Ivory Joe Hunter – Still Here

YouTube Playlist of all tracks below …if you scroll down and hit ‘play’ you can listen while you read the notes!

By the time Ivory Joe Hunter signed with Atlantic in late 1954, he had been a regular visitor to the upper echelons of the R&B Charts for almost a decade. Of his thirteen prior top ten hits, three had climbed to number one and spent over two months in the top position, including two massive hits for MGM in 1950, I Almost Lost My Mind and I Need You So. Since he had taken the follow-up, It’s A Sin, to #10 R&B for the label in early 1951, however, the hits had dried up, and MGM apparently chose to not to re-sign him. Wexler and Ertegun, who were fast becoming THE force to be reckoned with in R&B music, were only too happy to offer Hunter a contract.

Hunter’s first release for Atlantic, It May Sound Silly, was picked as the Cash Box ‘Rhythm ‘N’ Blues Sleeper of the Week’ in January of 1955, the same week that I’ve Got A Woman, the Ray Charles tune that changed everything, broke into the charts for the label, eventually cruising to #1. Ray would go on to just own the R&B top ten for the next few years, but Ivory Joe’s ‘sleeper’ didn’t do too bad either, climbing to #14. As Cash Box had predicted, Hunter’s composition had ‘every quality that will lead to Pop covers’ and it did. When The McGuire Sisters took it to #11 on Billboard’s Honor Roll of Hits for rival Coral Records that Spring, Atlantic’s in-house Progressive Music Publishing reaped the rewards.

After another 1955 release that went nowhere, Cash Box would again pick an Ivory Joe and His Ivorytones release as ‘Sleeper of the Week’ in February of 1956, A Tear Fell. Picked up pretty much immediately by Coral this time, Theresa Brewer’s cover version would chart the same time as Hunter’s, going top five Pop, while Joe had to settle for #15 R&B. Although Hunter was not the songwriter this time out, the Burton-Randolph composition had been published by Progressive Music… cha-ching!

The Industry was paying attention, and Randy Wood at Dot Records decided to cut the ultimate R&B cross-over crooner, Pat Boone, on a remake of Ivory Joe’s 1950 classic I Almost Lost My Mind. Just a huge record, it would go nation-wide in the Summer of 1956, spending a full month at #1 on the Billboard charts. Nat ‘King’ Cole had also taken the song to #26 Pop (#7 R&B) for Capitol in 1950, but this was a whole new ballgame. Somewhere around in here, 1650 Broadway publishing giant Hill and Range went from ‘Sole Seller’ of the sheet music, to owning the song outright. In any event I’m sure Hunter, as the sole songwriter, was still getting paid.

Atlantic was not amused. As Jerry Wexler told Rob Finnis: “…we were very hipped on what Pat Boone was doing. He lifted a technique and a style from Ivory Joe, and we went back and lifted from Boone.” They released what was essentially a re-write of the same song, with new lyrics and an updated arrangement by Ray Ellis, for the label that December. Since I Met You Baby turned out to be an unprecedented success, becoming Atlantic’s first million-seller, spending three weeks at the top of the R&B charts, while crossing over on its own (without the benefit of a white person covering it) to just miss the top ten, climbing to #12 on Billboards’s Pop Honor Roll of Hits as 1956 gave way to 1957. The publishing on this one? Why, Progressive of course…

Ivory Joe on Top of The World

Joe made the cover of Cash Box on March 30th, 1957, receiving his Gold Record in front of millions on The Ed Sullivan Show. This was the big time! Right there on the front page, it was also reported (as it had been in Billboard) that Hunter had ‘just signed a three year contract with Atlantic’…

On February 23rd, Elvis Presley, with Too Much then at #1 on the Pop Charts (#3 R&B), had been at Radio Recorders in Hollywood cutting tracks for an upcoming LP to be be issued in conjunction with the Paramount Pictures film Loving You, which would premier that Summer. By all accounts a big fan of our man Ivory Joe (whose gigundo smash for Atlantic was then still riding the charts) Elvis chose to cover Hunter’s 1950 #1 R&B hit I Need You So for the album. On March 26th, four days before Joe graced the cover of Cash Box above, Elvis officially purchased Graceland on the outskirts of Memphis.

Hunter’s follow-up for Atlantic, his own composition, Empty Arms, had been chosen as ‘Disk of the Week’ in Cash Box on March 23rd, but had to share that honor with the Teresa Brewer version, which was released on Coral the same day. Joe was hot, and the boys on Broadway knew it. The Atlantic single would spend sixteen weeks on Billboard’s Pop chart, but only make it to #43. Coral’s ‘whitebread’ version, however, would hit #13 during its own seventeen week run. Hunter was all smiles though as, if you notice, the publishing credit on both labels now reads ‘Ivory Music’. As a veteran performer, I’m sure Joe knew where the real money was in the business, and had apparently demanded his own publishing as part of his new deal with Atlantic.

Aside from Ivory’s newfound Pop crossover success, it was the R&B charts that had always been his stronghold. Sure enough, Empty Arms made it to #2 in Billboard on May 15th, kept from the top slot by Chuck Berry’s fourth top five hit in a row, School Day. As you can see, Hunter had taken the number two spot that Elvis’ All Shook Up (which had been selected as the Cash Box ‘Disk of the Week’ in the same issue that featured Joe on the cover), occupied a week earlier. By May 22nd, however, that monster of a record came roaring back, hit #1 R&B and stayed there for the next month (not to mention the nine weeks it spent leading off Billboard’s Pop Honor Roll of Hits). The flip of Joe’s record, Love’s A Hurting Game, would also chart, but only make it to #7 R&B. Rock & Roll was definitely here to stay, and Ivory Joe Hunter would never see the R&B top five again.

Ivory Joe Hunter visits Graceland, July 30, 1957

Elvis, much to his eternal credit, invited Ivory Joe to visit him at Graceland in July, while (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear was in the midst of it’s seven week stay at the top of Billboard’s Pop charts. George Klein told Peter Guralnick about that visit in Last Train To Memphis: “Elvis said, ‘Ivory Joe, I sure do like your songs. You ain’t got any more of them for me, do you?’ Now, Ivory Joe was a real friendly guy. Great big kind of guy. You just immediately liked him, and he said, ‘Well, baby, I just have – I got one just for you.’ So we went in the piano room, and he sang My Wish Came True and Elvis said, ‘Shit, I’m cutting that at my next session!’ Which he did, even though it didn’t come out for a couple of years… and they sat there for hours, mostly singing Ivory Joe’s songs, a few of Elvis’ – man I just wish I had a tape machine!” We wish you did too, George.

Despite Atlantic’s boastful full-page ad in Cash Box that August, Hunter’s next release for the label (now published by something called ‘Desiard Music’) missed the charts entirely, as did his next three subsequent Atlantic singles. For whatever reason, the R&B record-buying public had appeared to move on, and Ivory Joe couldn’t buy a hit for over a year. In September of 1958, perhaps due to its great baritone-heavy arrangement, Yes I Want You (with Progressive back as the Publisher) did crawl to #94 on Billboard’s newly instituted ‘Hot 100’ and climbed as high as #13 R&B that October. It would be Hunter’s last R&B chart appearance, ever. There would be one more Atlantic single, released in March of 1959, but by then (amazingly) both parties seemed to have agreed to dissolve that three year contract a year early.

True to his (and George Klein’s) word, Elvis had cut My Wish Came True at the September 1957 ‘Christmas’ sessions with Leiber & Stoller at Radio Recorders in Hollywood. Released as the flip of yet another #1 record, A Big Hunk Of Love, it would also chart on its own, going to #12 on that Hot 100. The King had also recorded another Ivory Joe tune, this time in June of 1958, Ain’t That Loving You Baby (penned with Joe’s pal Clyde Otis), but it wasn’t released until 1964, when it hit #16 in Billboard.

No doubt encouraged by Hunter’s recent Pop crossover success, and the fact that Pat Boone had had such a huge hit for the label with Joe’s material, Dot Records signed Joe in late 1958. There doesn’t seem to have been any mention of it in the trade papers at the time, which seems odd, really. I mean, it must have been one sweet deal, and would certainly have been newsworthy, I’d think. Oh well. In any event, Dot managed to effectively end any shot Joe had at staying relevant as an R&B artist with their first release on him. At the time that City Lights was recorded, Ray Price’s version of the song was in the midst of its thirteen week stay at #1 on Billboard’s new Hot C&W Sides chart. It’s hard to imagine what Randy Wood was hoping to accomplish here. Although Ivory’s waxing of it did make it to #92 on the Hot 100 in early 1959, that would prove to be his final appearance on any chart whatsoever. Hunter had now essentially become too white for the black people, and had remained (of course) too black for the whites. How the mighty had fallen, and in less than two years!

Ivory Joe would soldier on for Dot out in Hollywood, releasing three more singles that went un-noticed in 1959. By 1960, he was back in New York recording for George Goldner. Of the four sides released that year on Goldisc, Let Them Say is probably the best, but even Goldner’s golden touch as producer didn’t help. Apparently signing a one year contract with Capitol in 1961, his three underwhelming singles cut for the big label that year once again failed to connect with the public. A great one-off for Ewart Abner’s Vee-Jay imprint in 1962, You Only Want Me When You Need Me (written by veteran songwriter Charles Singleton), died on the vine as well, even though the previous release on the label had gone top twenty both R&B and Pop for Jerry Butler… Ivory Joe couldn’t catch a break.

In June of 1963, Cash Box reported that Joe had become “…a part of the talent line-up of Smash Records. Inking, made by A&R man Shelby Singleton, is a continuation of the label’s ‘name’ artist build-up.” I’m not sure what ‘names’ they were referring to, as at this point Roger Miller and Jerry Lee had yet to sign with the label. Be that as it may, after Ray Charles had taken Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music to the top of Billboard’s LP charts the Summer before, I imagine Singleton had high hopes of replicating that kind of cross-over success with Ray’s former Atlantic label-mate. Shelby put Hunter together with Bill Justis to cut an album’s worth of material in April of ’63. The first of two singles for the Mercury subsidiary would be released in May. Joe’s own composition, My Arms Are Waiting (once more published by Desiard), is just Nashville all the way, and no doubt features our friend Jerry Kennedy on guitar. Perhaps it was too Country for the Pop Charts, but it would be another three years before Charley Pride would break through the color barrier there in Music City. Singleton then tried sending Joe back to New York to work with Sigma Seven Productions, but the resulting single just wasn’t that good. There didn’t seem to be any room at the Inn for Ivory Joe, no matter where he turned.

Where he turned next was Memphis.

Here was Hunter, on the ‘comeback trail’ right there on McLemore Avenue at the dawn of the ‘Soul Explosion’ as Stax was coming into its own. On Can’t Explain How It Happened, in addition to ‘big Joe’s’ laid-back ‘vocal chords’, he lets loose on the piano more than he had done in recent years, I think. Along with those Memphis horns, Cropper’s stinging guitar and Duck Dunn’s strolling bass line, it’s the drums on this one that make it a truly great record, in my opinion. Although again published by Desiard, the ‘Shaw’ credited as Joe’s co-writer here, refers to the Memphis based itinerant record man and all-around operator Jimmy Shaw, who we talked a little more about here.

I hadn’t noticed it the first time I read it, I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t paying attention. I had started writing this piece in February, just before I got the news that our friend Howard Grimes had passed. On the plane on the way down to Memphis for the funeral, I decided I’d read Timekeeper: My Life In Rhythm one more time. When I saw this, I got chills, man. It was almost as if Howard had reached out and grabbed me…

I have to admit, I wasn’t familiar with the record but, for Bulldog to say it was ‘the most complicated rhythm I ever cut’ (in an entire lifetime of complicated rhythms), I knew I had to check it out… Whoah! Kind of like Smokey Johnson meets Ray Barretto or something, here’s yet another example of Howard’s innovative percussion work and sheer genius behind the drum kit. This Kind Of Woman just cooks along, with Joe apparently playing the organ on this side and slyly spelling out just what kind of woman he wants (along with the kind he doesn’t), punctuated by some punchy latin-tinged horns. No wonder I thought the drums on the A side were great… it was Howard! Like he said, they ‘gave it everything every time’, and it shows.

One has to wonder how such a solid single failed to get noticed (aside from those 17 Louisiana and Texas dee-jays). Did Atlantic, as the Stax distributor, possibly still harbor some ill will over Hunter’s prematurely jumping ship five years before? Hmmm…

There is one other 1964 Ivory Joe single that is usually dated as being cut after his lone Stax outing, Joie 720. Apparently a subsidiary of something called L & S Records out in Los Angeles, not much else seems to be known about Joie other than that there were two other releases on the label around the same time. Hunter, who had cut his teeth cutting hits on his own West Coast labels in the late forties, was credited here as the producer, with the mis-spelled ‘De Saird’ now sharing the publishing with ‘Portulaca Music’. I suppose it doesn’t much matter, but I think the Joie single may have been recorded first, as the copyright for the A side, I Need A Woman, was registered in June, while Howard’s complicated Stax B side above was copyrighted that August, around the same time that it was released. Pretty much a straight ahead West Coast Blues number, I wonder who the guitar player might be… Arthur Adams? It is also interesting to note that, even though it says Desiard on the label, the song was registered by Morris Levy’s Frost Music Corp. which ‘In August of that year [1964] had… recently expanded via the purchase of other publishers.’ What a tangled web Joe (and Joie) wove…

Not one to sit still, it was another year, another record label for our man Ivory as he teamed up with Huey Meaux sometime in 1965. Meaux’s ‘Crazy Cajun Enterprises’ was based in Conroe, Texas, just about 100 miles west of Kirbyville, where Joe grew up. Not sure why Huey decided to place Hunter on his Tear Drop imprint, on which about half of his recent releases had been Chicano, instead of on Tribe (the label he had just scored big on with The Sir Douglas Quintet), but there it is. Hunter would cut four sides that year for Huey in Houston at Gold Star Recording. With the great Joey Long‘s guitar mixed front and center, Meaux succeeded in putting a little bit of the ebony back in ol’ Ivory’s records. For my money, the pure Blues of I’ve Asked You For The Last Time still holds up as one of Joe’s best records from this period. You have to wonder if Shelby Singleton, who had gotten his start plugging Huey’s productions, was instrumental in hooking Hunter up with him, and if the subsequent signing of the SDQ to Smash while Meaux was otherwise engaged a few years later was part of the deal…

Bettye Jo Elliot got her start in the industry working for Sam Phillip’s ‘all-girl’ Memphis radio station WHER in the mid-fifties before becoming one of their much-loved on-air disk jockeys. In 1957, she met and married Louis Jack Berger, owner of the West Memphis nightclub The Plantation Inn. Under her guidance, it soon became one of the few places where white kids could go and hear black music, influencing an entire generation in the process. Impressed with the sheer talent of the acts they were booking, she would start her own record label, Bet-T, in 1960 and release a single on William Bell’s Del-Rios, a full year before Chips Moman cut him at Stax. In 1965, Bettye began working for Ray Brown’s National Artist Attractions which, according to Travis Wammack, ‘booked everyone in town’. Convinced she could do better for her artists, she left a year later and formed her own agency, Continental Artists Inc., naming Don Dortch as her vice-president. Ivory Joe would become one of Continental’s first clients, which may have been what lured him back to Memphis in 1966.

It certainly seemed like the right move as, when Hunter signed with Goldwax that Spring, James Carr was climbing the charts for the label, eventually breaking into the R&B top ten. According to the liner notes for The Complete Goldwax Singles, Volume Two, Quinton Claunch had cut Every Little Bit Helped Me on Joe in 1964 (apparently before his stint at Stax), and released it ‘out of the can’ in June of ’66. After nobody seemed to notice, Claunch changed gears a bit and recorded Hunter in a more pop-oriented, Bert Berns style production, leasing his next 45 to United Artists subsidiary Veep in early 1967. Despite being picked as a ‘best bet’ in Cashbox in March, no ‘secure chart berth’ ever did materialize for Don’t You Believe Him, or it’s B+ B side, What’s The Matter Baby.

