chapter three
Left to right: Joe Bihari, B.B. King, Los Angeles DJ Hunter Hancock, and Cash Box editor Joel Friedman presenting an award from the magazine.
(Michael Ochs Archives/Stringer)
By 1950, the shellac crisis was over, and a few record labels were switching to vinyl polychloride, which was cheaper and unbreakable—at least compared to shellac. James Petrillo, the head of the American Federation of Musicians, had conceded that the future was upon him, and the union took a more conciliatory attitude toward recording and stopped striking. There were lots of records flooding into the market, even in minority-interest genres like blues and country. But who was buying them?
The answer was jukebox operators, at least for the independent record labels: the men who added and subtracted records from the machines. Jukeboxes were everywhere: bars, diners, roadhouses, even barbershops and places you’d never expect; some churches had recreational areas outside the sanctuary where a jukebox filled with gospel records gave ambience to church dinners and other social events, for instance. Jukeboxes also had heavy tonearms and ground down the records they played, particularly if they were made of shellac, which meant replacing a big hit every couple of weeks. If an individual consumer was actually interested enough in a record, there were used record stores stocking records they’d bought from jukebox operators. Relatively few country or blues records were bought new by individual consumers.
Mainstream pop was played on the radio during the disc jockeys’ time slots, but the evening, when the largest listening audience was tuned in, was still the province of live orchestras playing “sweet” dance music (or “Mickey Mouse music,” as all too many of the musicians who played it called it). There was virtually no blues and no country on the radio with a couple of notable exceptions. Country had weekly live broadcasts, from WSM’s Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, to the WLS Barn Dance in Chicago, and the Louisiana Hayride (started in 1948 in Shreveport, Louisiana, on KWKH), and of course short local shows, usually early in the morning, with live performers. These were notable because the Opry, Barn Dance, and Hayride went out on so-called clear channel stations that were allowed to operate on a stronger signal at night when most other stations were silent and, therefore, could be heard by listeners far away from the original signal, thanks to the “ozone skip” where the atmosphere bounced the signal back down to earth.
Another Nashville station, WLAC, also had a clear channel signal, and it was there that something remarkable happened. Most radio stations offered airtime to whoever could buy it, so that often someone would show up with a suggestion for a show sponsored by someone (or someones) who’d buy the airtime in exchange for commercials. WLAC, by 1950, had three disc jockeys at night, after its network programming shut off, who changed the face of American music: Bill “Hoss” Allen, Gene Nobles, and John “John R.” Richbourg.
Nobles had started in 1947, and his sponsor was Randy’s Record Shop in suburban Gallatin, Tennessee, owned by Randy Woods. Nobles, a white man, was a swing fan, so he naturally gravitated toward jump blues and boogie music on his program, from 10:00 to 10:45 at night, on which he noted that his sponsor could get any record you liked. Within a few weeks, Woods called him and asked what all these odd titles people had ordered were. Were they race records? They were indeed, and so Woods contacted a wholesaler and started buying them. Then he got the smart idea of offering packages: five records for $2.98 plus COD and handling. Most of these were hits, some were not. It was a great way of getting rid of overstock and duds. Then Ernest Young, who owned a store in Nashville, decided this was a good way to make money, so he bought forty-five minutes and Nobles’s services from 9:00 to 9:45. Ernie’s Record Mart, too, started shipping rhythm and blues packages via mail order. Finally, Buckley’s Record Store, also in Nashville, bought an hour from midnight to 1:00 A.M., and Nobles did that, too. In the summer of 1947, he decided he needed a vacation, so the station told their newscaster, John Richbourg, to take over. They also found a young man just out of college, Bill Allen, to take some of the slots. Randy’s and Ernie’s were friendly competitors, and confused listeners often ordered the latest package from the wrong store, and they’d simply hand the order over. The on-air personalities of Gene Nobles, Hoss Allen, and John R., though, seeped through the night to any ears that would receive them, and as odd as it may have seemed to some, not a few of those ears were attached to high school- and college-age white kids, who loved the extroverted DJs and the music they played. WLAC’s signal reached over twenty states: Bob Dylan, as a youngster, would lie awake listening to it in Minnesota. But of course, WLAC didn’t invest in market research, which barely existed at the time. Randy’s and Ernie’s had no idea who they were selling to and might not have snapped if they’d investigated: it was a common ploy to have the record packages sent to a relative or friend to avoid parental scrutiny, and especially down south, listeners to this forbidden music formed a sort of secret society.
