“Jimi Hendrix played with us at the Eldorado Club in 1964,” said Summerour. “He was stationed at that Army base up in Ft. Campbell and he’d come down when he wanted to play music. We were playing one night and he walks in and we were like, ‘Who is that guy?’ Now this was before he made the top. I’ll never forget it. I was 24 years old and I’m standing there and here he comes walking in carrying his guitar. We were all young then and anyone who came in with a guitar, saxophone, whatever it was, we challenged ’em!” he said with a gleam in his eye.

“We were ready for him.

“So Jimi asked, ‘Can I sit in?’ and he wants to come on stage,” Summerour said. I looked at our guitar player, Horace, and told him, ‘You’re gonna get cut.’ We were all young and crazy then,” he said with a chuckle. Hendrix started playing and that was it. “He was bad then, even before he became world famous.”
Poor Horace, Summerour said, put his guitar down and sat behind the stage shaking his head because he knew he’d been outdone.

Summerour made it a habit to always carry his horn around with him, just in case. One night in 1974, Archie Bell and the Drells were playing the Maple Valley Country Club in Gainesville, Ga., so he asked if he could sit in with them and Archie told him, ‘Yeah, come on up.’”

Years later, in 2003, after Bell had gone solo, they teamed up again to play the Broadway Club on Nolensville Road in Nashville.

Summerour’s years of playing have earned him recognition in recent years. In 2013, he was honored by Jimmy Church, a longtime jazz promoter, and the Tennessee Rhythm and Blues Society, and he received the Blues Lover Award in 2011 from Marion James and the New Era Rhythm and Blues Society in Nashville.

Summerour and his wife, Kathleen, still live in Murfreesboro. He still plays occasionally; his last appearance was at the Wilson County Fair in August. One thing he still wants to do is to play the local Main Street JazzFest.

“I love entertaining people,” Summerour said. “I love to play and I want people to enjoy it.”