As discussed earlier, Goldwax brought both Reggie Young and Bobby Emmons across town for an Ivory Joe session at Sam Phillips Recording on June 26th, 1967. Issued that September as Veep 1270, the flip, From The First Time We Met (essentially a re-make of his biggest hit for Atlantic) was predicted by Billboard to reach the Hot 100, but didn’t. It’s the ‘Plug Side’, Did She Ask About Me, however, that just knocks me out. Quinton’s immaculate production, Reggie’s shimmering guitar and Hunter’s heartfelt vocal delivery combine to make this one a winner. It was written by Goldwax ‘Country Series’ artist Carmol Taylor, in a genre which fit Ivory Joe like a glove. Claunch was just a couple of years ahead of his time…

At this point, there is no mention of Ivory Joe Hunter in any of the trade magazines for well over a year, until he is mentioned in Billboard in December of 1968 as ‘returning to the disk scene’ for Sound Stage 7.

Signing with the Monument subsidiary during the exact period when John Richbourg’s ‘exclusive production arm’ had been cutting all of its artists at American in Memphis, it is inconceivable to me that Fred Foster would not opt to send Ivory Joe there as well, especially in light of the great record we just talked about that Hunter had cut in 1967 with most of Moman’s ‘Memphis Boys’ at Sam Phillips.

Although only the Joe Simon and Ella Washington singles mentioned as ‘chart bound!’ in the Cash Box ad at right actually charted, all of them (except for Ivory Joe’s) had been cut with Moman at 827 Thomas, and still hold up today as the stone classics they are.

A Billboard article about Monument from the week before states simply that John R “currently produces all Sound Stage 7 artists with the exception of Arthur Alexander and Ivory Joe Hunter,” but gives absolutely no reason why that might be.

Production duties for Ivory Joe would be handled by Monument’s Vice President and National Sales Director Steve Poncio, who had joined the company in August of 1967. Prior to that, Poncio had come up through the ranks in Houston, and had been running his own company, United Record Distributing, there since 1949. Instead of Memphis, Poncio chose to cut Hunter at the ACA Studio in Houston with local session musicians. His choice of material seems questionable as well as, rather that let Joe cut his own compositions, the label had him cover a tune that Otis Williams and his Charms had taken to #11 Pop (right behind Cathy Carr at #2 and Gale Storm at #6) in 1956, Ivory Tower. Although ol’ Joe is singing his heart out, the tune sounds, if you will, dated – because it was.! Poncio would produce two more singles for the label on Hunter at ACA in 1969 which are, in my opinion, virtually unlistenable. It all just seems a shame, and such a missed opportunity. I’d love to have heard what magic Chips might have created with Ivory Joe in the house…

In January of 1969, Sonny James, cut Ivory Joe’s Since I Met You Baby. When it was released that August, it went straight to the top of Billboard’s Country chart – Sonny’s tenth number one hit in a row. On April 10th, 1971, his version of Hunter’s Empty Arms became the fourteenth [James’ unparalleled streak of #1’s would grow to 16 by the end of the year]. In his book Willful Shadows, Sonny said, “I was doing a personal appearance in Monroe Louisiana, where he [Joe] lived… he said ‘Son back there when you did those songs for me my catalog of songs was… just laying there and wasn’t anybody touching them, any of the recorded ones or the one that had never been recorded… all of the sudden my whole catalog – they started doing songs I’d forgotten I’d written!’ ”

On May 4th, 1971, Elvis was featured on the cover of LOOK magazine, with a feature about his ‘hidden life’ promised inside. Since Suspicious Minds had gone to number one in November of ’69, The King’s chart position had been steadily slipping, and I’m sure RCA (and The Colonel) were glad for the exposure. On May 15th, Presley returned to RCA Studio B, the site of his ‘marathon sessions’ the year before, to work on a proposed new Christmas Album. Somewhere around 2am on May 20th, Elvis sat down at the piano and performed an Ivory Joe B side from 1950, I Will Be True, a favorite of his which he had also recorded while in the Army in Germany. With engineer Al Pachuki rolling the tapes, Elvis then launched into five takes of another Ivory Joe song that nobody in the studio had ever heard before, It’s Still Here. When RCA decided to include it on the ‘Fool‘ album in 1973, it was Gladys Music (the publishing arm named after Presley’s mother) that registered the copyright. In the Elvis Collectors Forum, it says the song is “intriguing, as there’s no known recording of it prior to Elvis.”

Long time contributor, Tom Erik Ogland (Norway’s own Soul Detective) begs to differ…

After some world-class digging, Tom unearthed a previously unknown single by Ivory Joe on Delta, a small Louisiana label. He first found the B side, I’m Looking For A Girl (Who’s Looking For A Boy), on YouTube, where there was a comment about the A side of that single actually being It’s Still Here, but he could find no confirmation of that. Then the real detective work began. Through the comment on YouTube, eBay and a Popsike listing, Tom was able to track down the owner of one of the two known copies. Although it had recently been sold again, luckily he had kept scans and mp3 rips of both sides, which are presented here for the first time. With the help of Praguefrank and another knowledgeable record collector friend from Finland, Tom was then able to use the matrix numbers to definitively date the record as being released in early 1968, before Hunter’s first sessions for Sound Stage 7 in Houston.

Now, how about that?

Desiard Street, Monroe 1960s

Although now sharing the BMI publishing with what must have been Delta’s own Ark-La-Miss Music, Desiard is still listed first, which would certainly suggest (although there appears to be no record of it) that the song was indeed copyrighted at least five years before the Gladys Music entry mentioned above. As it turns out, Desiard is the name of the bayou and main drag that wind their way through Ivory Joe’s adopted hometown of Monroe, Louisiana. Who knew? In a 1970 Commercial Appeal article, Hunter is quoted as saying, “Now, Elvis, he’s something else. He recorded some of my songs and they all sold over a million for him. He’s money in the bank when they put a record out on him…” I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to imagine Joe sending Presley a copy of the Delta 45 when it was released. The fact that Elvis was able to sit down at the piano and perform it through from memory in 1971 seems to indicate that he had played it many times before, and knew it by heart. Thanks, Tom!

Tired of going nowhere fast at Sound Stage 7, in early 1970 Joe decided to return to Memphis on his own. In the same article in The Commercial Appeal mentioned earlier, Bettye Berger outlines Hunter’s own appeal to ‘put his career in her hands’. Bettye circled the wagons at that point, and asked Charlie Chalmers to put together a session in late March at Sam Phillips that would include heavy hitters Bowlegs Miller, Jack Hale, James Mitchell and Isaac Hayes, who would also write this poignant note about Hunter being ‘copped and then dropped’ for the back of the album cover.

Epic apparently won the bidding for Berger’s tapes and, on May 19th, 1971 (the day before Elvis sat down at that piano), they released a single from the album (now aptly titled The Return Of Ivory Joe Hunter), Heartbreak And Misery. “That’s Jackie Harvell on guitar,” Charlie Chalmers told me, “I hired him to do that record.” Arranged by Chalmers and Sandra Rhodes, who also plays bass on the album, that’s her sister Donna on drums. “That was before I started singing backup with them,” Charlie said, “I wrote those strings, but I didn’t do horns… must have been in a hurry!” Seeing as the whole album was cut in two days, I’d say so. It’s interesting to hear the Rhodes – Rhodes backup without the Chalmers in the middle. It was Willie Mitchell who would figure out that equation just a few months later.

In October of 1972, Ivory Joe was a special guest at The Grand Ole Opry’s 47th birthday celebration, and the crowd went wild as he launched into some of those recent Sonny James hits. Perhaps the best of the surviving live audio from The Ryman is Hunter’s version of the Charlie Rich tune that Jerry Lee Lewis took into the Country Top 20 in 1958, I’ll Make It All Up To You. Just a consummate performer, Joe and his under-stated piano make the song his own as he holds the audience in the palm of his hand. Wow! He would make three more appearances on that stage over the next couple of years…

In November of 1972, with the migration of Moman’s Memphis Boys to Nashville almost complete, Bettye Berger would book Ivory Joe into Jack Clement’s Studio B to work on a new album. One of his first real jobs in Music City, Reggie Young’s log book shows him cutting with Hunter on his days off between the Quadrophonic Dobie Gray sessions that yielded Drift Away. Berger brought in other Memphis stalwarts like Tommy Cogbill and Stan Kesler to work with Cowboy Jack, and began shopping the album around to various labels.

Although, as we’ve seen, certainly not his first, Cash Box reported that Ivory Joe was forming his own publishing firm there in Nashville in March of 1973 – that would be four months before the Elvis’ Gladys copyright outlined above. Always the optimist, Hunter is quoted as saying “I have always been Country, but I happened to hit with a Blues song and then after that I was categorized Blues” _{^{[a situation, by the way, that continues at The Grammys to this day]}} By November, Record World announced his signing with Paramount Records, a division of Gulf + Western that had purchased Randy Wood’s Dot label (and Stax!) a few years before. According to the article, the label was going all out on promotion, with ‘appearances on nationally syndicated radio and television shows’ including WSM’s Music City U.S.A.

Issued on October 3rd, 1973, He’ll Never Love You, with Lloyd Green on pedal steel and Charlie McCoy on harmonica, is a top-shelf Country record. Just a great song, it had been written by Bettye Berger for Donnie (Dortch) Dexter for a previous release on her Bet-T label. Be that as it may, Ivory’s pleading vocals, Hank Levine’s arrangement (and Reggie’s guitar) make this one a winner. Joe’s LP, I’ve Always Been Country, made up mostly of covers of Country standards, was released in early 1974.

Then, tragically, just when it seemed that Hunter might have had a shot at making it in Nashville, he was diagnosed with Stage Four lung cancer, which had him in and out of Methodist Hospital in Memphis for most of the year. In Guralnick and Jorgensen’s Elvis Day by Day, they report that, on August 5th, the King sent Bettye Berger a check for $1000 to help defray the cost of Joe’s medical bills, accompanied by this note: “I am very sorry to hear of Joe’s illness. I have been a long-time admirer of Ivory Joe and his talent. Please tell Joe for me that I wish him a speedy recovery. Joe is a great talent and has been an inspiration to many artists that have come along. It hurts me deeply to hear of his condition. I sincerely hope that this check will be of some help. Thank you for letting me know about Joe. – Sincerely, Elvis Presley.”

On October 1st, Bettye Berger organized a benefit concert at the new Opry House location. A testament to Ivory’s wide appeal, it featured such diverse talents as Isaac Hayes, William Bell, George Jones and Tammy Wynette. They airlifted Joe from his hospital bed in Memphis, and brought him on stage in a wheelchair. He would perform three songs, his current single, “He’ll Never Love You,” “Empty Arms” and a song he had recently co-written with Berger, God Just Lent Them To You, There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. When you think of this as the last song Hunter ever performed, well… I can certainly see why.

On November 8th, 1974, Ivory Joe Hunter was called home.

As Bettye Berger said: “It was his realness, that uniqueness of expression that enabled his message to relate to everyone. His Blues were a very soft variety, his gentle but determined nature always obvious even throughout his long period of illness, when he insisted: ‘I plan on being around for a long time… forever!'” _{Record World 11/23/74}

You know what? Joe was right… he’s still here!

Ivory Joe Hunter – Still Here YouTube Playlist

Ivory Joe had recorded a second Country album in 1973 at Pete Drake’s studio in Nashville. Tentatively titled Just Tell My Friends, it was shelved after his death, and had remained in the can until it was released digitally on Tim Whitsett’s LocoBop label as This Is My Country, which, for some reason has been erroneously dated on YouTube as having been originally recorded in 1964… the version of It’s Still Here on the album was indeed recorded after Elvis…

In Loving Memory: Bettye Berger passed away at 89 years old in January of 2020

Special Thanks to: Tom Erik Ogland, Charlie Chalmers, Mark Nicholson, PragueFrank, Rob Finnis, Rob Bowman, Peter Guralnick, John Broven and Richard Tapp

1967 Episode Six – Tip On In

YouTube Playlist of all tracks below

…if you scroll down and hit ‘play’ you can listen while you read the notes!

By 1966, Ernie Young had been releasing J.D. Miller’s Crowley, Louisiana productions on his Excello label for over a decade, resulting in some truly great records. When Slim Harpo’s Baby Scratch My Back hit the airwaves that January, it took the country by storm, soaring to #1 R&B in both Billboard and Cash Box, and staying there atop all that Motown for a couple of weeks, while even crossing over into the Top 20 on the Hot 100. Young’s usual method of distributing his singles through Ernie’s Record Mart couldn’t keep up with demand, and he was forced to ship orders directly from the pressing plant, a situation he was none too happy with. I’m not sure if that had something to do with it (or if he just decided to strike while the iron’s hot) but, by July, the 74 year old Young had sold everything lock, stock and barrel, to something called The Crescent Amusement Company.

Miller had been under the impression that his productions had been ‘leased’ to Nashboro/Excello, and that he had retained ownership of his master tapes. Crescent’s legal team felt otherwise, and sent new label president Jack Funk and newly named VP Shannon Williams (shown here re-signing The Thunderbolt Of The Middle West) down to Crowley to try and smooth things over and continue the arrangement he had with Young. J.D. would have none of it, and in the ensuing battle of wills, the last two Miller-produced Slim Harpo singles (including the future Jagger & Richards’ favorite, Shake Your Hips), were virtually ignored by the folks in Nashville and, consequently, by the record-buying public as well.

With his eye on the future, Harpo took advantage of a loophole in his contract with Miller to sign directly with the new regime at Excello. This was seen by J.D. as the final betrayal, and embroiled him in an extended legal battle with the label, one which he would eventually lose.

As Shannon Williams told John Broven in South To Louisiana: The Music Of The Cajun Bayous, “Well, of course, after we signed him the question was ‘What are we going to do with him now?’… Nashville just is not a Blues location, and the players are not here; let’s take him somewhere that we think maybe he can turn out a hit… We got in touch with this guy Ray Harris; he set the whole thing up, said he could get the pickers and Willie Mitchell and these guys that played there. It was like a house band, I guess, and they loved to do it.”  Martin Hawkins, author of Slim Harpo: Blues King Bee of Baton Rouge, sent me this great ad for an ‘All Star Rhythm & Blues Show’ in El Dorado, Arkansas (just over the Louisiana state line) in December of 1966. “The interesting thing is that he was part of a package led by Willie Mitchell,”  Hawkins said, “and may have been backed by Mitchell’s guys rather than carrying his own group… Harpo had Memphis in mind, even if he didn’t hatch a plan with anyone else.”  In other words, Slim might have let Williams and Ray Harris think it was all their idea.

“So we’d all go down to Memphis to do this and it turned out very well…” Williams went on to tell Broven, “He [Slim] loved it. He felt this was such a good switch; he was very up on this whole thing… I think the Hi session men got down with him. Willie Mitchell didn’t have much to do with the session; it was mostly directed by this fellow Harris… it didn’t seem like Harris was too much on for Harpo’s harmonica, but that of course is a trademark. We insisted on it… I recall the difficulty in mic’ing as to where Harpo could both do his guitar and his harp and sing. Played guitar on all the records, it was sort of ordinary.”

Hmmm… So, it was a known fact that Slim had recorded at Hi sometime in the Spring of 1967. In 2012, Broven and I asked Howard Grimes if he had ever worked on a session with Harpo – “Nope, that’s one I would remember,” he said, “I backed him up a few times when he came through Memphis, but I never cut with him.” In October of 2016, when I first got my hands on Reggie’s 1967 session log book, one of the first things I did was look for any mention of Slim’s visit, to no avail…

In May of 2020, when the late great Sherry Emmons Brugman sent me Bobby’s 1967 log book, BINGO!, there it was. The fabled session had been held on April 18th but, if that was the case, why hadn’t Reggie made note of it in his book? Well, the last date entered from his New York sojourn for Atlantic was the 15th, after which begins the first of those inexplicable ‘black holes’ in Reggie’s journal, with no entries at all for the ensuing two weeks. Although that may indicate that he hadn’t worked at all for the rest of the month of April, it seems highly unlikely.

The first record released from the session was the timeless Tip On In, which would climb to #37 R&B during that long hot Summer. Driven by what Colin Escott describes as “One of the most elegant grooves in all of R&B,” the bass, the drums and that shimmering rhythm guitar are just locked in behind Harpo’s ‘trademark’ harp and sly vocals. I’d say that’s Satch Arnold on drums and either Mike Leech or Tommy Cogbill on the bass – the question remains, though, is that Slim on guitar? Hawkins: “It is likely that Slim Plays the dry scratch that keeps time while Teenie Hodges plays lead, and in that case Slim must have overdubbed his harp solo”  Escott: “I don’t think Harpo could have played the through-riff AND sung. He could have overdubbed his vocal, but the guitar still sounds too professional. Sounds like a studio guy – no flubbed notes or changes.”  Hmmm…

I think I’d have to agree that the tremelo ‘scratch’ rhythm is being played by a ‘studio guy’ – it could be Reggie, or it could be Teenie Hodges (or even Cogbill), but there is no doubt in my mind that the lead guitarist here is Clarence Nelson! ‘That fellow Harris’ would have brought him in to ‘Blues things up a bit’ as he had done with Amos Patton a few months before and, as we mentioned in episode four, we know Nelson was in the house for the Ace Cannon session held the following day. Very cool! Bob Holmes, who Excello had recently hired as a producer and arranger, is listed as a co-writer on Part 1, which may have been to give him a share of the royalties, as he’s not credited on Part 2. In any event, this is just an awesome record all the way around… who knew there was that much ‘Swamp’ right there on South Lauderdale?