Up in New York, Atlantic noticed a surge in sales among their southern distributors every time one of their records made it into one of the packages, and it wasn’t long until the sponsors realized that they were missing out on some money and started their own labels. Randy Woods started Dot in 1950, and Ernie Young had Excello (for blues) and Nashboro (gospel) up and running by 1952.
Meanwhile, there was Wynonie Harris’s important question. Harris was a six-footer from Omaha with lady-killing good looks and a vocal style indebted to, but not a copy of, Big Joe Turner’s. He hooked up with Lucky Millinder’s popular large band in 1944 and was the vocalist on Millinder’s hit song “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well?” This boosted his profile enough for him to go solo, and he made a great many undistinguished records for Bess Berman at Apollo. What he clearly needed was someone who could write good lyrics, because his singing chops were never in doubt. In 1947, things came together; he signed with King Records, where he worked with the A&R team of Henry Glover (another Lucky Millinder alumnus) and Ralph Bass. A&R, at least back then, was what it said: artists and repertoire, with the A&R department of a record company responsible for hooking performing talent up with song material they could do a good job with. Harris continued to tour but hadn’t had any hits on King by the day he played New Orleans and refused to see a guy named Roy Brown, who idolized him. Brown was a short, rotund ex-boxer who’d been working the clubs in New Orleans and had written a song he wanted to get to Harris. Dejected at having been turned away, he contacted another singer playing the clubs there, Cecil Gant, and played the song for him. Gant was still well connected and immediately called the president of New Jersey–based De Luxe Records, Jules Braun (at, legend has it, 4:00 A.M.). Braun sent Brown a contract first thing, and he went into the studio and cut the song, “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” One of the King A&R team heard the song and sent Harris into the studio to record it, and, with King’s higher profile, the song took off faster and topped the black charts just as the summer of 1948 came on. Brown’s version didn’t do too badly, either, although it peaked at #13.
Two careers were made by one song, and something of a line was drawn. Bestselling blues songs were rarely very explicit about sex, but although the “rockin’” in the lyrics might have been about dancing and playing music, there was the couplet “Gonna hold my baby tight as I can / Tonight she’ll know I’m a mighty, mighty man.” That was pushing it, but nobody made much of a squawk; it was “just colored folks,” and it wasn’t like white bands were playing this material or impressionable white children were listening to it. Except, maybe, for the ones who were buying those records from WLAC. After all, the record shops there offered all-King packages and always salted them with at least one smash hit. And that may not be where a teenager, recently relocated from Tupelo, Mississippi, to Memphis, got a copy of it, but young Elvis Presley did indeed have a copy of it and played it over and over. He was a nice kid, fond of his mother, and always went to church with her on Sundays—sometimes twice, if he could convince her to head down the road to the black church after the services at their church was over. He often could. He could be remarkably persuasive, even if he was a little shy, and his mother, Gladys, found it hard to deny him anything.
Elvis may not have been aware of it, but music in black churches was changing, as was the music on the little-noticed gospel touring circuit. There wasn’t much money to be made by record companies in gospel music—after all, most record sales were to jukebox operators, and the last thing you’d want on a bar’s juke was an admonition to repent—but some were recording it, anyway. Art Rupe of Specialty Records liked gospel music as a fan and adjured his representatives in the field to push “our spiritual line” when selling to retail accounts. He’d started recording gospel in 1947, when James Petrillo called the last of his musicians’ union strikes, forbidding instrumentalists from recording. No problem: some of the most popular gospel groups were vocal ensembles, and singing without instruments was how they honed their arrangements, only adding a piano or guitar or organ at the last minute. The Pilgrim Travelers were Rupe’s first group, and they were a perfect bridge between what had been and what was coming. The group had been in existence since 1930, shifting membership around a central core, as with all long-lived gospel groups, the core being in this case Joe Johnson and two brothers named Davis. By the time they signed with Rupe, Johnson and the Davises were long gone, and the group was under the capable leadership of J. W. Alexander, who helped them move away from the archaic style of a lead vocalist with the group making rhythmic syllables in the background to the more modern style of everyone singing the same words in harmony, led by a solo vocalist. This wasn’t exactly a new style, because black pop groups like the Mills Brothers had pioneered it in the ’30s, but it was new to gospel. (It’s also important to note that gospel wasn’t performed at weekly church services, which emphasized congregational singing led by a pastor or music director and perhaps the church’s own choir, but, rather, at special shows called programs featuring traveling acts, big and small, in a more showbizzy context.)
