chapter two
Rhythm and Blues show ad, early 1950s.
(The Michael Barson Collection)
Musicians called it the Stroll. Every decent-sized town with a black presence had one: the strip where the nightclubs were, where the barbershops were, where the barbecue and chicken-and-waffle joints were. The “colored” movie theater was on the Stroll, along with doctors, dentists, insurance companies, and morticians who catered to the black community. Off to the side stood the churches. Occasionally, fraternal organizations like the black Elks would have a hall there that they rented out. The Stroll was the main street of the black community, and its heartbeat. Some were bigger than others, and some, like 125th Street in New York, Beale Street in Memphis, and Central Avenue in Los Angeles, were legendary and spoken of in terms white people reserved for Fifth Avenue and the Champs-Elysées. And while World War II had made things difficult for the black entertainment business, it certainly didn’t shut it down. The biggest stars paid the bills by touring as much as they could (and in weird places, too; there’s a famous recording of the Duke Ellington orchestra playing in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1941 to what must have been an all-white crowd), but many smaller bands, often with a male and a female vocalist and a couple of instrumental soloists, stayed within a given geographic area, their touring limited by rationing. Their repertoire was broad: pop tunes mixed with blues and Louis Jordan–style novelties.
The blues these groups played tended to be very smooth and sophisticated, quite unlike the stuff being played by Chicago’s Bluebird crowd of transplanted rural Southerners. One model for this new music was provided by the Nat King Cole Trio, piano, guitar, and bass. Cole began by recording straightforward jazz, and although he didn’t like the way his voice sounded, he was outvoted by his band (and, later, audiences) and started recording vocals. This unit proved very popular and would have risen faster if the war and the recording ban hadn’t interfered, but their sound made a nice contrast from brassy, horn-led combos. Cole’s turf was Hollywood, but his peers played the Stroll, Central Avenue.
Central Avenue had been legendary almost from the start, when black railroad workers from Texas settled there in the early twentieth century, and by 1920, Central Avenue pretty much was black Los Angeles. Traversing its length, however, could hardly be called a stroll: just along Central, it was a thirty-block stretch, and of course the residential part went onto the side streets. But there were some legendary structures on Central: the Dunbar Hotel, a luxurious black-owned place much frequented by well-heeled black people and with a famous nightclub, the Apex, next door. The club later changed its name to the Club Alabam, and it became Los Angeles’s answer to New York’s Cotton Club, only without the slumming white folks. At Twelfth and Central stood Spikes Brothers Music, a venerable store selling instruments and sheet music—and later, records—to the community, and just down a couple of blocks was the black musicians union. At the corner of Vernon and Central was Ivie Anderson’s Chicken Shack, run by the woman who had been Duke Ellington’s greatest vocalist, and a little farther down was Bronze Recording Studios, with another Ellington connection: one of its investors was Herb Jeffries, once an Ellington vocalist and now a star in black cinema, Westerns a specialty, earning him the nickname “the Bronze Buckaroo.”
Much farther down Central, though, things changed. This is where the later arrivals settled, in the area called Watts. The entertainment they sought wasn’t the slick Nat Cole variety; it was blues. When Franklin D. Roosevelt integrated the war industries, black people with shipbuilding, welding, and other useful skills left Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas and headed straight to California, and a whole lot of them settled around Central or in Watts. The former Japanese neighborhood downtown, too, had been emptied, its residents sent to internment camps and their property seized, and the neighborhood was transformed as black people moved in. The new arrivals did what they could to integrate with their sophisticated neighbors, but a certain amount of friction remained. It was evident in the clubs. Bebop and what was to be known as rhythm and blues hit Central more or less simultaneously: Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s ill-fated 1945 booking at Billy Berg’s in Hollywood may have been a total bust financially, but one reason the club didn’t make money was that young local guys like Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Charles Mingus, and others sat at the bar, nursing Coca-Colas and hearing the music of the future. Meanwhile, three Oklahomans, Jimmy and Joe Liggins and Roy Milton, had come to town and assembled three small bands playing less harmonically sophisticated music largely based on blues forms and singing catchy tunes for dancing. Pee Wee Crayton, a guitarist from Texas, settled in, assembling a band that included another Texan, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman. A former sewing-machine salesman, Big Jay McNeely, was purveying a honking, primitive style with his tenor sax and getting a following. And black Los Angeles, flush with wartime wages, made it all thrive.