Even though it was the notation in Bobby Emmons’ book that opened this can of worms in the first place, there does not seem to be any keyboards on either side of Tip On In. They do appear, however, on Harpo’s next release from the session, with Bob Holmes (whom Williams described as “the respectable black front to the company”) now earning his ‘mechanicals’ via a producer’s credit. I’m Gonna Keep What I’ve Got, grooves along in the same elegant fashion, and features more of Clarence Nelson’s ‘vise-grip’ guitar work. According to Martin Hawkins, the flip of that single, the straight ahead Blues number I’ve Got To Be With You Tonight, was also cut at the Memphis session, as was Hey Little Lee, which was only released on 45 in France (go figure). The reverb-y lead guitar on both of these sides is played by someone else entirely, and I believe it to be ol’ Slim himself! This would reconcile the Williams’ comment about him ‘playing guitar on all the records’. Also, in Hawkins’ chapter on these recordings, he says that Harpo “…had recently taken to playing some electric lead,” then goes on to quote Slim’s wife Lovell, who said “He would never finish an engagement until he had played his guitar.”  There ya go, folks!

Speaking of Louisiana…

New Orleans’ Minit label was formed in 1959 by Joe Banashak and WMRY radio personality Larry McKinley. Once Ernie K-Doe’s Mother In Law went positively viral for Minit in 1961 (topping both the R&B and Pop charts), it ushered in the ‘second wave’ of popularity for Crescent City R&B. No doubt encouraged by that success, a local woman named Connie La Rocca (then working at her brother-in-law’s hoppin’ chicken restaurant on Carrolton Avenue) started up the Frisco label with WYLD deejay Harold Atkins in 1962. According to Earl King, “Harold was the key to Frisco’s success. Harold was a genius. He knew everybody in the business and could get records played. He was a soft-spoken person; a gentleman in every respect.”

After a couple of releases of his own, as ‘Al Adams‘ (and an awesome instrumental by Porgy & The Polka Dots), Hal and Connie signed local legend Danny White who was, without question, THE most popular entertainer in New Orleans. White’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye would become a local phenomenon that Fall, blaring from every juke box and car radio in town but, due to a lack of any real distribution, only managed to ‘bubble under’ the Hot 100 nationally. Undaunted, Frisco continued to issue great sides on White, with Earl King’s Loan Me A Handkerchief picked up by ABC-Paramount in early 1964, along with two more ABC 45s released later that year.

1964 was also the year that Hal Atkins got a job at WDIA and relocated to Memphis. With his gregarious personality, and his continuing ability to ‘get records played’, he would soon became a player on the local music scene. At that point, Isaac Hayes and his new songwriting partner David Porter had yet to realize their full potential at Stax, and were looking for an outlet for their considerable talents. Atkins was impressed with what they had to offer, and convinced Connie La Rocca to fly Danny White up to Memphis to record.

According to the liner notes of the 1998 Ace release The Frisco Records Story, compiled by John Broven and Tad Jones, the session on White was at ‘Hi’ that Summer, anchored by Bowlegs Miller, Floyd Newman and what would eventually become known as The Memphis Horns. That (?) there no doubt refers to Miller’s bass player, Cleve ‘Frog’ Shears, whom we met last episode. The interesting thing is the inclusion of Howard Grimes and Teenie Hodges on the list, a full two years before I thought they’d arrived there on South Lauderdale. I asked John Broven about those A.F.of M. contracts, “I’m afraid all the Frisco files were submerged by Katrina,” he said, so I called Howard, but the name Danny White didn’t ring any bells. Hmmm…

Composed, ‘Arranged & Conducted by D. Porter & I. Hayes’, the four tracks cut that day would comprise White’s last two Frisco singles, the best of the lot being Can’t Do Nothing Without You, named by Sir Shambling as a ‘personal favourite’, “…with White snarling and growling his way through the lyric in fine style.” Just excellent stuff, man, I agree – but it just doesn’t sound like The Bulldog on the drum kit to me, you know? I sent the tracks down to Howard (who doesn’t do the ‘computer’ thing) and he’s gonna listen to them and report back…

Stay Tuned!

With Connie La Rocca winding down things at Frisco, Hal Atkins decided to try his hand at forming another label with his newfound compadres Hayes and Porter and (wait for it…) Chips Moman! Isaac had been one of the first artists through the door at American, cutting a single there for Youngstown in 1962, and knew Chips well. Calling the label Genie, they brought in a local kid who had also been having a hard time ‘breaking in’ at Stax, Homer Banks, in early 1965. The soaring Lady Of Stone (a ‘Hamp Production’, as in Hayes-Atkins-Moman-Porter) was selected as a ‘regional breakout’ in Billboard that Summer, along with a Youngstown single cut there on Thomas Street around the same time. Although Homer’s single never quite broke out, the other single would become the one that put American Sound on the map

In Rob Bowman’s indispensable Soulsville, U.S.A., he reports that cutting the Genie single with Moman (of all people) had Jim Stewart ‘more than a little piqued’. “Somehow or another, the word got out that I was responsible,” Banks told Bowman, “I lured [Hayes and Porter] into doing it. That closed the door even tighter. For a long time I was barred from the studio. I wasn’t allowed to come in there.” Be that as it may, the incident may have been the first step towards Stewart further appreciating what he had there in Hayes and Porter.

Perhaps that’s why he consented to allow Atkins to cut Danny White there as one of the last ‘outside sessions’ held on East McElmore in late 1965. Hayes and Porter’s groovin’ A side Keep My Woman Home, is right up there with any of the other Stax/Volt records cut there at the time. The flip (with Steve Cropper now joining Isaac and David as a songwriter), I’m Dedicating My Life To You is even better. Wow! It seems a shame that Stewart didn’t sign White as an artist right then and there, but he may still have been annoyed enough with Atkins to make sure that didn’t happen. Instead the single was released on the one-off Atteru label before being leased to New York based Atlas where it disappeared without a trace.

Shortly after Lew Chudd at Imperial purchased Minit Records from Joe Banashak in 1963, he sold the whole shooting match to Liberty, who then moved all operations to the West Coast and discontinued Minit as a subsidiary label entirely. With the dawn of the ‘Soul Era’ upon them in early 1966, Liberty wanted to get back in the game and re-activated Minit as their R&B outlet under the direction of the energetic Renny Roker. Roker had no qualms about swooping into Memphis and picking up the crumbs that fell off the Stax table. On April 23rd, Billboard announced that the ‘new’ Minit’s first release would be by none other than McLemore Avenue outcast Homer Banks. The article went on to say that the single was being recorded in Memphis by ‘an outside production company’. “It was Bowlegs,” Howard Grimes told me, “Bowlegs knew everybody and had the connections, he was the one rounding up the musicians up to do those sessions” One of those musicians, we now believe, was Reggie Young.

You may recall, as mentioned back on the 1966 Discography Page, that Young kept two log books in 1966, the second one being an attempt to ‘clean up’ and keep better track of his session work. A notation for ‘Peacock’ on April 16th (a week before the Billboard article) had us mystified. I mean, there didn’t appear to be any evidence of Don Robey cutting at Hi before he brought O.V. Wright there that November. A ‘memoranda’ that read ‘Izak’ didn’t help matters either. After being clarified in the second book as referring to ‘Isaac Hayes’, that actually made things worse. We were like, Huh? Now, due to the dogged persistence of Mark Nicholson, I think we might have figured it out.

Arranged by Gene ‘Bowlegs’ Miller, there is absolutely no doubt that the supremely excellent Fighting To Win has Reggie’s guitar all over it. Banks shares the composer’s credit with Hayes and Porter on this one, and with Deanie Parker (another Stax employee who had yet to come into her own), on the plug side, A Lot Of Love (think Spencer Davis might have owned a copy?). How this was not a major hit (I mean beyond the Twisted Wheel ‘Northern Soul’ boys) is beyond me… These are definitely two of the ‘3 tunes’ that Reggie says he cut that day, with the third one issued as a B side that September, Do You Know What, another Hayes and Porter gem.

So, what’s with the reference to Peacock? Something Howard Grimes said may hold a clue; “Bowlegs was working for Don Robey…” At first I was, like, ‘Ummm… no’ until I noticed this entry in Reggie’s 1966 book for September 28th. Hmmm… As we discussed last episode, the former Fernwood Studio on North Main had been purchased by Don Robey and was run by Earl Forest and Gilbert Caple, another dis-affected member of the Stax family. The upper left hand corner notation in Reggie’s book always indicated the name of the studio where a session was held (as in ‘Sun’, ‘Pepper’, ‘American’ etc.) and, with ‘Peacock’ being the name of Robey’s primary label and Houston nightclub empire, that may have been how the studio was known in those days – a hypothesis I have yet to corroborate… Detectives?

With artists like Louis Jordan, The Ink Spots and Buddy Johnson, Decca Records had been a major player in the post-war ‘race’ records market. Once Owen Bradley took over the reins of their Nashville division in the late fifties, it had become primarily a Country label. Now, just as we’ve seen with Mercury, Decca was looking to recapture their slice of the lucrative R&B pie.

Washington D.C. disk-jockey Al Bell had formed the Safice label with former member of The Rainbows, Chester Simmons, and Falcons founder Eddie Floyd in 1964. Although distributed by Atlantic, their releases failed to make much noise outside of Bell’s WUST listening area. In Eddie Floyd’s great book Knock! Knock! Knock! On Wood, he relates, “Al Bell was benefiting from his closer ties to Atlantic. Joe Medlin, the label’s head of national promotion, introduced Al to Milt Gabler, who ran A&R at Decca. Milt was well known, a sophisticated jazz man, and he brought us the singer Grover Mitchell… he sung a ballad that I wrote with Chester and Al, called I Will Always Have Faith in You. Nobody really heard it at the time, but it’s a song with a deep gospel feel to it that would come back for me many times over.” – most notably, when Carla Thomas took it to #11 R&B a few years later. Eddie had first met Carla (by then already an established star at Stax), when she was attending Howard University in 1965. She had been impressed with his songwriting, and agreed to cut a couple of demos for Bell and Floyd that Spring. “It must have been some kind of karma,” she said later. The kind of karma that brought all three of them back to Memphis to cut one of those ‘Isbell-Floyd’ compositions, Stop! Look What You’re Doing at Stax, and send it to #30 R&B that Summer.

On the basis of that success, Jim Stewart would allow Safice to cut another of those last ‘outside’ sessions there on Eddie and Roy Arlington, whose soulful rendition of ‘Isbell-Floyd’ tune, Everybody Makes A Mistake Sometimes just lays me out.

At the time, Stax was in need of a full-time promotion man and, once Jerry Wexler agreed to pay half his salary, they hired Al Bell in October of ’65. According to Rob Bowman, Bell was “…taken around the country and shown the tricks of the trade by Atlantic promotion man and longtime friend Joe Medlin.” Medlin had been one of the first artists signed to Atlantic in 1948, before recording for a variety of labels in the 1950s. He began his career as an A&R and promotion man for United Artists in 1962, and secured his position there at Atlantic shortly thereafter. In August of 1966, he received the National Association of Radio Announcers Dave Dixon Award (named after the NARA president who had perished in a tragic accident in 1964) for his distinguished service at Atlantic. Within a month, he had resigned.

Further demonstrating their commitment to resuscitating their R&B division, Decca had hired Medlin away from Atlantic for what must have been a princely sum that September. “I know about 500 R&B deejays by name – and I know the names of about 300 of their wives,” Medlin told Billboard shortly thereafter, “When I want play on a record I visit the deejay or call him up, ask about the family, chew the fat awhile, and relax. More often than not, he’ll ask me what looks like it might happen.” Joe knew that at that point, more often than not, what might happen might happen in Memphis.

One of the first things Medlin did was sign Danny White. Although I’m sure he would have rather cut him with his friends at Stax, by then the doors had been closed to outsiders for good. Medlin booked a session at Hi instead, with Bowlegs (once again) serving as the arranger. There has been some mystery about when this might have been held, as Reggie makes no mention of White in his 1966 book.

According to the Discography Of American Historical Recordings, Decca logged the four song session as being held on October 12th, a date for which Reggie had no entry. At first I thought that perhaps the actual date was the September 28th ‘Bo Legs’ session discussed earlier, but now I believe it was held the week before, on the 20th. I hadn’t associated the ‘from N.Y.’ with Decca, but there it is plainly stated on the label… duh!

With Eddie Floyd’s blockbuster Knock On Wood then climbing the charts on its way to #1 R&B, Decca chose Floyd composition Taking Inventory as White’s first release. Although predicted to reach the R&B singles chart in Billboard that November, it didn’t. If our calculations are correct, the B side of that single, then, would be the first recording of Don Bryant’s Cracked Up Over You which, as we’ve seen, would be cut by both Lee Rogers and Junior Parker shortly thereafter. This may well be the best version of ’em all, with Danny just going for it over those kickin’ drum breaks… Satch Arnold? Sammy Creason? Howard Grimes? Hmmm…

Released in March of 1967, You Can Never Keep A Good Man Down (another Don Bryant tune), would become the next single pulled from that session. It was selected by Billboard as ‘destined for top-of-the-chart honors’, but somehow that failed to materialize. Just a great record, punctuated by Reggie’s unmistakable guitar, you have to wonder why it didn’t make it – especially in light of all of Medlin’s ‘fat chewin’… The flip was the last of the ‘4 Tunes’ Danny cut with Bowlegs that day, another stab at his big Sugar Town smash, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. It’s not bad, but I do miss those Irving Banister guitar fills… just sayin’. All four of these sides were ‘Produced by D & A Productions’ – anybody have any idea who that might have been?

A month later, Joe Medlin was back at Hi with a young lady he had discovered singing in a Church Street nightclub in his hometown of Norfolk, Virginia. Maydie Myles had come up singing Gospel, but took the name of Debbie Taylor when she began performing R&B. With Medlin now credited as producer (and no mention of Bowlegs on the label), Don Bryant’s I Get The Blues sure sounds like a Gene Miller arrangement to me. That fat baritone, the two guitars (Cogbill and Reggie?), the background singers, those smokin’ drums… another hidden South Lauderdale gem, folks!

Reggie would log one more session in 1966 for Decca, on November 14th, with ‘Bo-Leggs’ listed as the leader. Although we may never know for sure, at first we thought that may have been when these two unreleased tracks, discovered among the Decca masters, were recorded, but now I don’t think so…

The first of the tracks is a high voltage duet featuring both Debbie and Danny White, I Don’t Mind Overtime With You. Whew! The second, I’m Gonna Use What I’ve Got To Get What I Need, is by Danny White and is, in my opinion, every bit as good as the issued recordings, if not better. Initially, I thought the guitar player on here was definitely Reggie but, after repeated listenings, I became convinced it was someone else… I think it’s Bobby Womack. Wait… what?

Catalogued as ‘Overtime’, according to the Discography of American Hisorical Recordings, the duet was recorded on June 30, 1967, with consecutive matrix numbers assigned to two Danny White tracks, with ‘[Unknown Title(s)]’ no doubt referring to the unreleased song featured above. On June 30th, both Reggie and Bobby had logged a Goldwax session at Sun, followed by a Don Bryant session at Hi. This could mean, of course, that Decca hadn’t assigned those matrix numbers to these earlier recorded tracks until then (as we’ve seen), or that they were cut somewhere else, without Emmons and Young. The Atlantic Records Discography places both Bowlegs and Womack in the house at American the following day for the start of the Wilson Pickett sessions on July 1st. What if they got there the day before?

As we saw last episode, Bowlegs had worked as an arranger at American for Mercury in May. Medlin, I’m sure, was itching to get Decca in the door there as well and may have booked a session, leaving it up to Miller to ’round up’ the musicians. With Reggie unavailable, Bowlegs (who ‘knew everybody’) could have heard that Womack was in town and hired him instead. With Moman’s former partners Hayes and Porter also on board as songwriters (and defacto producers), it seems extremely possible that those June 30th sessions may have been held at 827 Thomas.