Alexander’s Pilgrim Travelers were (as were most savvy gospel groups) chasing the Soul Stirrers, a Chicago-based group that had been around since the mid-1920s. By 1950, they were under the leadership of R. H. Harris, who was acutely aware of showmanship, since gospel programs were fiercely competitive, and who was also recording in this new style for Specialty. (Harris also led the group to record songs with social content, like “Why Do You Like Roosevelt (Poor Man’s Friend)” and “Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb.”) In 1951, Harris, who was continually trying to have the best singers in his group, hired a young, handsome kid named Sam Cooke for the group and noted with approval the number of teenage girls who turned out for the programs as a result. Actually, he must have known what would happen: Sam had been lead vocalist in a group called the Highway QCs, who had a habit of turning up when a program was in town and blowing all competition away, even though they were still teenagers. (He was replaced there by another Chicago teenager named Lou Rawls.) There was no doubt the new sound of gospel was popular; a group called the Trumpeteers managed to hit the #1 slot on the Race chart in 1949 with “Milky White Way.”
But of course, not every group of black teenage boys wanted to sing gospel, as you’d expect; group singing was fun, Jesus often wasn’t, and you didn’t have to be R. H. Harris to note that the women at a gospel program were mostly older. But one thing the gospel groups had gotten right was the economic model: all you needed were your singers and maybe a piano or guitar. So the late 1940s saw a rush of secular vocal groups, starting with the Ravens. Except for youth, there wasn’t much difference between the Ravens and the Mills Brothers, but an accident at New York’s famous Apollo Theater amateur show set them apart: bass singer Jimmy “Ricky” Ricks started singing before the rest of the group because he was so nervous, and the others had the smarts to back him up as the lead singer. Snapped up by National Records, a tiny New York indie label, run by Herb Abramson and engineer (and former Manhattan Project prodigy: he’d done top-secret work on the atomic bomb while studying nuclear physics at Columbia University) Tom Dowd, they managed eight records in 1948, most of which hit the R&B top ten, culminating in December with a two-sided Christmas hit of “Silent Night” and “White Christmas,” the latter of which had a swinging arrangement that was later copied by both Billy Ward and His Dominoes and the Drifters. The Ravens were followed by the Orioles, whose lead singer, Sonny Til, had a voice as airy and light as Ricky Ricks’s was plummy and deep. The Orioles’ harmonies were complex, and their debut single, “It’s Too Soon to Know,” blew the roof off the Apollo after their manager (and author of the song) got them onto the show after they’d lost on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts TV show. Deborah Chessler—a teenage department store clerk in Baltimore who first encouraged, then wrote songs for, and finally managed the Orioles—was a dynamo, and the group wound up on the amusingly named It’s A Natural label, largely as a result of her work and that appearance at the Apollo.
It was obvious that things were changing in the black music world, and to reflect this, in mid-1949, a young journalist named Gerald Wexler, who was pretty aware of the scene, convinced his employer, Billboard, one of the two top trade magazines for the record business (the other being Cash Box) to change the name of its Race Records chart to Rhythm and Blues, the term record dealers and people in the street used for the emerging music. The term embraced all manner of black music; #1 records on Billboard’s chart between 1948 and 1950 included pure blues (Memphis Slim, Arbee Stidham, Pee Wee Crayton, John Lee Hooker, and Lonnie Johnson), jump blues (Bull Moose Jackson, Wynonie Harris, Amos Milburn, Roy Brown, Charles Brown, and multiple entries by Louis Jordan), instrumentals (Sonny Thompson, Hal Singer, and Big Jay McNeely), and black pop (Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, Percy Mayfield, and the Orioles). Very few of these crossed over to the white charts.