Chicago, too, was a magnet for black war workers, and they mostly came from Mississippi and Tennessee, thanks to the Illinois Central Railroad, which would take them from Memphis straight to Chicago. Many of these workers were less skilled than the ones in Los Angeles, increasingly displaced from tenant farming jobs by a new cotton-picking machine that made hand labor all but obsolete. But you didn’t need much skill to work in a steel plant or a slaughterhouse, and rural Southern black people had been migrating north for some time, so having relatives in town was a distinct possibility. That’s what happened to McKinley Morganfield, who’d grown up on Stovall’s Plantation, the same plantation that Charley Patton and Son House had lived on, where he’d worked his way up from agricultural laborer to truck and tractor driver, as well as one of the plantation’s entertainers. One day in 1941, two men documenting black folk music for the Library of Congress—Alan Lomax, from Washington, D.C., and black folklorist John Work from Memphis—came by with a huge recording device and recorded three songs with Morganfield. When Lomax got back to Washington, he compiled the best of the recordings from the trip into a five-disc “album.” The only performer to get a whole disc to himself was Morganfield, and Lomax sent him a copy. Morganfield, upon receiving it, heard himself for the first time. He promptly put on his best suit, grabbed the record, and went to the nearest photo studio to have his picture taken holding it. Lomax and Work came back the next summer and recorded more. By the summer after that, Morganfield had joined the exodus north. His mother had a relative he could stay with until he found his own place.
As the war wound down, shellac supplies were still depleted, although replacement plastics had been developed for wartime use. Nobody was buying records because there were no records to buy. And then … then there was one. The story that was circulated at the time was that at a war bonds rally in 1944, a little black soldier visiting from Nashville had asked to play a tune, and he was so well received that someone made a record of it with him. “I Wonder” was a perfect song for wartime: the singer wonders if his lover, so far away, has been faithful, a situation loads of GIs faced. But the truth is more prosaic: Private Cecil Gant had wandered into Bronze Recording Studios and asked to make a record. The man in charge, Leroy Hurte, didn’t tell him that there wasn’t any shellac to press one on, but he listened to the songs Gant was playing and liked one of them. “I figured that one would sell,” Hurte said later. He had some copies pressed up—heaven knows where he got the shellac—and distributed them locally. The song took off. But one night Hurte heard a radio DJ announce the record as “a Gilt-Edge recording.” Gilt-Edge was another tiny label, but owned by a white guy with good connections. Gant had walked into his company and asked if he could re-record his song for them, and of course, with the record already selling, the guy, Richard Nelson, said yes. In the ensuing mess, each label disputed the other’s copyright, and a judge found for Nelson. Hurte actually bought a record press and pressed more Bronze copies of the song and distributed it to Pullman porters to sell on the trains they worked on (a time-honored distribution system not only for records but for the Negro press) and by hand to retailers on the Stroll, and Nelson activated a network of distributors nationwide and got radio airplay across the country. As for Gant, he made a few more records for Gilt-Edge, which sold respectably, and then vanished for three years. He shows up again on the Nashville label Bullet in 1948 and died in 1951 of pneumonia.
Hurte wasn’t finished, though. Word on Central was that there was a combo that had a song that they played for what seemed like hours and that just kept people dancing and dancing. This was worth looking into, and Hurte eventually got Joe Liggins, whose band it was, to come down to the Bronze studio and record it. “The Honeydripper” was recorded in two parts, and slapped on either side of a record, but for some reason, Hurte didn’t put it out right away. Disgusted, Liggins dragged Leon René, another black entrepreneur, down to the club and had the band do one of their deluxe versions of the tune. René witnessed the frenzy and rushed the band after the set and told them he’d record them for his label, Exclusive. This came out in the summer of 1945 and took straight off. Although Hurte eventually raised the money to put out his recording of it, the Exclusive version is better recorded and better played. The blunder almost cost Hurte his business, and to make up for it, he offered the service of his record press to three Jewish guys who’d appeared on Central. Jules, Joe, and Saul Bihari were Hungarians from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who got into the record business slowly. Jules started working for a record distributor and jukebox firm in Little Tokyo in 1942, which meant instant familiarity with what was going on on Central. His biggest problem was a lack of material to stock the jukeboxes with: record companies weren’t putting out enough blues and jazz to keep them fresh. His brother Joe suggested that they start making them themselves. There was money in it, as “I Wonder” was proving every day.