The magnificent Check Yourself would go on to chart in early 1968, and whoah, is it good! A slightly modified version of the song had also been cut on Ruby Johnson at Stax, but had remained unreleased – possibly because of Debbie’s smoldering take on it here. Think it was cut at American?

Lending creedence to the theory that the Debbie and Danny session was actually held on the date Decca said it was, is the fact that the Gladys Tyler session they logged as being held on March 24th is confirmed by Bobby Emmons’ book. Gladys, like Debbie, hailed from Virginia and had cut a single for Decca subsidiary Coral in 1963. After another release on the tiny Brooks label out of Richmond, Decca had re-signed her in 1966, pairing her with Ray Scott and The Scottsmen. Scott’s real name apparently was Walter Spriggs, whom All Music describes as a ‘musician/manager/songwriter/hustler’. Spriggs had hooked up with Jesse Stone at Atco in the late fifties, before changing his moniker and label-hopping a bit before Decca picked him and Gladys up shortly before Joe Medlin got there.

Medlin had booked both of them into Hi for that March ’67 session, while heavily tapping the Stax talent pool around the corner. With Bowlegs getting the label credit this time as arranger, the producer is listed as James Cross. James had started out working at The Satellite Record Shop before engineering late night sessions for Chalice, the Gospel subsidiary that Al Bell had created soon after he came on the scene. Jim Stewart shut down Chalice in late 1966, after only eight releases. According to Rob Bowman, Cross would then wed “…one of the great unkown Stax singers, Wendy Rene (nee Mary Frierson). Being close to Packy Axton, Cross was never a favorite of Jim Stewart’s.” I’m sure he was only too happy to help out the competition.

Decca selected two more Hayes & Porter tunes for the plug sides of the 45s cut at the session, but check out these two awesome Mack Rice flips. Just as we’ve seen with Mercury, Rice’s music was now in demand since Mustang Sally tore up the charts for Atlantic earlier in the year. Gladys is really belting it out on the rockin’ Mr. Green, Mrs. Green, with Reggie’s galvanic guitar and that barking baritone combining to make this one a keeper! Yeah, baby! The Ray Scott record, Can’t Get Over Losing You, isn’t far behind. Ray’s pleading delivery over those hypnotic background vocals, Bobby’s piano, Reggie’s bluesy guitar and that driving bass, this is just pure Memphis, y’all! As far as I can tell, these are the only tunes James Cross was ever credited as producing. What a shame.

Decca was back on South Lauderdale in November, for a session ‘directed’ by Willie Mitchell, as Bowlegs had apparently moved on by then. The producers are credited as Joe Medlin and Jack Gibson. Quite a colorful character, ‘Jack The Rapper’ had launched the first black-owned radio sation in the nation in 1949, become the founder and guiding force behind NARA in 1955, and had joined Berry Gordy at Motown in 1963. Landing him for Decca’s renewed R&B resurgence in late 1966 must have been seen as quite the coup. I’m not sure if Jack and Joe were present at the studio when they recorded it, but Tony Ashley’s hard-hitting vocals on We Must Have Love are just pure Soul, with Reggie’s incisive guitar mixed right up front, no doubt at Willie Michell’s ‘direction’. As we saw in episode four, Willie was still including Reggie and Bobby on sessions at Hi as late as November of 1967, and we believe this to have been another indication of that…

Ashley may have been one of the ‘two others’ noted in Emmons’ book on November 6th, with ‘Jackson’ no doubt referring to George – or in this case ‘Bart’. What’s up with that? Well, as you may recall, we had speculated that it was ‘music industry attorney and agent’ Alex Migliara who was behind recording George’s lone 1967 Hi single that Summer, and that perhaps Jackson had failed to mention that he was still under contract to Goldwax at the time. In any event (although I’m sure the name change didn’t fool anybody in Memphis), when Migliara arranged to have this one picked up by Decca, he had decided to play it safe (while helping himself to a piece of both the songwriting and production credits in the process). The rockin’ Dancing Man just cooks along, with Jackson’s wit and way with words hinting at his future work in Muscle Shoals…

1967 Episode Six Playlist

Special thanks go to Howard Grimes, Charlie Chalmers, Rob Bowman, John Ridley, Martin Hawkins, Colin Escott, John Broven, Mark Nicholson, and 45cat.

1967 Episode Five – A Touch Of The Blues

YouTube Playlist of all tracks below…

(here’s a quick tip, if you scroll down and hit ‘play’ on the playlist first, you can listen to it while you read the notes. Thanks!)

With Stax cranking out hit after hit around the corner, by 1967 other major record companies began looking for ways to cash in on some of that Memphis Magic. Let’s check it out…

One of the first people to book an ‘outside’ session at Hi was Don Robey, who would cut some of the greatest Soul records ever made there on O.V. Wright in late 1966. Those Back Beat releases had yet to see any chart action (although they soon would), but Robey was apparently impressed enough to record Bobby Bland, his biggest star, there in early 1967. In Charles Farley’s Soul Of The Man, he reports that the session took place on Valentine’s Day, but both Reggie and Bobby’s books confirm that the session was actually held on February 6th. Farley goes on to list the three sides that were cut that day as Lover With A Reputation (which, in true Robey fashion, stayed ‘in the can’ until 1970), Set Me Free (an Lp only track), and the sublime A Touch Of The Blues, with Reggie’s tasty Blues licks helping to propel it to #30 R&B in early 1968. What a great record…

The songwriter credit here reads ‘D.Malone’ which, as we all know, stands for Deadric Malone, the nefarious alias that Robey employed as he routinely ripped off many an actual composer. As I said nine years ago, “The source of much speculation over the years as to whether or not this was an actual person (some said it was his wife), I’ve come to believe he just made it up. It was the ever vigilant [Preston] Lauterbach who pointed out to me that there are two Memphis streets which follow each other in quick succession as you cross over Lamar Avenue on Airways Boulevard on the way out of town – Deadrick and Malone! One can only imagine the wily Robey on his way to the airport, seizing on this random sequence as his new nom de plume…” Incredible, huh?

Robey would bring O.V. Wright back to South Lauderdale in August to cut three more sides, one of which was the soulful What About You, which would enter the Billboard charts the same day as the Bland single that November, and climb as high as #48 R&B. Written by Don Bryant (although the flip was ‘composed’ by Ol’ Deadric), it was only the second of O.V.’s records to credit Willie Mitchell as producer, a role which Mitchell would continue to play until Wright’s sad demise in 1980.

I never realized, until I started working on this episode, that Don Robey’s sudden interest in recording at Hi in September of ’66 was probably precipitated by the fact that Mercury had decided to cut Junior Parker there the month before. At this point, I’m not sure of the exact details of Junior leaving Duke and signing with Mercury that Summer, but I’m sure Robey was none too pleased about losing a man who had been one of his biggest stars. The big label was certainly going for it, importing Bobby Robinson to Memphis as Parker’s producer and all that, but Robey may have had the last laugh after all. Despite being picked as a ‘best bet’ in Cashbox, Mercury’s Just Like A Fish (with an uncredited Howard Grimes on drums), eluded the Billboard charts entirely, while a 45 Robey issued on Duke shortly after that, Man Or Mouse, enjoyed a ten week run on their R&B Top 50, peaking at #27 in early 1967, scoring higher than Parker had in almost five years.

A check of John Broven’s coveted copy of The Blues Discography, reveals that Man Or Mouse was cut in Memphis on August 4, 1966 – three days after the first Mercury session on Junior listed by Reggie in his log book. I guess Robey was never one to care much about contractual details! On the flip, Wait For Another Day, ‘Malone’ shares the songwriting credit with Gilbert Caple and Larry Davis. As we discussed in our Clarence Nelson investigation, after leaving Satellite, Gilbert Caple had hooked up with Earl Forest at the former Fernwood studio on N. Main, which is no doubt where the session was held, with Larry Davis on guitar. Robey was one slippery character!

Mercury was definitely not amused, and ran this announcement of their plans to expand their R&B presence in The Bluff City on the front page of Billboard in January, while the Duke 45 was still on the charts. “Roy Dea and I went all the way back to the first grade in Shreveport,” Jerry Kennedy told me, “and I brought him to Nashville to work with me in the mid-sixties… there was a big to-do in Memphis. Irv Green and Steinberg came down, the President and Vice-President of Mercury, and threw a cocktail party, the whole deal. The office was located in the original Holiday Inn building, and I brought Roy in to help me run it.”

What the announcement doesn’t mention is that, according to Cash Box, Mercury had already hired promotion man Boo Frazier to ‘helm’ their R&B division in November of ’66, the same week that Bobby Robinson was at Hi with Junior Parker. The article goes on (and on) about Frazier’s past accomplishments, but it’s interesting to note that, just prior to inking his pact with Mercury, Boo had been the ‘eastern representative’ for Don Robey at Duke-Peacock. Hmmm… I wonder how ol’ Deadric felt about that?

The arranger credited on all the Mercury Junior Parker sessions held at Hi in 1966 was Gene Miller. As we mentioned in episode one, ‘Bowlegs’ and Willie Mitchell had a ‘falling out’ at Hi right around this time. According to Howard Grimes, Miller would kind of ‘improvise’ a little while reading Mitchell’s horn charts, with Willie scolding him to “Just play what’s on the damn paper!” As Willie’s star began to shine brighter there on South Lauderdale, Bowlegs no doubt saw the writing on the wall, and hitched his own to the Mercury operation, where he would serve as their ‘secret weapon’

Mercury sent Boo Frazier to Memphis in February to work as a ‘co-producer’ with Roy Dea. Their first assignment was a four side session on Margie Hendrix at Hi on Valentine’s Day. The label had signed Margie in 1965, after her tumultous reign as a Raelette, and issued two singles on her that went nowhere. With Bowlegs’ cookin’ arrangement, and Reggie’s trademark guitar work, I Call You Lover But You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Tramp (written by Mack Rice) is just about as good as it gets. The second 45 released from those sessions is right up there as well, with Margie giving Otis Redding a run for his money on Restless, which was written by Curtis Johnson. Johnson had started out at Satellite as a member of The Chips (re-christened The Astors after the Moman split), and was now with Bowlegs’ band. Just pure Memphis ‘in yo’ face’ Soul, it’s hard to believe neither of these records connected with the public.

According to Chuck Berry, “On June 17, 1966, after much negotiation, I signed with Mercury Records, obtaining a sixty thousand dollar advance on future royalties.” After an ill-conceived album of re-recordings of most of his Chess hits fell on deaf ears, Mercury handed him over to Dea and Frazier in Memphis, who booked him into Hi and cut an album’s worth of material on March 22nd and 23rd. A major guitar hero of Reggie Young’s, “I cut an album with Chuck Berry,” was one of the first things he told me when we started talking about all this. The problem is, however, that Berry appears to have just been ‘phoning it in’, and the record just isn’t that good. On the title track, Back To Memphis, released as a single that April, it’s cool to hear Reggie and Chuck trading licks, but overall the whole project feels like a missed opportunity.

By contrast, Memphis Soul, the album Boo and Roy produced at Hi ten days later on Bowlegs’ organ player Jesse Butler, is just da bomb! Released on Mercury subsidiary (or is it the other way around?), Philips, it’s a lost testament to just how great the Bowlegs Miller outfit was. Check out Butler killing it on that big fat Hammond (the same one Charles Hodges would come to own within a few years?). The entire Lp is phenomenal (including the obligatory cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis’), but, Drown In My Own Tears, the plug side of the single they pulled from the album just knocks me out. I asked Charlie Chalmers if that was him blowing that amazing sax on here, “Yeah, that’s me, but I didn’t finish playin’ the whole verse. That’s not like me, to stop playin’ in the middle of a solo. Oh well, they must have mixed it out,” he said, “I did lots of sessions with Jesse… but, he had a punctuality problem. You never knew if he was going to show up to the session until he got there, so that didn’t help him any.” I guess not, as he continues to fly way under the radar. Thanks, Charlie!

As Reggie and Bobby began to make the move to American, Mercury wasn’t far behind. They apparently had signed Norman West away from Joe Cuoghi, and cut two sides on him at American on April 18th, possibly because Hi was booked (more on that next episode). This sweet cover of the Sonny Thompson penned Little Willie John classic Let Them Talk was released on their Smash subsidiary, and features some of Bobby’s best Gospel-flavored piano work. Although there’s no mention of Bowlegs on the label, I’m betting that’s his horn charts. Kind of like Robey had with Junior Parker, Hi would release the M.O.C. single on Norman we talked about last episode within a few weeks of this session but, hey, at least the material was already ‘in the can’!

As we discussed in the 1966 notes, Shelby Singleton had cut Jerry Lee Lewis at Sun with Reggie that July for a Smash single that hadn’t become one. Singleton had moved on since then, and Jerry Kennedy was left to run that show. As Kennedy told us for the Soul Of The Memphis Boys project: “I’m not sure whose idea it was to cut the Soul My Way album on Jerry Lee, it might have been Shelby’s, but at that point we figured we had nothing to lose. It was Roy’s idea to cut it at American with some of Chips’ folks, and he was right. He asked me to come in as producer…all in all it was a great experience.”

As Jerry Kennedy told us this past Summer, he liked to play guitar on his productions whenever possible. Having Chips behind the board at American certainly afforded him that opportunity, and we were able to confirm that thanks to the session details provided by Jay Halsey. On It’s A Hang Up Baby, the plug side of the single pulled from the album, you can hear Kennedy and Young working the groove together, kind of like Jerry and Billy Sanford had on Oh, Pretty Woman. As with Roy Dea, Jerry knew Reggie (and Sanford) from the Shreveport days and fit right in with ‘Chips’ folks’. It may not quite be ‘Soul’, but it’s still a damn good record.

Mercury had signed Gloria Lynne to their Fontana subsidiary in 1965, where she would score her biggest hit (#8 R&B) with a Hal Mooney produced version of Watermelon Man, featuring new lyrics she had written for the Herbie Hancock standard.

Nothing much seemed to be happening after that and so, just as with Jerry Lee, Mercury decided to try and cut her as more of a ‘Soul’ artist, booking her into American a week later to record The Other Side Of Gloria Lynne. Despite Charlie Fach’s call in Billboard to ‘get material’ to Roy Dea for the album, it’s mostly covers of other people’s R&B hits which, in my opinion, is rarely a good idea. A Dea and Frazier production, with Moman’s Memphis Boys playing Bowlegs’ arrangements – how bad could it be? Gloria’s take on the 1964 Soul Sisters’ R&B charter, I Can’t Stand It, would be the single released from the album that July, and is classic AGP all the way, with Tommy Cogbill and Gene Chrisman solidly in the pocket, Charlie Chalmers’ beefy saxophone, and Lynne just belting it out. It could have been a hit in its own right but, alas, it wasn’t.

This next one may have been cut at Hi during two Mercury sessions noted in Reggie’s book on April 4th and 5th, but it seems odd that he wouldn’t have listed Junior Parker as the artist, especially since he had for those late 1966 dates. The fact that I Can’t Put My Finger On It is a Donnie Fritts composition, however, has led to some speculation that it may have been cut at Fame in Muscle Shoals, so we asked David Hood; “…with Charlie Chalmers, Bowlegs Miller and Reggie on it, I would definitely say it is a Memphis cut, possibly American.” Thanks David, we concur. I absolutely love Bowlegs’ funky arrangement here, with the baritone holding down the bottom while, once again, Charlie Chalmers just wails on the sax break. Yeah, Baby! Breaking into the R&B Top 50 in August, it would be the last record to have ‘Produced by Roy Dea & Boo Frazier’ printed on the label.

Shortly after it was released, buried deep in Billboard’s back pages, it was announced that Roy had ‘departed’ Mercury Records, with no further explanation given. I’m not sure what happened there, but I imagine ‘creative differences’ may have had something to do with it.

Let’s talk for a minute here about Charlie Chalmers, and how important a figure he is in American music. In addition to his own great production work at Sam Phillips we talked about earlier, by 1967 he had become one of the most ‘in demand’ horn men in the nation. Between Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett’s records for Atlantic, Charlie’s saxophone would spend an incredible EIGHTEEN WEEKS at NUMBER ONE on Billboard’s R&B chart in ’67 alone! Small wonder he seemed to be on just about every record cut in Memphis as well. “I was working somewhere everyday it seems like,” Charlie told me, “a few short years, but countless sessions. A magic time!” Magic indeed!