Somehow, the Ertegun brothers, Ahmet and Nesuhi, thought they could break into this in a big way and enlisted Herb Abramson and Tom Dowd (who were still working for National) and Abramson’s formidable wife, Miriam, to join Atlantic Records. National was falling apart anyway, so the Abramsons and Dowd found themselves working for the most ridiculously underprepared record label in New York. Capitalized largely by the sale of the brothers’ immense record collection, they’d set up offices in the Ritz Hotel just in time for the 1947 Petrillo strike. Soon, they moved to far more modest quarters in the Hotel Jefferson. They released a bunch of random stuff—some jazz, some spoken word (at one point Ahmet Ertegun told Billboard they were going to release the complete works of Shakespeare on 78), even some country—and then had a stroke of luck. A distributor complained that there was a hit record, a blues record called “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” by Stick McGhee that he couldn’t get enough copies of, and he wondered if Ertegun could help. The only blues artist Ertegun knew in New York was Brownie McGhee, so he found him and asked him about it. It turned out that Stick McGhee was Brownie’s brother and just happened to be visiting Brownie at his place in Harlem. A session was quickly organized, and Atlantic had its first hit.
Its second one came from the center of the Stroll in Detroit. The Flame Show Bar was hands down the most prestigious black nightclub in the city, so much so that Duke Ellington played there within months of its opening. He was quite impressed with a young vocalist, Ruth Brown, that he heard there. She’d been working with Lucky Millinder’s band, and Ellington mentioned her to Willis Conover, the jazz disc jockey with the Voice of America, and Conover mentioned her to Herb Abramson, who found her on tour near Washington, D.C., and summoned her to New York to record. She was on her way with her manager, Blanche Calloway (bandleader Cab Calloway’s wife), when they had an automobile accident just outside Philadelphia. As soon as she was able, Brown went to New York, surprising the crew at Atlantic, who were busy recording Eddie Condon, a retro-jazz guitarist who led a band with some remarkable talents in it. Brown limped in, and Condon’s band were impressed with the song she’d chosen to record, “So Long,” so they spent extra time on the arrangement, and the song was a top-ten hit in the last months of 1949. Miriam Abramson signed on as her manager, and Brown began a career that would provide Atlantic with a couple of dozen hits over the next decade. She was versatile enough that her style partook of blues, jazz, and pop, which, given the taste among Atlantic’s management, made her the ideal artist for them.
Another denizen of the Stroll in Detroit was an illiterate auto worker from northern Mississippi, John Lee Hooker, whose music couldn’t have been further from Ruth Brown’s. His sparse, primitive blues (a lot of his songs only had one chord), accompanied only by his guitar, appealed to people like him: poor black folk who’d left the South for work in the North, and the only concession he’d made to his urban setting was to get an electric guitar so he could be louder than the crowds he played for. In 1949, somebody he’d hired as his manager sent a demo of two of his tunes to Modern Records in Los Angeles, and they released it as is, with the label correctly identifying the contents: “Boogie Chillen,” by John Lee Hooker & His Guitar. The record flew in the face of postwar sophistication: one man and one guitar playing one chord, essentially, and not making much of an effort vocally, either. It was a smash.
The Biharis wondered if this were a trend, and picked up a master by a Houston bluesman who’d recorded some fairly primitive stuff for Gold Star Records there, Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins (so named because a few of his early recordings were with a pianist, “Thunder” Smith, and someone suggested that Thunder and Lightnin’ would make a good name for an act). Hopkins had had a couple of local hits (“Katie Mae,” “Short Haired Woman”) on Gold Star Records, but the record Modern put out was “Tim Moore’s Farm,” a song current with several Texas bluesmen at the time about a real farmer in Grimes County notorious for his mistreatment of black workers. The man’s real name was Tom, but nobody in that part of Texas needed to be told who it was about, and the story was universal enough to sell it to jukebox patrons all over the country. Hooker and Hopkins had little in common other than being solo acts and their practice of recording under a bewildering number of names for anyone who’d pay them.