Jules agreed enthusiastically. During his rounds, he’d heard a young woman playing some light classics in a music store. Hadda Hopgood was well educated, middle class, light skinned, and tremendously talented. Jules fell in love on the spot and asked her if she could play a boogie. Intrigued, Hadda improvised one, and Jules asked her if she’d ever thought of making a record. Would she like to? Well, why not? She was intrigued by this ambitious young man, and thus started a love affair and an important record label. Re-christened Hadda Brooks, she rehearsed a couple of tunes that she called “Swingin’ the Boogie” and “Bluesin’ the Boogie” and Jules submitted the tapes to Hurte to master and press demo copies. When they had the performance and the sound right, the brothers incorporated as Modern Music Co. at 111 South San Pedro and pressed up Modern Music 101. They had to go elsewhere to get the record pressed, though; Hurte was still hand-pressing copies of “I Wonder” on his single press. From this single record, a mighty independent label was to grow.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, another couple of ambitious Jewish brothers were also looking at the black music being made in their neighborhood. Lejzor and Fiszel Czyz were the sons of a Polish immigrant who’d opened a successful liquor store in Chicago. As soon as the boys could, they started running jazz clubs and changed their names to Leonard and Philip Chess. By the mid-1940s, they’d opened a highly successful club, the Macomba Lounge, and observed that the audiences loved some of the talent they were presenting, but the performers were stuck because they had no way to publicize themselves. In 1947, Leonard invested in a tiny record label called Aristocrat Records, and soon he and Phil had taken it over. Their first records (after the 1947 recording ban was lifted) were by unknowns: the Five Blazers were on Aristocrat 201, and Clarence Samuels, Jump Jackson, Andrew Tibbs, and Tom Archia (a regular performer at the Macomba) also made records. But, although they didn’t know it, the Chess brothers were waiting for McKinley Morganfield.
* * *
He’d been lucky: a friend from Stovall’s, Dan Jones Sr., who used his truck to clear apartments for landlords, hired the young man to help him. Not only did they get the pick of appliances and other stuff people had left behind, they also got early word of vacancies, and before long, Morganfield had a nice large apartment for twelve dollars a month. A place to live was one thing, but work in his chosen field was another. By this time, he was calling himself Muddy Waters, a name that evoked the Deep South as much as his slide guitar playing did. He was also playing an electric guitar, a nice Gretsch (an earlier guitar, which gave him problems all the time, had been stolen at a club), and holding down a regular gig with some friends. Finally, he had a chance to record, with none other than J. Mayo “Ink” Williams running the session. “Mean Red Spider” was the B side of “Let Me Be Your Coal Man” by James “Sweet Lucy” Carter and His Orchestra, and Muddy is buried underneath clarinets and saxophones: this was very much the old-time Chicago sound. But on that session, he met someone who introduced him to Leroy “Baby Face” Foster, who played guitar and drums. Muddy was already working with Jimmy Rogers, a hot young guitarist who doubled on harmonica, and once this group had solidified, they started packing the clubs. On September 27, 1946, they went into the studio with Lester Melrose, the man who’d forged the Bluebird sound, and recorded eight sides for Columbia, three featuring Muddy, the rest in combination with a couple of other vocalists. The tracks by pianist Jimmy Clark came out, but Muddy’s remained unreleased for years.