The next two singles to emanate from Mercury’s Memphis operation were issued back-to-back in September. The first of these was Junior Parker’s take on the Brook Benton standard Hurtin’ Inside. According to the liner notes of I’m So Satisfied, it was cut in August while Junior’s previous release was still on the charts. The label credit now reads ‘A Boo Frazier Production’, with no mention of Roy Dea. Both Reggie and Bobby logged a session on Margie Hendrix on June 6th at American where they would cut another Mack Rice gem, Don’t Take Your Good Thing, which was the second release.

Another ‘Boo Frazier Production’, I’m sure he didn’t have to do a whole lot considering all the talent in the room. With Margie’s swaggering delivery, Bowlegs punchy horn lines, and Moman’s American Group just locked in, it’s difficult to understand why this record wasn’t a hit. I’m beginning to get the feeling here that, once Roy pulled out, Mercury may have lost interest and not put much promotion behind Boo’s productions… I don’t know.

Bobby Hebb’s Everything Is Coming Up Roses was released on Philips around the same time (yes, that’s Charlie Chalmers on the sax). With this side of the 45 written by Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, and the flip by Darryl Carter (both published by Press Music), I’d say it’s pretty much a lock that it was cut at American… only neither Reggie nor Bobby mention the session in their books. There may be a reason for that. While still a ‘Boo Frazier Production’, under that on the label it reads ‘Produced by: Curtis Johnson, Cleve Shears, Jesse Butler’. Now, why would that be? Well, Cleve ‘Frog’ Shears was Bowlegs’ bass player, and we’ve already met the other two guys. I’m thinking that Frazier used Bowlegs’ band on this one, for one reason or another, hence the mention on the label. I’m not sure why, but this would be the last of the Frazier productions to credit Miller as arranger.

Frazier’s next trio of releases, although still listing Johnson, Shears and Butler as co-producers in one form or another, would be arranged by Gilbert Caple. As alluded to earlier, I believe this would indicate that they were cut at the North Main Street studio run by Earl Forest. Could there have been some ‘bad blood’ between Boo, Bowlegs and his boys? We may never know, I guess.

Gilbert Caples’ arrangement of Helen Davis’ That’s My Man (another Curtis Johnson tune) is, in my opinion, right up there with the stuff Ruby Johnson had been cutting across town at Stax. Dig as I might, there doesn’t seem to be any information out there about Ms. Davis… detectives? Released around the same time, Norman West’s Words Won’t Say (How Much You Mean To Me) was written by Wylie Sappington, composer of Don Bryant’s equally ‘deep’ Is That Asking Too Much, which we discussed last episode. According to Sir Shambling, Norman’s soulful side here is “one of the best unknown soul ballads from the city. Pure Memphis magic.” I couldn’t agree more, yet both of these great records would sink without a trace.

According to Michael Ruppli’s The Mercury Labels: A Discography, the following consecutive matrix numbers after the West single were issued as both sides of Mercury 32731, by a group called The Shadows. I didn’t think that referred to Cliff Richard’s UK chart toppers, so I started looking around. The record wasn’t listed on 45cat, not on Discogs, not on eBay, yet somehow it turned up on YouTube. 

It was next to impossible to read much information off of the low resolution scans on the video, so I decided to look up the composers on the BMI Repertoire database. The names didn’t mean anything to me, and at first I thought it must have been some kind of typo, but then I started googling and asking around. Thanks to John Ridley, Martin Goggin, Mark Nicholson, John Broven and ol’ Jukebox George, I’ve been able to get a better handle on who these Shadows might have been…

Fonnie ‘Tuna’ Harley

Like Curtis Johnson’s Astors, Memphis vocal group The Lyrics started out recording with Chips Moman at Satellite. When Jim Stewart passed on releasing the tapes, Chips took them over to Slim Wallace at Fernwood who did. The group would go on to have the inaugural release on Goldwax in 1963, before their lead singer, Percy Milem, decided to leave the group and pursue a solo career, resulting in some truly great records. As we saw in episode three, Reggie and Bobby had cut two sessions at Sun with Percy for Goldwax in June. What I hadn’t realized, is that there was another member of The Lyrics who had remained active in the music business, first tenor Fonnie ‘Tuna’ Harley. “My Mom was a school teacher, and she said she wanted to be different,” Harley told Martin Goggin in Juke Blues 66, “so she called me ‘Fonnie’ and my sister ‘Donnie’… Donnie said ‘I can sing, let’s do something together’.”

Tuna went on to tell Goggin, “We organized a group called Act III with a guy named LaVorn Smith. We cut a ballad called I Can Feel The Tears… over at Sonic Studios with Roland Janes. Donnie did the lead and Lavorn did the arrangement.” Fonnie told Goggin that the single had been released on his own Harley label in 1967, but our research seems to indicate that it may have actually been cut in 1970, and that may indeed be Reggie playing that amazing guitar…

The single that was actually released in 1967 was the aforementioned Mercury 72731 [now added to 45cat by Jukebox George], with the copyrights of both sides being registered that October. I’ll tell you what, Donnie Harley was one great singer! Check out the movin’ and groovin’ Beautiful Heaven and the sweet uptown Soul of Time Is Running Out. Both tunes were co-authored by Fonnie and Donnie and arranged by Gilbert Caple, with Curtis Johnson and Cleve Shears listed as Boo Frazier’s co-producers. A solid record all the way around, how is it that it is virtually nowhere to be found? John Broven thinks that perhaps Mercury realized the conflict with the group’s name and, with the UK Shadows then signed to Epic in the US, pulled the record to avoid any legal problems with CBS. I’d say that sounds about right… ugh.*

A similar thing might have happened with Act III, as there was another group recording under that name for Larry Uttal at Mala/Bell. In 1965, Charles Stewart produced a single on Texas vocal group The Van Dykes and released it on his own Hue label. When Mala picked it up for national distribution, it climbed to #24 R&B in early ’66, and three more chart hits would follow. According to the Goggin article, Fonnie’s friend Willie Bean convinced Stewart to re-issue the Harley single on Hue but, apparently to avoid any conflict with Mala, he changed the name of the group to Gents & The Lady. It was the astute Mark Nicholson who pointed out this entry in Reggie’s 1970 log book for an overdub session on September 22nd… I’d say he’s our guitarist!

The ‘Trump’ notation refers, not to the future orange president, but to the unfortunately named Capitol subsidiary label run by Tommy Cogbill. Just about a month earlier, Cogbill had produced a great two-sider on them, under yet another moniker, Donnie, Fonnie & LaVorn. A Woman Who’ll Let You Be A Man is just great, and reminiscent of the material Tommy had been producing on The Masqueraders around the same time… only nobody seemed to notice.

Changing their name once again to Numbers, Fonnie and Donnie would work with Curtis Johnson (who had gone on to become a member of proto-funk outfit Brothers Unlimited), and cut the disco-era Got To Pull Away as the sole release on the Rolashed label in 1977. I’m lovin’ it!! Sadly, Fonnie Harley passed on in Memphis in 2017. Donnie moved to Texas and, as far as we can tell, is still around… talk about under-appreciated! If you ever read this, Donnie, thank you!

“…um, red, I thought we were talking about 1967.”  Oh yeah, sorry.

Just as with Junior Parker, Mercury had signed Roy Head away from Don Robey. Head had barely managed to crawl out of the 90s on the Hot 100 in 1966, so I’m sure Robey wasn’t too broken up about losing him. For his big label debut, Boo Frazier brought him to American in September to cut Mickey Newberry’s Got Down On Saturday (Sunday In The Rain). One of the coolest cats ever, Roy’s delivery here puts you in mind of The Hombres’ Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out), which would begin it’s climb to #12 on the Billboard Hot 100 within a few days of this session.

Billboard had also predicted that Roy’s effort here would put him ‘back on top in short order’, but it didn’t. ‘The American Studio Group’ shares the production credit on this one which, as far as I can tell, was the last of Mercury’s Memphis ‘Boo Frazier Productions’.

In late 1965, Mercury had decided to discontinue it’s Blue Rock subsidiary, which had been the Chicago label’s primary outlet for R&B product. A decision which led directly, I believe, to their increased presence in Memphis. After the lack of any real chart action on the records we discussed above, Mercury opted to re-activate Blue Rock in 1968, naming our man Boo Frazier as ‘director of artist relations and national promo director’ of the label – as cogent an illustration of ‘The Peter Principle’ in action if ever there was one, I’d venture to say.

Oh well…

* While doing research for this episode I came across this on a 45cat page for an ultra-rare Jimmy Hart record: “Based on info from soul 45 experts it is likely to be a ‘test press’, albeit in full store-ready stock form, run by RPC in Richmond, Indiana prior to a planned commercial run. However, no such full run occurred. According to those in the know, protocol for some contract pressings at the time was to run 6 copies with full retail-ready labels and provide four to the label, with the plant keeping two file copies (also happened for promo copies sometimes). The timing of this planned release (fall 1965) coincides with the parent company putting Blue Rock on hold until its return in 1968…” Which may well have been the case with Mercury 72731 – no full run may have ever existed!

1967 Episode Five Playlist

Special thanks go to Jerry Kennedy, Charlie Chalmers, Mark Nicholson, John Ridley, Martin Goggin, Jay Halsey, Richard Tapp, John Broven, 45cat and Jukebox George.

1967 Episode Four – Can’t Get No Ride

Our fourth installment of the notes for the 1967 Reggie Young & Bobby Emmons Discography  (You Tube Playlist below)

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Sherry Emmons Brugman who, like her father, was much loved by all who knew her. Her enthusiasm and warmth of spirit shone like the sun. It was Sherry’s kindness that made it possible for us to digitize Bobby’s session log books, thereby insuring that his music will live on for future generations…
May God Rest Her Beautiful Soul.

As we discussed in episode one, 1967 was a transitional year at Hi Records. Let’s take a closer look at what was happening down there on South Lauderdale:

Despite being listed as the lone songwriter of the soulful The Goodest Man (the flip of Gene ‘Bowlegs’ Miller’s only single for the label in 1967), despite her superb lip-sync performances of unreleased Hi tracks on back-to-back episodes of The!!!!Beat in 1966, the great Veniece Starks would have no 1967 releases of her own on Hi. As a matter of fact, of the four sessions held on her that year, the only track listed by name in Bobby’s book to see the light of day was 18 Days, which wasn’t released until 1971 (as a B side, and then again as one in 1974!), and the label couldn’t even bother to spell her name correctly. This classy lady (who passed away, sadly, in 2019) deserved better (there, I’ve said it).

Up until this point, there was no producer credit given on Hi 45 labels, and it’s interesting to note that both Bowlegs Miller and Willie Mitchell were the first to receive one on back-to-back Hi releases that Summer. Miller’s production of Love What You’re Doing To Me on Janet & The Jays is pure uptown Soul, kind of like Stax meets Motown. Small wonder it sounds like a Stax record, as it was written by McLemore Avenue heavyweights William Bell, Joe Shamwell and Harold Beane. Picked as a ‘Best Bet’ in Cashbox, apparently all bets were off as once again Hi seems to have dropped the ball on promoting another highly talented young lady (even though they managed to spell her name correctly this time out). According to Sir Shambling, the group hailed from Holly Springs, Mississippi and, in addition to Janet Wallace, included Essie Brown and Marilyn James. As far as I can tell, this would be their final release… what a shame.

It was the next Hi 45, however, that was the first to credit Willie Mitchell as producer. It was the A side of that record that was predicted by Billboard to make the R&B charts (although it didn’t), and was a song so good that Hi would issue it again in 1972, but let’s focus on this hidden gem of a B side. George Jackson had been working with Quinton Claunch and Dan Greer at Goldwax, where they had had a 1966 single release as George and Greer which went nowhere. Alex Migliara was a Memphis music industry attorney and agent, who had been writing liner notes for Hi LPs on Ace Cannon and Willie Mitchell. I imagine it was Migliara who brought George to Willie at Hi, even though he may have still been under contract to Goldwax (more on that next episode). In any event, Magliara helped himself to a share of the writer’s credit on both sides (along with another Goldwax mainstay, Dot Hester) on this August release. So Good To Me just cooks along, once again mining some of that Motown magic, with Tommy Cogbill just going off on bass. What a record!

There were two sessions held on Don Bryant in January, but Hi chose to use a track recorded six months earlier, The Call Of Distress, as the flip of his first single release from those sessions that April (maybe because Ray Harris claimed half the songwriting credit?). In episode one we already mentioned the top side of Don’s next Hi 45, identified by Reggie as being cut on January 6th, but not released until July. Check out the equally great B side of that record (given a B+ by Cashbox), Is That Asking Too Much. Probably cut at the June 30th session (with Willie Mitchell listed as the producer), I’m thinking it features both Teenie Hodges and Reggie on guitar. As Don recently told Heikki Suasolo, “It was not all the time I was trying to sound like somebody else. I was trying to get ideas from what was going on at the time and, depending on the type of song, I would model it on somebody.” Judging by those killer unreleased Detroit demos (that we talked about in episode one), they were often better than whomever it was he was modeling them on! Bryant had one more 45 issued by Hi that October, but by then both Reggie and Bobby Emmons had pretty much flown the coop.  [If you haven’t already, you should buy Bryant’s Grammy nominated 2020 album You Make Me Feel. I swear, the man is singing better now than he was back then! You go, Don!]

Hi subsidiary label M.O.C. would issue only three singles in 1967. The first one, an awesome record by Norm West (with both sides penned by Don Bryant) was issued in May, but had been cut at a session back in February of 1966. The next release would be by the way cool Big Amos. Although both books list a split session held on him on February 9th, they only mention the flip side, Going To Vietnam (and yet another unreleased Veniece track). The big fat Willie Mitchell production here on the plug side, I’m Gone, may have been cut at an earlier session in November, as I’d say that’s definitely Reggie on guitar and Bobby on the organ. In any event, it’s another little known slice of the emerging ‘Sound of Memphis’. Except for a couple more songs trotted out of the can in 1970 for Hi Lp Rivertown Blues, Big Amos Patton’s career ended, unfortunately, here.

The final 1967 M.O.C. 45 was cut during two separate sessions held on a local kid named Finley Brown in May and June. Just a wild record, I Can’t Get No Ride (with both Bill Cantrell and Ray Harris sharing the songwriting credits with Don Bryant) kinda sounds like Sam The Sham meets The Hombres (or something). Billed as a ‘mind-blowing… groovy effort’ in the same August 5th edition of Cashbox mentioned earlier, Hi was no doubt looking to grab a piece of that psychedelic Summer of Love thang. The predicted ‘chart ride’ never happened though, and Finley would go on to cut a couple of singles for Stax subsidiary Enterprise before fading from view.

Jerry Jaye & The Jaywalkers were a Rockabilly outfit that had been out there working the Arkansas club circuit since the late fifties. After a couple of releases on local labels that withered away, they came to Roland Janes at Sonic and cut two sides in the Fall of 1966. Jaye then created his own label, Connie, and pressed up 500 copies of the record to sell at the band’s gigs. He then brought a box of 25 of them to Joe Cuoghi at Poplar Records, who used his considerable clout to get the B side chosen as ‘pick of the week’ at Memphis radio station WCM, after which the initial run sold out in a flash. Cuoghi (and Ray Harris) offered Jerry a deal…

Hi would re-issue the 45 (this time with the correct title and songwriting credits), and sign Jaye as an artist for future releases. With London’s distribution behind it, My Girl Josephine would spend nine weeks on the Hot 100, climbing as high as #29. Hi Records hadn’t dented the charts since Willie Mitchell’s Bad Eye in 1966, and the pressure was on to cut an LP while the record was hot. According to Jerry, “We cut the album in one day. We started around two in the afternoon, took a break around ten and went for a bite to eat, came back and by four the next morning we had the album cut. It was really rushed.”

According to Bobby’s session notes, that would have been on April 10th and 11th, despite the fact that Jerry Wexler had flown Reggie, Tommy Cogbill (and like half of Muscle Shoals) up to New York on the 10th. Predictably, Jaye’s album (which lists Cuoghi himself as the producer) just isn’t that good. The follow-up single, another cover of a Fats Domino tune pulled from the Lp, fell on deaf ears, as did four more Hi releases on him. I think it says a lot about the state of affairs on South Lauderdale at this point that the only real chart hit that Hi would have in 1967 was cut at Sonic…

According to Reggie, he had gotten a phone call from Ray Harris somewhere right around in here that had changed everything. “Listen, I know we’ve been paying you guys fifteen dollars a session,” Harris told him, “but we’re gonna have to cut it to ten…” Within a few hours, Young said, he got a call from Joe Cuoghi telling him to disregard what Ray said, assuring him that things would continue on as usual, but the damage had already been done. From that moment on, Reggie told me, he had made up his mind that it was time to move on.