Electric guitar players were hardly novelties in black popular music at this point—T-Bone Walker had had hits in the ’30s—but this kind of stripped-down country blues was certainly an odd trend. Jules and Saul Bihari decided to accept a long-standing invitation to look for talent in Memphis in mid-1950, and while visiting WDIA (the “mother station of the Negroes,” with all-white management but a pioneering all-black air staff), they heard a demo by a guitarist who also had a popular program on the station, Riley King. B. B. King, as he was known professionally (the initials stood for Blues Boy), had made quite an impression on Memphis music fans since he came to town from his native Itta Bena, Mississippi, with his guitar protected from the elements by a gunnysack. He’d already recorded for Bullet Records in Nashville to no great effect, but the Biharis heard a great singer who played blues guitar with a pure tone and an endlessly inventive flow of ideas and decided to get him into the studio right away. Fortunately, unlike a lot of Southern metropolises, Memphis had a brand-new, technically up-to-date, great-sounding studio. All that was needed was to assemble a band and get King over to Union Avenue to cut some tunes. Sam Phillips was ready for them. He’d tried a bunch of stuff to get the Memphis Recording Service off the ground, and now here was the nation’s top rhythm and blues label asking him to record one of the city’s top names—and offering first refusal on anything else he had to offer, which included his early encourager Joe Hill Louis, harmonica player Big Walter Horton, and others, who wound up on Modern. B. B., though, wasn’t coming up with anything.
Phillips, meanwhile, was enjoying the scouting services of a teenage pianist from Clarksdale, Mississippi, Ike Turner. Turner’s mother had run a hotel-cum–rooming house for musicians, one of those refuges where touring black performers could stay in the segregated South, and he’d learned a lot about what was good and what people wanted. He also had his own band, the Kings of Rhythm, and although he was more than willing to use them to back up others on sessions, he really wanted his own career. At B. B. King’s urging, he brought them up to Memphis in 1951, and in no time he found himself on a session with Sam Phillips. One of the tunes they recorded featured his saxophonist, Jackie Brenston, doing a tune he’d do during their live show, “Rocket 88.”
Leonard Chess happened to be in town on a scouting expedition similar to the one the Biharis had done the year before and heard it. Knowing that it was a hit, he bought it on the spot from Phillips and asked if he had other masters for sale. As a matter of fact, he did. One was by a very unusual performer Turner had found, a huge forty-one-year-old ex-farmer from West Helena, Arkansas, who’d played the blues all his life and had, as a youth, traveled with Charley Patton. Chester Burnett played guitar and harmonica, but his real attraction was his voice; Sam Phillips has memorably described it as “where the soul of man never dies,” and it lent credibility to Burnett’s stage name, Howlin’ Wolf. He was unabashedly old-fashioned, but maintained a band of young players, so his music spoke across generations. Chess picked up the recordings Phillips had and took them back to Chicago with him. The ones Chess rejected Sam sent to Modern.
Then, something unfortunate—for some—happened: “Rocket 88” took off like its namesake. The Biharis were not happy; one of the biggest hits of 1951 (as it turned out to be) had been sold outright to their biggest competitor instead of being offered to them first. Ike Turner wasn’t happy; the record came out under the name Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, not Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm, featuring Jackie Brenston. The result was that the Biharis refused to deal with Phillips or his studio anymore, and Turner refused to deal with him or Chess. Chess won all around; they kept up their relationship with Sam, and although they didn’t realize it yet, in Howlin’ Wolf they’d acquired another important talent who would sustain their label for years to come. The Biharis, meanwhile, were eager to record B. B. King again, and Sam’s studio was the only game in town. Well, not when you’re in touch with Ike Turner, it’s not; he swung by the colored YMCA and told the Biharis he’d found a place to record. Joe Bihari came to town lugging a couple of tape recorders, Ike found a bunch of blankets to hang on the walls of the gymnasium, and they got to work. B. B. recorded an old Lowell Fulson tune, “Three O’Clock Blues,” and a few other tracks, Ike played piano, and Bihari also got in sessions with some other locals Ike had recommended to him, including Johnny Ace and Bobby Bland, before the YMCA demanded their room back. Joe packed up the tape recorders and headed back to Los Angeles, and released “Three O’Clock Blues” toward the end of the year. B. B. promptly forgot about it until Bihari sent him a telegram telling him they’d sold one hundred thousand copies of the song and it was still gathering momentum.