The third time was the charm. By this time, the Muddy Waters–Jimmy Rogers–Baby Face Foster band had added another artist: Marion Walter Jacobs, whom Rogers knew from Mississippi as “a little squirrel-faced kid” who played harmonica. After being blasted out of bed one morning by the sound of a harmonica player performing at the Maxwell Street Market near his house, Rogers headed down there to find the kid, now an adult, playing like crazy, and took him over to meet Muddy. In no time, the band found a home at the Club Zanzibar, at Ashland and Thirteenth, just around the corner from Muddy’s home, where they started playing blues with a power and authority that was brand new. Some of it was the volume from those electric instruments (and Little Walter’s using a microphone to amplify his harmonica), and some of it was the down-home sound, including that of the slide guitar that Muddy transformed with electricity, that reminded homesick immigrants of life in the South—but with the electric sound of the city. Nobody else in Chicago was doing this, and other musicians would come to gape. By this time, the Chess brothers had hired a talent scout for Aristocrat, a black man incongruously named Sammy Goldberg, and he heard word of Muddy’s talent. He ran into him at the musicians’ union hall one day, asked to hear him play, and he liked what he heard. Shortly thereafter, the Chess brothers were doing a session, and pianist Sunnyland Slim talked himself into playing on it. During a break, he told the brothers they should hear Muddy Waters, and Goldberg enthusiastically agreed. Leonard Chess ordered Sunnyland to go get him—now. They tracked him down at work (he was by now driving a truck for the Westerngrade Venetian Blinds company) and told him his mother was sick and he should come home. Muddy’s mother was worse than sick—she’d been dead for several years—so Muddy figured something important was happening and arrived at his house to find Sunnyland, who explained there was a session in progress waiting for him to show up. Muddy lost no time grabbing his guitar and driving down to Aristocrat. It took until February 1948 for the sides under Muddy’s name to be released, and they didn’t sell very well, but a synergy had been established that neither the Chess brothers nor Muddy Waters could have envisioned, where one would make the other famous, and vice versa.
The Aristocrat / Muddy Waters story was the story of black urban popular music in the late 1940s in miniature. The question was how to make money with it, and one way to do that was to make records, which sold musicians’ reputations to an audience while the musicians were busy elsewhere performing live. The initial investment, as Leroy Hurte had discovered, was fairly small. If all you wanted to do was reach locals, knowing your Stroll as intimately as Jules Bihari or Leonard Chess did was essential; there were few record stores, but plenty of jukeboxes, as well as beauty shops, newsstands, tobacconists, and radio repair shops willing to feature a rack of 78s. And lord knows there was talent begging to be recorded.
One ambitious musician stopped by a construction site on Union Avenue in Memphis, where a redheaded guy just out of the Army Signal Corps and currently employed by a local radio station as an engineer was working hard on something. The musician, one-man band Joe Hill Louis, asked the young man what he was doing. “I’m going to build a recording studio here once I get the building into shape,” he replied. “Man,” said Joe Hill, “that’s just what we need here in Memphis.” And it was; Joe Hill had a contract with Columbia, and a hometown place to record for them would fit into his—and other artists’—plans nicely. Much recording was still done at radio stations at night, when they were off the air, but a dedicated recording studio would result in much higher quality sound. Some black Memphis talent went all the way to Nashville, where Jim Bulleit’s Bullet Records put out blues records, but, like Chicago, Memphis had developed a stripped-down electric sound that younger fans liked and Bulleit didn’t understand. As soon as Sam Phillips opened the doors to the Memphis Recording Service in 1950, though, people started appearing to show what they had. He immediately hired a woman he knew from his radio station, Marion Keisker, to help him out. Phillips well knew that he stood in a perfect place to attract musicians: black musicians came north from the Mississippi Delta and stayed, as they had for decades, and there was a whole coterie of country musicians who deeply resented Nashville’s grip on the music they wanted to make. Now he was finding out just how lucky he’d been.
Farther north, in Cincinnati, a similarly fortuitous geographic conjunction brought together black and white musicians of all kinds, and King Records had been there since 1943, mostly to record the odd kinds of hillbilly music the area abounded in. King was anchored by a nearly blind, irascible Jewish man named Syd Nathan, whose doctor had told him to get into a less stressful business than the one he was in, resulting in him setting up a record store selling used jukebox records. This led to his setting up King Records to release some of the music he heard on live broadcasts on WLW, including bluegrass (which always sold well in Ohio) and some non-Nashville country artists, but his distributors told him there was a huge demand for “race” records, so he formed the Queen label, which soon merged into King. By all accounts, unlike Phillips, Nathan initially had no idea what he was doing and was very, very lucky.