If Hi as a company at this point seemed a bit behind the times when it came to Soul or Rock & Roll, when it came to Country they were a bit ahead of them – with the same results. Narvel Felts had first recorded on South Lauderdale in 1959 with Cowboy Jack Clement, and had been signed by Roland Janes at Sonic shortly after that. With over a dozen releases as a Pop artist that failed to click with the public, Hi signed him in 1966. After two more lackluster singles, somebody at the label (probably Ray Harris) decided to ‘cut him Country’ on Carl Butler’s 1962 smash hit, Don’t Let Me Cross Over. Nobody bought it. When Jerry Kennedy cut the same song on Jerry Lee and Linda Gail Lewis two years later, it went top ten Country. Go figure. Ironically, Narvel would break into that same top ten himself in 1973 with a cover of Dobie Gray’s (and Reggie’s) masterpiece Drift Away, the first of over forty chart entries in the decade to follow.

In late 1966, Hi had signed Charlie Rich with the stipulation that his manager, Seymour Rosenberg (yes, the same guy who had been a partner with Chips at American), could produce him. After one lavish release that didn’t sell, ‘Sy Rose’ was back at it in February, recording Rich on a slew of demos that would go unreleased, including some of the same tracks that Willie Mitchell had cut on the folks from Detroit (see episode one). According to Colin Escott’s liner notes for I’ll Shed No Tears, it was Ray Harris and Joe Cuoghi who “came up with the concept of a Hank Williams tribute album recorded in an uptown Country style.”

On the surface, it seemed like a great idea, only once the tracks for the record were completed in March, Hank’s widow supposedly objected to Hi using his name on the album… although the real story is probably that she wanted Hi to fork over some cash to use it, and that wasn’t gonna happen. “It was just a shot,” Ray Harris told Hank Davis, “we were trying to be successful for Charlie. You never know in the record business.” No, you sure don’t. Released in May as Charlie Rich Sings Country & Western, it didn’t sell, nor did the single culled from the album. Although a lot of it is a little too ‘syrupy’ for my taste, the great head arrangement here on Cold, Cold Heart (despite the cloying background vocals) still holds up, I think.

Finally given the green light to record his own compositions, Rich was back at the studio in July to cut what would become his final Hi release that Fall. This great ‘undubbed’ version of the top side of that single (sans background singers), Only Me, kind of foreshadows the work Reggie and Bobby would be doing with Elvis in a year or so. Once again, though, nobody seemed to notice, and when Charlie’s one year contract was up, Rosenberg brought him to Billy Sherill in Nashville where he would begin his incredible onslaught of Country chart hits within a few months, and become recognized as the superstar he was. I’m sure Ray Harris and Joe Cuoghi were left shaking their heads.

Instrumental albums had been Hi’s bread and butter for years (people used to think that ‘Hi’ stood for ‘Home of the Instrumentals’), and it was Ace Cannon who told us that Joe Cuoghi liked that “middle-of-the-road, Sinatra stuff.” According to BSN Pubs, Hi would issue three albums on Ace in 1967. Bobby Emmons, in addition to performing on over fifteen live gigs with Cannon, also lists six sessions on him at Hi in his log book. Reggie, on the other hand, only noted two. This may possibly be due to the aforementioned gaps in his log entries, but one session they both made note of was on March 1st, when Since I Fell For You was recorded. Released as an album track on The Incomparable Sax Of Ace Cannon, it’s another obscure ‘head arrangement’ of a great song that’s gone unnoticed all these years.

Ace Cannon would only have two single releases in ’67. The first of those, issued in July, was his unique take on Johnny Cash’s I Walk The Line, which later appeared on his Hi Lp Memphis Golden Hits. I hadn’t realized it until I started writing this episode, but that’s CLARENCE NELSON on guitar! How do I know? Well, the first clue is that Clarence always recorded with his guitar plugged straight into the board, which sounds right in this case. Secondly, it was no doubt one of eleven sides cut on Ace during sessions which Bobby (but not Reggie) had listed as being held on April 17th and 19th. It is our considered opinion that Clarence was also in the house for the April 18th session… but more on that next episode. Very Cool!

The backbone of the label, of course, had always been Bill Black’s Combo, who had started the instrumental ball rolling back in 1959. Hi would release four albums on them in 1967, none of which sold very much. Bobby Emmons lists nine Bill Black sessions in his log book, Reggie only one, held on March 20th. The title track from their second release, King Of The Road, was recorded that day, and is one of the few tunes that we know for sure featured both Bobby and Reggie. Produced by Joe Cuoghi, it comes across, in my opinion, as a hackneyed holdover from a formula which had run its course by then. Black had been dead for two years, and I’m sure that by this point Young was all too ready to lay down his pencil and hit the road himself…

Amazingly, there would only be one single released by Bill Black’s Combo in 1967, neither side of which appeared on any of the albums. As we’ve discussed in the past, when we asked Jerry ‘Satch’ Arnold why he hadn’t left Hi for American when pretty much everyone else did, he answered “I wasn’t asked.” As the only founding member of the Combo left there on South Lauderdale, he may have felt it incumbent upon himself to carry on in Bill’s name. Both sides of the single had been written (and I imagine, produced) by Arnold, which was chosen as a ‘Best Bet’ in Cashbox in April. The plodding B side, Peg Leg features a guitar player that is (once again) neither Reggie Young nor Clarence Nelson. Theories abound about who it might be – from Teenie Hodges to Tommy Cogbill to Chips Moman himself! Detectives?

Check out this cool photo recently unearthed by Mark Nicholson in a 1964 Billboard. Tommy Cogbill is on guitar here as the picture was taken on a promotional River Boat cruise to celebrate Hi Records’ fifth anniversary on September 23, 1964, when Reggie was still touring the UK with Bob Tucker and the road version of The Combo. That’s Satch on drums, and Bill himself on electric bass. The gentleman on sax is Charlie Chalmers, who was about to play a significant part in the label’s history.

Even though, for the most part, it was the same studio crew playing on all of Hi’s instrumental releases, Willie Mitchell was the only one who had broken out of the nether regions of the Billboard charts since Cannon’s Tuff in 1961. Three Willie Mitchell 45s would be issued in 1967, with Slippin’ & Slidin’ crawling to #96 that Summer, but let’s take a look at the B sides of those three records, shall we?

Cut in late ’66, the top side of this one was another Cashbox Bet that didn’t pay off, but it’s the stunning B+ B side that highlights one of the most unsung of all Memphis musicians, saxophonist Fred Ford, whose elegant rendition of Erroll Garner’s Misty just knocks me out. It would later be included on Hi Lp The Hit Sound Of Willie Mitchell, where Elton Whisenhunt proclaims “Fred Ford… does a terrific job. His fullness of sound, as he weaves back and forth between melody and original styling, is something to behold.” It sure is. What an awesome record!

As discussed, Willie had begun bringing Teenie Hodges to the studio in 1966. Aw Shucks, the flip of the #96 ‘hit’ mentioned earlier credits Andrew Love and Teenie as songwriters (along with Willie), and that’s definitely him on guitar. On the B side of Mitchell’s next release Lucky, though, I’d say that’s definitely Reggie. Such was the nature of things on South Lauderdale at the time I imagine, as Reggie wasn’t always around. Bobby Emmons is just killing it on both of ’em, though! Neither of these sides would be included on Lp.

Mitchell had released two albums already but, that November, with Joe Tex’s Skinny Legs And All dominating the charts with that ‘live from the studio’ sound, and Buddy Killen working on Tex’s Live And Lively Lp in Nashville, Hi decided to cut one on Willie. When I first saw the personnel listed in the credits on Discogs, I figured they had to be wrong. By then Reggie, Bobby and Mike Leech were with Chips at American full time, I thought, and there was no way the drummer at Hi could have been Gene Chrisman… so I ran it by Charlie Chalmers, who told me “Yup. that sounds about right!” So there ya go. So much for Moman having everybody tied up at 827 Thomas, I guess! I find that whole ‘live’ concept kind of annoying, but check out Chalmers (who, of course, had cut the Wilson Pickett version with Chips at Fame) deep in the pocket with them Memphis Boys on Mustang Sally. Yeah, baby!

In early 1968, when Hi traditionally would have released a single from the album, they put Willie’s ‘live’ cover of Joe Zawinul’s Mercy, Mercy, Mercy out as the B side, but chose a track from the previous Lp, Ooh Baby, You Turn Me On, as the plug side. Cut back on March 8th, Soul Serenade features Teenie Hodges’ guitar front and center, with the role of King Curtis being played brilliantly by Charlie Chalmers. The record took off, soaring into the top ten on the R&B charts, and even climbing as high as #23 on the Hot 100. In many ways, the success of this 45 paved the way for the future at Hi Records in the post Reggie (and Bobby) era as, within a year, the rest of the Hodges brothers would join with Teenie and Howard Grimes to form Hi Rhythm and, shortly after that, Charlie would lay down his horn to anchor the distinctive background vocals of Rhodes-Chalmers-Rhodes on dozens of Hi hits to come…

1967 Episode Four Playlist

Special thanks go to Howard Grimes, Charlie Chalmers, Ace Cannon, Jerry ‘Satch’ Arnold, Don Bryant, Scott Bomar, Colin Escott, Hank Davis, John Ridley, Tom DeJong, Mark Nicholson and John Broven.

Entire Episode also available on Soul Detective, where the in-line audio links actually work… also, don’t forget to check the 450 or so other audio tracks on the 1967 Discography page.

Travis Wammack – Somethin’ Else

Some new revelations straight from the horse’s mouth… along with a major discovery!

(YouTube playlist of all tracks below, as always…)

Down in The Shoals, it was kinda like ‘all Travis all the time’ as, in addition to being asked to speak at the unveiling of his ‘star’ at the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, we got to see him and The Snakeman Band perform at no less than three different gigs over the course of the few days we were down there – the Johnny Belew Benefit at Champy’s, the Rally by the River benefit for St. Jude’s Hospital, and the tenth annual Sheffield Street Party later on the same day. The fact that he and his band were willing to set up and play all three shows, knowing they were only getting paid for one, says a lot about the type of people these guys are, and further demonstrates the warm and welcoming vibe of the ‘Quad-Cities’ area… it always feels like goin’ home.

Having the opportunity to hang out and bother Travis in between sets enabled me to clear up a few things, and answer a few questions I had after our big investigation last time out…

As you may know, Sam Phillips left more records ‘in the can’ at Sun than he actually released. Over the years, that material has seen the light of day on myriad compilations, CDs and box sets. In 1985, a company called Redita Records in The Netherlands issued an LP called Rock ‘N Roll Fever, composed of mostly obscure tracks by Rockabilly era artists, one of whom was named ‘Little Louis’ Robertson. According to the liner notes on that album, his identity is “…a mystery, appearing only on some Memphis demos from 1957…” Actually, according to the excellent resource 706 Union Avenue, the session for Robertson’s previously unreleased track on the album, I’m Gonna Rock, was held at Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service on August 12, 1958.

In the early nineties, Dave Travis purchased Eddie Bond’s Stomper Time Records and ‘relocated it in England as a reissue label’, according to Discogs. I’m not sure what happened next, but somehow Mr. Travis must have decided that the pre-pubescent dulcet tones of ‘Little Louis’ must actually have belonged to ‘Little Travis’, and released the same recording of I’m Gonna Rock in a few different formats as a Travis Wammack cut, an error which has now been carried over in the digital age to places like YouTube and Spotify.

It’s gotten so out of hand that on Discogs, Wammack is actually listed as an ‘alias’ of Robertson. Well let’s set the record straight once and for all:“That ain’t me,” Travis told me, “and I never heard of anybody named Louis Robertson, little or otherwise, back then. I’m not sure where they got the idea… I told Stuart Colman that it wasn’t me when I was over in England with Little Richard… I remember a guy named Lou Roberts, but I don’t think it’s the same person.” There ya go.

Lou Roberts headed a ‘blue-eyed Soul’ band, The Marks, that played the same circuit in and around The Muscle Shoals area as groups like The Fairlanes, The Del-Rays, The Pallbearers and Hollis Dixon’s Keynotes in the early sixties. He did record at Sun (by then Sam Phillips Recording on Madison Avenue) in early 1965, cutting four sides for Stan Kesler, who leased them to MGM. Known locally as ‘King Louie’, he would continue to record for Kesler’s Sounds Of Memphis subsidiary in the early seventies. Roberts’ keyboard player, Don Culver, was quite the songwriter and (as we discussed earlier) wrote one of the truly great Soul songs, picked up by Charlie Chalmers for Barbara & The Browns, and later by Papa Don Schroeder for James & Bobby Purify. So, detectives, do you think Lou Roberts is actually the grown-up version of Little Louis Robertson? Hmmm…

One of the absolute highlights of our road trip was getting to see J.M. Van Eaton, the fabled Sun Records drummer, perform Great Balls of Fire with Travis Wammack. At 83 years old, Van Eaton still seems as spry as ever, beating them skins with the same kind of energy he displayed as one of the architects of Rock ‘n’ Roll. He recently re-located to Muscle Shoals, he told me, to be closer to the music, and you never know where he might turn up, sitting in with local acts like The Snakeman Band whenever he gets the chance. Along with Roland Janes, he was one of Billy Lee Riley’s Little Green Men, and had a couple of cool instrumental releases under his own name on Riley’s Rita and Nita labels after leaving Sun in 1959.

In 1988, Bear Family Records in Germany issued an LP called The Roland Janes Sessions that pulled together some obscure tracks by the Green Men, including three previously unreleased cuts attributed to J.M. Van Eaton that were recorded at Sonic in 1964 with Travis Wammack on guitar. As it turns out, one of those tunes, entitled Something Else on the LP, actually was released as the flip of one of Travis’ ARA singles as Somethin’ Else in late 1965. Written by Van Eaton, it sounds more New Orleans than Memphis, with those punchy horn lines over that second-line drumbeat. In any event, I guess it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, it’s just great to see these two Memphis legends back playing together after 57 years!

“I’ve got something for you,” Travis said after his set at Champy’s… I had no idea what he was talking about. After the ‘star’ ceremony at the Hall of Fame, he handed me a near-mint copy of the Red West Combo 45 we featured in our last post. “Just my way of saying thank you,” he said. I was pretty much blown away… I mean, I didn’t expect anything. Very Cool! Just a great record, My Babe has this early-Stax Memphis instrumental vibe goin’ on, and holding it there in my hand afforded me the opportunity to ask him who else was in the ‘Combo’ – “That’s Prentiss McPhail on bass, James (Brown) Hooker on organ and Danny Taylor on drums… Danny and Jerry ‘Smoochy’ Smith had a duo that was kickin’ butt in Memphis at the time.”

As it turns out, that butt kickin’ duo actually had a release on what appears to have been their own label, Smo-Dan. I’m not sure how Shelby Singleton got the publishing on The Only Thing Wrong With Her, but there ya go. Speaking of arcane Memphis records, Travis told me that, as part of the same deal with Red West, they cut Elvis’ ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ girlfriend, Anita Wood, at Sonic, resulting in a couple of Santo 45s of her own. Released in April of 1964, This Has Happened Before, with Roland Janes employing the same kind of ‘vocal doubling’ that Chips Moman would begin using on Sandy Posey a couple of years later, is just a great ‘popcorn’ record that has flown under the radar for far too long.

You know, every time Mister Wammack opens his mouth, it seems like there’s more to be learned about his history in the music business. I just found out that, in addition to his band playing behind Peter and Gordon on their first U.S. tour in 1964, the Pop duo also covered two of Travis’ compositions on their U.K. album released shortly after that, My Little Girl’s Gone and Two Little Love Birds. Travis would cut his own more rockin’ version of that one for Janes’ ARA label in 1965.

At the Hall of Fame event, Travis told us “I was always on the look-out for a new sound for my guitar, and one night I was at the Drive-In Movies and I started thinking about what my guitar might sound like coming out of that little speaker that you hung there in the car window… so I just kind of forgot to take it out of the window one night, and drove home with it. I hooked it up to my amplifier, and it sounded pretty good!” I asked him later on if he had used that set-up on any records – “Stay,“ he said. Released in June of ’66, I wonder if Wexler knew what Travis was up to… you can’t make this stuff up!