Leonard Chess, for his part, not only had the Jackie Brenston record, but Muddy Waters was turning out to be a major signing. True, his sales were modest and mostly confined to the South and Chicago, but starting in January, he’d put “Louisiana Blues” and three other records on the national charts. Then, at the end of the year, Chess’s first release of Howlin’ Wolf turned out to be a double-sided hit: the furious “How Many More Years” and “Moanin’ at Midnight,” a spectral performance that begins with a wordless moan and continues on to highlight Wolf’s famous howl (which, he noted later, he intended to sound like Jimmie Rodgers’s yodeling). On “Louisiana Blues,” Waters spoke of going to New Orleans to buy a mojo hand. Was Southern mumbo-jumbo taking over the turf formerly occupied by more sophisticated urban performers?
Well, no; among others, Charles Brown had had a top hit with “Black Night,” which was harmonically sophisticated if depressing, and Earl Bostic had scored with “Flamingo,” a lovely instrumental. And then there were those vocal groups that kept popping up. It was hard keeping track of them, since at first they all seemed to be named after birds: the Ravens and the Orioles were followed by the Robins, the Cardinals, the Swallows, the Larks, and the Crows, although the Clovers, the Moonglows, the Dominoes, and the Five Satins also appeared in 1951. The Dominoes even managed to cross over to the pop charts with their classic, bass-led “Sixty Minute Man,” whose lyrics were suggestive, but not outright bawdy, although lots of radio stations wouldn’t play it. None of these groups had yet hit on a style—they all tended to be slightly modernized versions of the old vocal groups—but that would change.
Probably the strangest thing that happened in 1951 was that Alan Freed, a hard-drinking, trombone-playing Wagner fan (he’d named his daughter Sieglinde) in Cleveland who had had a bit of a problem holding down a job on the various Ohio radio stations he’d worked for and had finally been relegated to the late-night ghetto at WJW, had a conversation with a guy named Eliot Mintz, who owned the Record Rendezvous, one of the city’s largest record stores. Mintz said that he had a constant stream of white teenagers coming into the store and requesting obscure black records. Here, Mintz told Freed, was an audience for a radio show that played nothing but black records on a white station. Freed thought this was a risky proposition—and how would he square it with the brass, especially with his reputation as a troublemaker?—but Mintz promised not only to advertise heavily but to get other businesses to advertise, too. So in June, Freed debuted “The Moondog Show,” playing records Mintz said were popular and blasting them out on WJW’s fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel signal to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and, if atmospheric conditions were right, other parts of the country, too. It didn’t take long before distributors noted this surge in sales in Cleveland, of all places, and WJW, noticing the rise in late-night listenership, left Freed alone, even though he was howling, shouting, “Go! Go!” over sax solos, and pounding on a Cleveland phone book he kept close to the mike and otherwise acting like a lunatic.
Freed wasn’t the first white DJ to play black records, of course; as we’ve seen, the guys at WLAC had been doing it for a while, and another maniac, Dewey Phillips (no relation to Sam, although they did co-own a record label for a while), was enchanting Memphis teenagers with a canny mixture of blues, rhythm and blues, and some of the hotter hillbilly boogie records, and in Los Angeles, Hunter Hancock, a lanky Texan, was a big enough star on KGFJ that his Huntin’ with Hunter show was being syndicated via sixteen-inch discs to radio stations nationwide. But Freed was in Cleveland, which, compared to Chicago or Detroit, had a very small black music scene. It was teenagers who were driving this phenomenon—white teenagers, mostly. And somewhere along the way, Freed started calling the music he played by one of the terms its audience was already using for certain kinds of records: rock & roll. He was far from the first to use the term to designate rhythmic black music (although he later tried to copyright it), and instances of its use go back to at least the 1930s, but it gave the kids a banner around which to gather, a code name squares couldn’t penetrate.