If there was a single thing that characterized postwar black popular music, it was the size of the group making it. The big band era had died with wartime gasoline and rubber rationing, but a decent arranger could make a big sound out of a saxophone or two, a trumpet, an electric guitar played softly, and a piano, bass, and drums. If one of the instrumentalists also sang, that was a bonus. Jump blues they called some of the more sophisticated music that was drawing people to the clubs and record stores. It was pretty diverse stuff. Johnny Moore was a guitarist who worked with bass and drums and usually had a blues-singing pianist with him: at first Ivory Joe Hunter, but most famously a thin six-footer from Texas City, Texas, named Charles Brown, whose smooth voice fit in well with Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers. Their 1946 hit “Driftin’ Blues” was a languid, silken lament, and “Merry Christmas, Baby” the next year was an even bigger smash. (It was re-recorded several times, but the original was on Exclusive.) It’s said that throughout the 1950s, if a black household had two singles, that was one of them, and it is further claimed that it was the bestselling record by a black artist until Michael Jackson’s heyday. By the time it came out, Johnny Moore had been joined by his guitarist brother, Oscar, who’d been with the Nat King Cole Trio. On the other end of jump blues’ spectrum was Wynonie Harris. Subtlety was quite beyond him, both musically and lyrically, and once he’d moved to King Records in 1948, various songwriters fed him risqué lyrics aplenty: he was the blues shouter par excellence. And in the middle were countless others: Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Joe Turner (who’d arguably started this whole genre in the ’30s), Roy Brown, New Orleans based and Wynonie Harris’s closest competitor; Ivory Joe Hunter, who had a touch of country music in his compositions; Roy Milton, one of the rulers of Central Avenue, his band made even more powerful by the piano and vocals of Camille Howard; Jimmy Liggins, and his brother, Joe, two other bandleaders vying for supremacy on LA’s Stroll; and Bull Moose Jackson, Floyd Dixon, Wynona Carr, Amos Milburn, and Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson.
Country music, too, came out of the war with something new: Hank Williams. Williams’s influence on every country performer who came after him (and not a few who were starting their careers when he was) is so pervasive that today it’s hard to hear him as the revolutionary he was, and although his sound wasn’t groundbreaking, his songwriting was. His legend has him learning guitar and blues from a local black street performer, Tee Tot, in Montgomery, Alabama, where he grew up, and the result was that Williams wrote songs differently from earlier country songwriters. From the time of the Carter Family, who’d set the initial template for commercial country music, country songs had been about longing for an idealized past, a lost home, a parent who’d passed on to heaven, a lover lost to circumstance or death—all things beyond the singer’s ability to change them. Country was about fatalism and nostalgia for a better past, ideal for homesick people who had moved from the rural South to the industrial north. Hank Williams had internalized the blues and changed the rules. His songs said, “This happened to me, or this is happening to me, and here’s the way I feel about it.” He fell in love and was happy. His lover had left him and he was angry or vindictive. He was looking forward to a good time with or without somebody. The titles illustrate this: “You’re Gonna Change (or I’m Gonna Leave),” “I Just Don’t Like This Kind of Livin’” “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You),” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Honky Tonkin’.” These songs hit country audiences hard, and they made Williams a star, which was a mixed blessing for him: already a serious alcoholic, he became more unstable and unreliable, and he died from an overdose of prescription drugs in the backseat of a limo taking him to a New Year’s Eve show in West Virginia in 1953, age twenty-nine. In his short time, he had not only changed country music but had been recognized by the pop mainstream as a serious songwriter whose songs were recorded by everyone from Margaret Whiting to Fats Domino.