Travis went on to say, “When I was a kid, my family would tie up the butter and milk on a rope, and lower it down into the well so the cold water would keep ’em fresh. I used to love to hang over and stick my head down in there and yell… I loved the big fat sound the echo made. One day, I found this like ten foot length of pipe and I dragged it down to the studio. ‘Roland,’ I said, ‘I’m gonna put my amp at one end of this pipe, and I want you to put a microphone on the other.’ Sounded good, man!” Once again, I asked him if there were any records with that set up on them – “Have You Ever Had The Blues,” which was his next release on Atlantic. “I told you George Jackson grew up in the same neighborhood as me in Memphis, and that’s him that asks ‘Tell me, have you ever had the blues?’ at the start of that record. Years later, when I was playing those like ‘Legends of Rock & Roll’ shows with Little Richard, Lloyd Price [who wrote the song with Harold Logan] made it a point to come up to me and tell me how much he liked my version. I was amazed he had even heard it!” Ya gotta love it…

After the re-discovery of the incredible Ray Harris produced A-Bet 45 by Dee and Don in our last installment, I asked Travis about them: “I used to feature Dee and Don as part of my live shows, and I was the one that brought them to Ray at Hi.” I then started ‘googling’ a bit to try and find out more about who they were. As it turns out, there is a page about them on Sir Shambling’s Deep Soul Heaven (of course) on which Jim O’Neal, the founding editor of Living Blues reports:

“Don’s real name is Homer McMinn, better known now as Papa Don McMinn, a regular performer on Beale Street since the 1980s. He has been called ‘The Pale Prince of Beale Street’ and ‘The Boogie Man.’ He is a white singer and guitarist originally from Kansas, where he made a 45, Mary Jane, in the 1960s on the Runnin’ Wild label under the name Tiny Lyman & the Jukes. He’s mostly known for blues and boogie but also does country, rock and R&B.” Well, alright… John Broven then sent along an obituary confirming the sad news that the Pale Prince had passed away in 2017. There was, alas, still no information on Dee, but through Broven I was able to reach out to O’Neal directly and get him on the case…

“I found Don McMinn’s Facebook page still accessible today and started tracing a Dee Martin who was mentioned and connected somehow. One thing led to another and I have attached my file on her: born Catherine Virginia Fisk, she married McMinn (here in Kansas City), recorded as a backup singer as Dee McMinn (with Roy Head), Dee McKinnie (with John Mayall), Virginia Fisk (with McMinn) & Dee Martin (on the last sessions she did in Memphis).. . . Please forward to Red under condition that I be awarded an honorary Soul Detective badge for this!” [Actually, folks, Jim earned his badge years ago providing us with vital information about Sir Lattimore Brown and Cosimo Matassa… thanks, Jim!]

Catherine Virginia Fisk 1954

Once Jim mentioned Facebook, we were able to find out that Dee was inducted into The McNairy County Music Hall of Fame in 2015, at which time her husband Eddy Jack Martin wrote:

“Dee began performing in public at the age of four, by the age of 7 Dee made her first TV appearance on The Red Foley Show. By the early 70s Dee found herself in Memphis, TN singing backup in many of the Memphis studios . Jeff Beck is just one of many artist Dee sang back up for. While working in Memphis, blues legend John Mayall came into a club where Dee was preforming. Three months later Dee is in LA recording the first of three albums with MAYALL… over the next three years Dee did two American and European Tours, from here Dee went to New Orleans to record her album which was produced by ALLEN TOUSSAINT. As if that is not enough Dee has performed with such artists as Robin Trower, Buddy Miles, Rufus Thomas, The Memphis Horns, Joe Cocker, Greg Allman, Larry Taylor (Canned Heat), Rick Vito (Fleetwood Mac) and The Amazing Rhythm Aces just to name a few…” Just, like, wow!

Sadly, however, Jim O’Neal also discovered that she too had passed away, in December of 2015. According to her obituary: “Her character and temperament can best be shown from the first time she was diagnosed with that ugly word cancer until she left this world for the beauty and promise of the next. Although she had every right to cry, be mad, or even fall into a depression after her diagnosis, she instead loved and lived every moment she was given. Neither hard times nor cancer would rob her of who she was. Always graceful, until God called her home.” May She Rest In Peace.

It was through Facebook, once again, that I was able to make contact with Papa Don and Dee’s daughter, Lorina, who is carrying on in the family tradition, singing The Blues in Memphis: “Papa Don was indeed my father. I have some extremely fond memories of Allen Toussaint and those days… The one you posted [A-Bet 9429], I had never heard. I even sent it to my stepmother, Don’s wife, and she had never heard it. They had to have been The same age as their youngest grandson is now then. Lol. We did a family album at Ardent about 7 years ago and thankfully I got Mom in there too to do one song. I forgot all about the Travis Wammack stuff that they both told me about in the past. You’re just now saying that jogged my memory about that. It’s weird how things go full circle… that they were at Hi back then, and I have recorded there independent of them since their passing blows me away.” All of this pretty much blows me away, too.

Now, courtesy of Lorina, please allow me to present the first known photograph of Dee and Don:

Dee & Don McMinn, circa 1967

How awesome is that? Thanks so much, Lorina – You Rock!

Before I go, let’s take a look at another of those Congress sides that Wammack waxed at American with Tommy Cogbill producing in 1969, recently unearthed by Frank Bruno and Mark Nicholson. The breezy folk-rock of Don’t Walk Out Of My Life really does feature Travis ‘singing like a Bee-Gee,’ and with Reggie Young and the 827 Thomas Street Band behind him, definitely could have been a hit. It wasn’t, but remains just another indication of how broad and varied Travis’ solo career was before he even got to Muscle Shoals…

He’s Somethin’ Else!

YouTube Playlist for Travis Wammack – Somethin’ Else

…and just in case you missed our Soul Detective Road Trip Special Report, here ya go:

…gotta love the fact that YouTube picked Billy Lawson’s mug as the ‘thumbnail’ – lol!

Special thanks go to Travis, Mitzi and Monkey Wammack, Lorina McMinn, J.M. Van Eaton, Jay Halsey, Jim O’Neal, John Broven, John Ridley, Mark Nicholson, Frank Bruno, Billy Lawson, Johnny Belew and all our friends in The Shoals.

Quinton M. Claunch 1921-2021

It seemed he would always be there.

There, in the unassuming house in Parkway Village that he bought for his family in 1948. The house he lived in while he was working with Sam Phillips at Sun. The house he lived in as a progenitor of Hi Records. The house where a late night knock on the door would usher in the Soul Era at Goldwax.

I knocked on that door myself many times over the years, and got to know the man behind so much of the music I loved. A true character, his quick sense of humor and way with words was always accompanied by a mischievous glint in his eyes. No matter how much you thought you knew about him, there was always something more to tell. It was almost as if he left something out on purpose, so he could talk about it later on.

The last time John Broven and I knocked on that door in 2019, he told us the tale of how he would stay up nights as a boy growing up in Tishomingo, Mississippi and tune in ‘Border Blaster’ radio station XEG so he could listen to Cowboy Slim Rinehart on the radio. He wanted to play guitar so bad, he said, that his father sold a calf from the family farm and bought him one from the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. When the family moved north to Muscle Shoals, as his father got work as part of the war effort at Alcoa Aluminum, Quinton brought that guitar with him and changed American Music forever.

He had never mentioned that before.

He had told us before that, when Sam Phillips didn’t follow through on a promise to him and his best friend Bill Cantrell that he would use one of their songs as the flip of a Carl Perkins single, was when they made up their minds to leave Sun and start their own company, Hi Records. What he hadn’t told us, but now happened to mention that November afternoon, was that when The Beatles later covered the song (Sure To Fall), he was able to pay off the note on the house.

Incredible.

When I was doing the research for my 2015 interview of Willie Hightower at The Ponderosa Stomp, I discovered that Claunch and Cantrell had actually produced a whole album on Willie at Hi in 1982, one that hadn’t been released until 2007. Even though I had known him for years, he had never mentioned that either. It was that interview, and Hightower’s excellent performance at The Stomp, that would eventually lead to Quinton’s triumphant return to Muscle Shoals to work with Billy Lawson at Wishbone and produce one of the best Soul albums in years, Hightower’s Out Of The Blue in 2018.

He had said he wanted to go out in a “blaze of glory,” and he did – the record is nothing short of amazing.

I used to call Quinton a lot, and when I asked him how he was he would invariably respond, “I’m still here.”

Now, sadly, he is not.

Memphis will be a different place without him in it… I will miss my friend.

1967 Episode Two – Wayne’s World

Our second installment of the notes for the 1967 Reggie Young & Bobby Emmons Discography (You Tube Playlist below)

Now let’s talk about another major player in this story, one W.D. ‘Buddy’ Killen. Killen grew up in Muscle Shoals, but left for Nashville ‘before the ink was dry’ on his high school diploma in 1951. working as an itinerant bass player, he was soon holding down a gig at The Grand Ole Opry and working as a session musician in the burgeoning studio scene that would become known as Music Row. Jack Stapp was the program director at legendary clear channel radio station WSM, the broadcast home of The Opry. Figuring out where the real money was in the music business, Stapp had founded his own publishing company, Tree, around the same time Buddy got to town. Stapp admired Killen’s energy (and studio connections), and hired him as a ‘song plugger’ for the company in 1953.

In October of 1955, Mae Boren Axton pitched a song she had written with Tommy Durden to Elvis Presley, and offered him a third of the songwriter’s credit if he would record it. It remains unclear whether it was before or after he (and Col. Tom Parker) agreed, but Axton offered the publishing rights to Buddy Killen and Tree. In January of 1956, Presley and The Blue Moon Boys arrived in Nashville to record his first RCA Victor release, Heartbreak Hotel, which just blew the doors off of everything, breaking into the top five on Billboard’s Pop, C&W and R&B charts on its way to becoming The King’s first million seller, and putting him (and Tree) firmly on the map. In 1957, Jack Stapp would reward Buddy by naming him Vice-President and partner in the firm.

In late ’57, with Elvis about to be drafted, and Colonel Parker refusing to pay them what they were worth, The Blue Moon Boys saw the handwriting on the wall and left the Elvis circus behind. They headed home to Memphis, where Scotty Moore teamed up with Slim Wallace at his Fernwood label. Prior to Moore’s arrival, Wallace had been using Sam Phillips’ publishing company (Knox) for his releases but, soon after Scotty’s arrival, Fernwood 105 and 106 were published by Tree.

The way the story goes is that Scotty’s paper boy, Tommy Wayne Perkins (brother of Tennesse Two guitarist Luther Perkins), led a vocal group at his high school, and was itching to cut a record. Dubbing him Thomas Wayne, Moore would record a couple of sides on him in early 1958. Released as Fernwood 106, Scotty was excited about the chances of the top side, Ray Scott composition “You’re The One That Done It” and leased it to Mercury (71287) that March. The flip, This Time, had been written by Wayne’s guitar player, a kid named Lincoln Wayne ‘Chips’ Moman. Billboard agreed with Scotty, characterizing the A side as ‘intense’ and ‘sincere,’ while Moman’s flip was only ‘agreeable’ and ‘okay’… be that as it may, neither side charted and the record sank like a stone. Moore would start up his own publishing company, Bluff City Music, after that and go on to great success with Thomas Wayne a few months later when Tragedy soared to #5 on Billboard’s Hot 100.

Meanwhile, a kid named Gary Shelton had had the second release on Mercury’s Smash subsidiary in 1957, and been moved up to the big label (71310) around the same time as the Mercury Wayne single, with similar results. Gary must have heard something nobody else did and, after floundering around to a few other labels, he changed his name to Troy Shondell and cut This Time for the tiny Gold Crest imprint in his home town of Fort Wayne, Indiana. After being picked up for national distribution by Liberty in September of 1961, it would go on to become a smash hit, climbing to #6 on the Hot 100 and hitting #22 on the UK Singles Chart when it was released in England on London (got that?). Suddenly a top earner for Tree, Moman was now firmly on Buddy Killen’s radar.

By then, Chips had been tied up with Satellite for a couple of years, and was there as the label changed its name to Stax around the same time as the Shondell record hit in late 1961. Killen, meanwhile, had created his own Dial label (distributed by London) in Nashville as an outlet for Joe Tex around then too. In the Summer of 1962, Moman would have his notorious blow-out with Stewart and Axton over money and move on. A trumpet playing lawyer named Seymour Rosenberg offered to sue Stax and wound up negotiating a settlement of $3000, which he and Chips would use to open their own studio in North Memphis literally across the street from former Blue Moon Boy Bill Black’s studio, Lyn-Lou. It would be called American Sound.

As part of the same deal, Rosenberg had set up the Penthouse label, along with a subsidiary named Youngstown and an in-house publishing company, Press Music. The first release on Penthouse would be by Chips himself, recording under the name of Larry Wayne. At this point, Rosenberg apparently offered former Dixie Rambler Wayne McGinnis a piece of the pie if he would also issue the 45 on his already established Santo label. 

A far cry from the groundbreaking R&B Moman had been cutting on McLemore Avenue, both sides of the single had been written by former Rockabilly powerhouse Patricia Ferguson, and published by Press Music. The Nashville flavored Dialing Your Number (By Mistake) is the better of the two sides, which isn’t saying much… despite a mention in Cashbox that November, the record died on the vine and apparently marked the end of Lincoln Wayne’s career as a performer. By his own admission, by then Moman was “a down son of a bitch,” and had gambled or drank away most of his interest in the Rosenberg American empire.

In the August 10, 1963 edition of Billboard, Buddy Killen announced that Chips Moman had been signed to an exclusive contract with Tree Publishing both as a writer and producer, and would also be serving as his personal assistant. Hmmm… Joe Tex’s Dial releases had been going nowhere, and I’ve often wondered if Chips had anything to do with great records like I Wanna Be Free, which would be released that November. In any event, Chips’ stay there in Music City appears to have been short-lived, as he was back in Memphis cutting records on Barbara & The Browns and O.V. Wright at American as early as the Spring of 1964. Shortly after that, Killen would bring Tex to Muscle Shoals to record his breakthrough hit, Hold What You’ve Got, which would break into the top five both R&B and Pop after Jerry Wexler convinced Buddy to switch Dial’s manufacturing and distribution deal from London to Atlantic.

This Time was still earning Moman and Tree ‘mechanicals’ when it was released as the flip of future Memphis Boy Bobby Wood’s #46 Country hit That’s All I Need To Know in late 1964. Somewhere around in here, Don Crews bought out Rosenberg’s share of American, along with that of his nephew, Wayne McGinnis. When MGM picked up the Youngstown release of The Gentrys’ Keep On Dancing in 1965, Chips offered Crews a half interest in the record and leveraged himself back in as half owner of the studio, the labels and, most importantly, Press Music.

As we saw in 1966, after Jerry Wexler started using Chips Moman as his ‘contractor’ to import The Sound of Memphis to Fame in Muscle Shoals, Killen began doing the same thing, bringing Chips, Tommy Cogbill, Gene Chrisman and Reggie Young (remember him?) to Nashville for sessions with Bobby Marchan for Cameo/Parkway.

In January of ’67, Buddy would import Bobby Emmons as well for a session he co-produced with New York record man Phil Kahl for Diamond Records. Initially set up to record both label veteran Johnny Thunder and recent acquisition Ruby Winters seperately, it was Kahl’s brother, label head Joe Kolsky, who came up with the idea of cutting them as a duet. The concept worked, and Make Love To Me, propelled by Reggie’s great guitar fills and Bobby’s punchy organ, would spend the next two months on the charts, climbing as high as #13 R&B in Billboard. Diamond made sure they got their money’s worth on the trip to Nashville, paying the musicians overtime to cut the artists individually as well, resulting in two more Diamond 45s, including Winters’ blisteringly deep Try Me, with Reggie’s bluesy guitar reminiscent of the work he was doing at Hi with O.V. Wright.

Just six days later, Killen brought Reggie back to Nashville for another marathon nine hour session on January 24th, although this time it was for his own Dial label’s big star, Joe Tex. Joe had continued his chart-topping ways, with back to back #1 R&B hits as ’65 gave way to ’66, followed by three more that would land in the top ten, and cross over into the Pop Top 40. Buddy’s confidence in Tex was finally paying off. One of Joe’s most enduring classics, Show Me, was cut that day, and go on to hit #35 on Billboard’s Hot 100 that Spring. They just don’t come much better than this y’all! Although not released until December, the great Don’t Give Up (with Reggie’s trademark licks all over it) was also cut at that session. Now here’s something I never realized until I started researching all this… the very same day that this session was being held in Music City, Chips Moman, Dan Penn, Tommy Cogbill and Charlie Chalmers were 125 miles away in Muscle Shoals, cutting Do Right Woman, Do Right Man on Aretha for Jerry Wexler at Fame. Unreal!