Another game changer in the country field happened accidentally in 1945, when at the end of a recording session for someone called Cecil Campbell and the Briarhoppers, the session guitarist, Arthur Smith, played a boogie-woogie on his guitar and it was recorded. Boogie-woogie had been an immense craze in the 1930s, and many a black piano player had established a career with a strong left hand to put down the walking bass while the right hand played a melody. Indeed, Hadda Brooks recorded a lot of boogieing-the-classics numbers early in her career, but by then, the craze had already mostly died down with black audiences. Smith’s record of “Guitar Boogie,” though, caught the public fancy, and soon, country acts were recording boogies. Not all of them, of course; the majority were chasing Hank Williams’s lead, but on the West Coast, in particular, hillbilly boogie gave guitarists an outlet. True, some of it came from Texas as part of the Western swing tradition, and one of the most notable acts purveying it, the Delmore Brothers, whose “Freight Train Boogie” was a big hit in 1946, were from Alabama, but based in Cincinnati, where they could be near WLW, whose program Boone County Jamboree was a talent incubator for their label, King Records. Although the Delmores were proficient instrumentalists, they got a lot of help from the Jamboree’s star guitarist, Merle Travis, on their records and had a gospel group with him and Grandpa Jones, a banjo-playing novelty act, called the Brown’s Ferry Four. Travis was from nearby western Kentucky, where he’d come under the influence of a black guitarist named Arnold Shultz, as well as a very influential local country guitarist, Ike Everly, who had a radio show with his wife and two sons. Travis’s picking style enabled a bass line played with the thumb and a melody on the upper strings simultaneously, so the challenge of boogie-woogie on the guitar was perfect for him, and in 1946, he was signed by Capitol Records in Los Angeles as a performer. He also functioned as a studio musician for Capitol and other West Coast country labels and was an important part of the sound of Capitol’s top hillbilly boogie artist, Tennessee Ernie Ford. Not all the hillbilly boogie crowd played guitar: one notable star whom even Jerry Lee Lewis acknowledged as an influence was Aubrey “Moon” Mullican, from Beaumont, Texas, whose records on King and, later, Starday, were rambunctious enough to qualify as early rock & roll, although he was in his forties by the time his career really took off.
But Capitol was emblematic of the change in the record industry after the war. There were the big labels, based in New York: RCA Victor (a merger of the veteran label with a radio network), Columbia, Decca. Each had a Nashville office, and each ignored the West Coast. They recorded mainstream pop music in New York and mainstream country in Nashville. MGM, for whom Hank Williams recorded, was based in New York, but barely took itself seriously as a record label, being a division of a major film studio in Hollywood. Capitol had been started in 1942 by a successful songwriter, Johnny Mercer, with help from Buddy DeSylva, another songwriter with film connections, and the owner of Hollywood’s biggest record store, Wallichs Music City. Mercer’s goal was simple: he knew there was a lot of pop talent in Los Angeles that nobody in New York was touching, and a lot of songs being written for the movies that could be recorded with studio orchestras. After all, he was writing some himself. He also had a soft spot for country music and knew that, if not in Hollywood, certainly in the San Fernando Valley and Bakersfield nearby, there was an audience for it and that clubs were attracting performers from all over the country, many of whom settled in California. “We’re going into the open market for the best songs and the best performances we can give the public,” Glen Wallichs announced. “We plan a complete catalogue that will offer sweet music, swing music, Hawaiian, hill billy [sic] and race music.” Mercer had plenty of financing and plenty of connections in the record biz thanks to Wallichs, and so he didn’t have to rely on any established network of distribution or talent pool; in many ways he had California all to himself. Capitol was an independent label.
Of course, so were Exclusive and Bronze and Modern, but they took the path of narrowly focusing on the emerging black popular music in the city. They weren’t the only ones. Art Rupe, a fan of black music from suburban Pittsburgh, had founded Juke Box Records with some partners, but soon bought them out and renamed the label Specialty. Rupe had fallen in love with blues and gospel as a teenager and was attracted to Central Avenue the minute he saw it. Specialty immediately signed deals with some of the Stroll’s top young blues talent—Joe and Jimmy Liggins, Roy Milton, Percy Mayfield—and went after some of the top names in gospel music, which was undergoing a modernization of its own. The Soul Stirrers, Professor Alex Bradford, and the Pilgrim Travelers were among his early signings; few of the top gospel acts would pass up the opportunity to perform at one of LA’s Shrine Auditorium’s spectacular gospel programs, after all. He also got some sales and jukebox action out of Wynona Carr’s gospel novelties like “The Ball Game” and “Dragnet for Jesus.”
Leo and Eddie Mesner’s Aladdin Records started in 1945 as Philo Records, a jazz label, but soon turned its interest toward blues, after having a smash with Amos Milburn’s “Chicken Shack Boogie” in 1948. Then there was Lew Chudd, whose Imperial label was set up to exploit what Chudd felt was an untapped market for music made by Los Angeles’s Mexican community and managed to score some hits with both Edmundo Martinez Tostado, a.k.a. Don Tosti, whose “Pachuco Boogie” on Taxco was a rallying cry for East Los Angeles’s teenagers and the first of his many hits, and Lalo Guerrero, whose “Muy Sabroso Blues” and “Marihuana Boogie” were also huge hits for Imperial. But after he’d leased a couple of small hits with music recorded in New Orleans, Chudd went down there scouting talent, and bandleader Dave Bartholomew took him to the Hideaway Club where they found a twenty-year-old pianist, Antoine “Fats” Domino, who was the current heir to the “piano professor” tradition that stretched all the way back to Jelly Roll Morton and before. Chudd intuited there was much more money to be made in New Orleans than in East LA.
There was Swingtime, founded on South San Pedro by Jack Lauderdale, a short, chubby black guy with questionable connections, who had a genius for buying masters other people had recorded, and was notable for releasing Lowell Fulson’s “Every Day I Have the Blues” and buying “Lonely Boy” by a black guy in Seattle who was playing with a country band up there, Ray Charles. John Dolphin was a record store owner whose shop, opened in 1948, was one of the biggest ones on Central, with a DJ playing records in the window, and in 1950, Dolphin started his label, Recorded in Hollywood (which was miles away, but close enough), to feature blues artists he discovered. And Modern, thanks to the money from Hadda Brooks’s success, was buying up talent, too, from tiny labels like Four Star in Houston (Lightnin’ Hopkins) and Down Town, an Oakland label that got them master recordings by Lowell Fulson and Jimmy McCracklin.
Los Angeles led the nation in independent labels, but there were others. Besides Chess in Chicago, there was Mercury, which was analogous to Capitol in that it was founded by music-biz veterans and recorded pop music and blues instead of country, but far more sophisticated blues than Chess was recording: Chess had Muddy Waters, and Mercury had Dinah Washington, who could be said to combine the traditions of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday as she straddled blues and jazz in her repertoire. New York, where one would expect a lot of this sort of action, was very slow in catching the postwar trend, and initially, only Atlantic Records, formed in 1947 by pre-war record vet Herb Abramson and Ahmet Ertegun, son of the former Turkish ambassador to the United States, was looking for the same sort of artists as the West Coast labels were. Ertegun, along with his brother, Nesuhi, was a huge jazz fan and had been famous for his huge record collection and occasional jazz concerts at the embassy. Now he intended to seek out New York’s jazz artists and record them, with an eye toward turning Atlantic into America’s top jazz label. Based in New York, though, he wouldn’t have heard any local blues, so blues was absent from Atlantic’s roster. Uptown from Atlantic, Apollo Records was the fiefdom of Bess Berman, who ran a Harlem record store with her husband, Ike. Apollo released all kinds of music, recording some early bebop, some early sides by Wynonie Harris, and Dean Martin’s first efforts, but really took off when they found a young woman from New Orleans named Mahalia Jackson, who took the gospel world by storm, almost making the pop charts in 1947 with “Move Up a Little Higher,” and even found fans in the jazz world.
This was the scene in the record business at the end of the 1940s, but there were already some hints of what was to come. Country music, particularly on the West Coast, was featuring the electric guitar more (its use in country had been pioneered by Bob Wills’s band and by Ernest Tubb, a Texan who defended his use of the instrument as the only way to be heard in the west Texas oil patch bars his band, the Texas Troubadours, played) and was exploring the new kind of lyrics Hank Williams had introduced. Black music was radically shaken by the jump blues phenomenon, and, in Chicago, the loud, aggressive electric sound coming out of its clubs. Then, out of the Midwest, came a clarion call: “Have you heard the news?” Wynonie Harris asked. “There’s good rockin’ tonight.”