Killen would bring both Reggie and Bobby back to Nashville in February to cut Bobby Marchan’s funky Help Yourself for Cameo/Parkway. Although not mentioned by name in either of the log books, we believe that the three hours overtime listed by both of them was used for a Dial session on the man John Ridley calls a ‘most eclectic personality,’ Little Archie. Released that March, the high energy All I Have To Do represents yet another hidden Nashville R&B gem, cut by the boys from Memphis.

billboard 4/29/67

A few weeks later, Killen brought the boys back again to cut Dial’s new signee, Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry. Lo and behold, there, released as the flip of Tree songwriter Curly Putnam’s Hummin’ A Heartache, is Moman’s This Time! Maybe the best version of the tune to date, I love how Frogman kind of goes off there towards the end. The guitar doesn’t really sound like Reggie, and may well have been played by ol’ Chips himself. Another favorite from these sessions is Frogman’s take on Marchan’s Shake Your Money Maker. I’d bet the farm that’s Tommy Cogbill on that bass!

Buddy Killen had picked up Paul Kelly’s Chills And Fever from Lloyd, a small Miami label, and released it on Dial in late 1965. Despite Atlantic getting behind the record, it didn’t do much. Impressed by his songwriting abilities, Killen signed him and issued one more Dial 45 on him in February of ’66 that did even less. By November, Buddy had worked out a deal with Mercury, who (as we’ll see) was looking to expand their R&B operations, to license Kelly’s records to their Phillips subsidiary. As is obvious from the great Billboard photo above, Killen believed in Kelly (almost as much as he did Joe Tex), and would work closely with him for years. After the Frogman session on March 10th, Killen produced four sides on Paul for Phillips, including the marvelously deep Cryin’ For My Baby… wow!.

In the issue of Record World that was published the same date as the Billboard mentioned above, it was announced that Tree had purchased a 50% stake in Press Music. With Penn/Moman composition The Dark End Of The Street currently riding the charts, and Do Right Woman, Do Right Man earning Press mechanicals as the flip of Aretha’s huge number one hit (before it broke into the R&B top forty on its own), I’m sure Jack Stapp was happy to oblige. Besides managing to get Chips into a suit and tie, the deal would also provide a much needed influx of cash to fund the recent equipment upgrade at American. Don Crews was all smiles, as I’m sure Stapp was later on, as future Press big sellers like Cry Like A Baby and Suspicious Minds were now half theirs.

With the console at American now up to snuff, and his ‘house band’ just about where he wanted them, by May of 1967 Chips Moman had decided that from then on, the Mountains would have to come to Mohammed… and they did.

As mentioned earlier, almost the entire month of May had been left blank in Reggie’s book, but we had found a reference in the Cameo /Parkway log sheets (thank you, Teri Landi!) for a session held at American on Bobby Marchan on May 19th, which was subsequently confirmed by an entry in Bobby Emmons’ book. One of the absolute greatest records to ever emanate from 827 Thomas Street was cut that day – the Buddy Killen produced Someone To Take Your Place*, which still knocks me out every time I hear it. Check out Reggie’s guitar, and Charlie Chalmers wailing on that saxophone! Yeah, Baby! Marchan would also record the way cool New Orleans flavored Sad Sack at American that October.

…as it turns out, however, Marchan’s May 19th session may not have been Buddy’s first visit to American after all. In the liner notes to a Shout CD Singles A’s & B’s Volume 2, they refer to a session held on May 8th in ‘Tennessee?’ which yielded #24 R&B hit Woman Like That, Yeah. So, Nashville or Memphis? Well, that’s Reggie on there for sure, but according to Bobby’s book, Emmons was otherwise engaged, working on demos for eight hours at Pepper for Larry Raspberry. Ultimately, I guess it doesn’t matter much. Buddy did indeed bring Joe to American for sure on June 28th, to cut the great A Woman’s Hands, which also climbed to #24 R&B in Billboard that Fall. It was Joe’s next visit to American in September that has gotten all the press over the years, and rightfully so…

“Reggie was so creative, God, what a guitar player,” Killen told John Broven in a 2003 interview, “when he hit that lick on Skinny Legs And All, Joe fell out in the middle of the floor, he started kicking!” In Killen’s autobiography he said, “I brought the tape back to Nashville and listened to it a number of times. I felt that it still needed something…” It was Jerry Wexler who gave him the idea of dubbing in an audience to make it sound like a live recording. “The studio held only thirty people, not enough to sound like an auditorium crowd, so we overdubbed the applause more than once,” Buddy goes on to say, “…I also added slapback reverb to the tape, so it sounded as if the music was bouncing off the walls of the auditorium.” The idea worked, and ‘Skinny Legs’ went straight into the Pop top ten in both Billboard and Cash Box, and spent an incredible four months on the R&B charts, including two weeks at #2 (only kept from the top slot by I Heard It Through The Grapevine), on its way to becoming the all-time classic it remains to this day. It was Joe Tex’s 18th chart appearance in a row, a feat which would put him on the front cover of Cash Box in early 1968. I guess there’s not much else to say that hasn’t already been written about this record, except that I’d like to point out something I had been able to confirm with Darryl Carter, who was there in the room – it is Bobby Womack who asks Joe why he doesn’t take that woman with the skinny legs…

In a definite case of less probably having been more, the unparalleled success of that single convinced Atlantic to record a whole album with that ‘live in the studio’ concept. On Live And Lively, released in early 1968, Killen overdubbed audience sounds over Joe’s previous three hits as well, and held sessions in Nashville with Tex’s own band on November 2nd to flesh out the LP. There is one track listed as having been cut at those sessions, however, that we believe has Reggie playing on it, his deep reading of Do Right Woman, Do Right Man. That guitar may have also been an overdub, as Buddy would bring Joe to American one more time a week later to cut his timeless holiday classic, I’ll Make Every Day Christmas (For My Woman). Buddy had also brought Paul Kelly along with him on that visit, and cut the great My Love Is Growing Stronger the following day.

That’s about it for Buddy Killen’s 1967 involvement with Reggie and/or Bobby Emmons, but there is one more Dial release we need to talk about…

An entry in Reggie’s book for a session on August 28th for Shelby Singleton Productions had us scratching our heads, and coming up blank. Singleton had left Mercury earlier in 1967, and started up his own SSS International label, but we couldn’t seem to connect the dots on any of those releases. Once we were able to compare Bobby’s entry for that date, however, we were able to figure it out… well almost, anyway.

Apparently Skip Gibbs first recording, the snappy upbeat arrangement here on Fugue For A Lost Soul belies its title, and it’s dark subject matter (which, despite repeated listenings I have yet to figure out). Gibbs would go on to have five releases on Shelby Singleton’s Plantation label later on, so there’s that connection… but (just when you thought we were done with all that ‘Wayne’s World’ stuff we were talking about earlier), it turns out that the composers of this little gem were none other than the same Fred Burch and Gerald Nelson who wrote ‘Tragedy’ for Thomas Wayne back in 1958… You really can’t make this stuff up! Burch also produced, and would go on to work with Singleton as a songwriter (including writing the awesome He Made A Woman Out Of Me for Betty Lavette on Silver Fox), so how on earth this 45 ended up on Dial is anybody’s guess…

Shelby Singleton himself apparently did show up at American on September 17th to co-produce one of the great lost Soul records with Finley Duncan. Duncan had started up his Minaret label in 1962, but had also produced singles by Len Wade and The Tikis for Dial at Fame in 1966. Singleton had apparently bought an interest in Minaret shortly after that.

According to Sir Shambling, The Double Soul was made up of Elmore Morris and Charles Cooper. Morris was an R&B veteran who had cut a number of sides for Peacock in the late 50s. Cooper would later make up half of another duo Finley put together for the Abet label, Chuck & Mariann. Written by Morris, Blue Diamonds was selected as the A side of their lone 45, although the other two tunes cut that day (available on the discography page) are just as good. At this point, Singleton was still about a year away from hitting the big time with Harper Valley P.T.A., after which he and Duncan would build their Playground Recording Studio in Valparaiso, Florida.

…to be continued.

1967 Episode Two – Wayne’s World

*also available on ACE CDHCD 1572 The Soul Of The Memphis Boys

Entire Episode also available on Soul Detective, where the in-line audio links actually work… also, don’t forget to check the 450 or so other audio tracks on the 1967 Discography page. Special thanks go to Mark Nicholson, John Broven, John Ridley, Jay Halsey, Teri Landi and Russ Wapensky.

“Any freakin’ thing is possible…”

(YouTube playlist below)

In his comments after I posted episode one, Peter Nickols went on to say: “…surely Al Gardner’s ‘Just The Touch Of Your Hand’ is also superb… Don demoed that too. I know you feature the Gardner side in your audio samples but I think it’s worth a text mention – just my opinion.” Hmmm… I thought about that a while, then I remembered why I had decided not to ‘text mention it’ in the first place.

Sir-Rah 504

Although I totally agree with Peter’s assessment that Just A Touch Of Your Hand is a superb record, with Reggie Young’s guitar all over it, there is no mention of Willie Mitchell on the label… as a matter of fact, the label says ‘Supervised by Jack Ashford’… Huh? Like Motown Tambourine playing Funk Brother Jack Ashford? This obviously would place this as a Detroit production and, although it had been included on the Northern Souljers CD as being cut with Willie in Memphis, I figured I’d have trouble connecting those dots, and so I left it alone.

As Nickols mentioned, Don Bryant had also cut a demo version of Just A Touch Of Your Hand – a version so good it was released as a 45 (backed with Don’s equally awesome demo of Cloudy Days mentioned earlier) on Garry Cape’s Hit and Run label just last year. Unhindered by the syrupy strings and Motor City echo chamber of the Ashford supervised release, Don delivers the goods over what appears to be the same backing track. Wow! Bryant’s resurgence as one of the greatest living Soul singers still out there doing it has earned him a Grammy nomination for his excellent 2020 album You Make Me Feel. With The Grammys less than a week away, my friend (and producer of that record) Scott Bomar still took time out to ask Don if he could recall any details about how it is he cut this demo of somebody else’s song at Hi: “Unfortunately he didn’t recall any details about how the song came to him,” Scott said,  “…Willie was handling everything.”

Hmmm… maybe the names of the songwriters might offer us a clue? I had no idea who ‘H. Leeper’ might be, until Nickols put me on her trail: “…that’s a fairly unusual name and I think it is probably the influential North Carolina DJ known locally in Charlotte as Chatty Hattie Leeper.“ Like Martha Jean the Queen, Hattie was one of the first female R&B disk jockeys in the South, with a loyal following over 16,000 watt WGIV in Charlotte. It was through her position as secretary of the National Association of Radio and Television Announcers, however, that she also maintained close contacts with most of the major players in the mid-sixties Soul scene… more on that in a minute.

SS7 2653

SS7 2629

The other songwriter listed on the label was Allen Orange. The subject of our exhaustive Soul Detective Case Five (the case which would lead to our re-discovery of Sir Lattimore Brown), it didn’t seem possible that I hadn’t come across Hattie’s name before. Sound Stage 7 had released Paul Vann’s cover of the song as The Touch Of Your Hand (Means So Much) in February of 1970, with Orange listed as the sole composer. This is the version that we featured on the site back in 2007. What I hadn’t realized at the time was that SS7 had also issued it as Just The Touch Of Your Hand the year before, where ‘Hatty’ had also been given credit on the label. I still can’t decide if they are both the same recordings…

Bob Wilson 1966

In 1967, Orange was already working with John R at Sound Stage 7 alongside Bob Wilson in Nashville. How was it that this song had been recorded in Memphis via Detroit (and North Carolina) a full two years before the SS7 versions? Wilson had started out in Motor City with Ed Wingate at Golden World/Ric Tic before hiring on in Music City with Richbourg at Monument/SS7. It was through the aforementioned Case Five that I got to meet and hang out with him and do some amazing things (like cutting Sir Lattimore with him at Royal Studio in Memphis in 2008). Although we hadn’t spoken for a while, I figured I’d ask him: “I am on the Paul Vann cut, and have label credit as arranger, with Terry Burnside (Cincinnatti, white fellow, King Records background)… when we were with Willie, I don’t recall if I spoke of my background in Detroit, at Ric Tic, or not. I know he was very aware of my Sound Stage 7/Joe Simon/John R connection, but, don’t recall discussing Detroit. I never heard Willie Mitchell’s name spoken in Detroit, but, as you know, any freakin’ thing is possible…” It sure is.

There’s A Place In My Heart is another Allen Orange/Hattie Leeper song that was produced by Willie Mitchell at those sessions in Memphis in July of 1967 on a vocal group called The Appreciations. It appears once again that the same backing track was used as on the Don Bryant demo. In Mark Windle’s book It’s Better To Cry, there is an in-depth portrait of The Appreciations based on extensive interviews with several members of the group. They first got together as students at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina where they came to the attention of Chatty Hattie, who would become their manager and biggest advocate. After arranging a session with Jerry Wexler in New York for Atlantic that somehow ended up on Jubilee, Leeper set her sights on Detroit.

According to Windle: “Their next recording was I Can’t Hide It / No, No, No (Aware 1066). Hattie set up Aware for this sole release. The tracks were recorded in 1966 at the Golden World / Ric Tic Records Studios in Detroit. The group liked the Motown sound and wanted to be part of it. Willie Mitchell (band leader, producer, wind and keyboard player) coached and arranged the session and, according to Charles, played baritone sax. Mitchell is perhaps more associated with Memphis than Detroit. In reality however he wrote, produced, arranged and recorded a number of tracks for Lee Rogers, Buddy Lamp and others  on Detroit labels such as Wheelsville, Premium Stuff and D-Town, either from his Memphis base or in Detroit itself. ” Whoah… wait a minute – this is the first I’ve heard about Willie actually recording in Detroit! Windle goes on to explain “…the lead singer was adamant it was Willie. I questioned him two or three times to double check, as obviously I knew this would be an issue.” The baritone sax solo certainly sounds like Motown stalwart Mike Terry, but when asked years later, Terry said it wasn’t him. I suppose, if Willie actually was there at Golden World, his late great brother James, who was a killer baritone man in his own right, would probably have been there as well… like Wilson said “…any freakin’ thing is possible.” We may never know for sure, but that would certainly explain his connection with Hattie Leeper.

But what about our hypothesis last time out that it was another disk jockey, Detroit’s Ernie Durham, that cut those Sport and Sir-Rah tracks with Willie in Memphis? Perhaps the key to understanding all this lies in Stuart Cosgrove’s excellent Detroit 67: The Year That Changed Soul where he writes: “By 1967 Frantic Eddie Durham’s power was in decline and the old R&B radio station era he had come to personify was hanging on for dear life… the radio personalities that had inspired Gordy as a teenager… were losing their grip on power.” Although it may not have seemed like it, Motown had begun to lose its grip as well, despite purchasing the Golden World studios shortly after the Aware sessions outlined above. Mickey Stevenson had abruptly left the company in early 1967, and people began to get the message that all was not well in Hitsville U.S.A.

Sensing that vulnerability, a Detroit big shot named Andrew Harris started up his own trio of labels (Boss, Sport and Sir-Rah), hiring some of the biggest names in Detroit in the process, like Andre Williams, Shelley Haims and the aforementioned Jack Ashford. According to Ady Croasdell’s liner notes to the Kent CD Pied Piper Finale, “Harris is remembered by Ashford as a wealthy older guy who wanted to get involved in records, and by Jay Johnson of The Four Sonics as a red-haired white guy who was reputed to have earned his fortune through gambling. Ashford’s initial meeting with him was notable for being the first time he had seen a $500 bill when Harris peeled one from a wad to cover expenses…” It’s certainly not much of a stretch to think that he might have peeled a few of those off and sent them in Frantic Ernie’s direction to cover those sessions in Memphis… “…any freakin’ thing is possible.“

Hmmm… but what about Allen Orange’s collaboration with Hattie Leeper? Initially I thought that perhaps Orange had accompanied John R and Joe Simon to Royal Studio in March (more on those sessions soon), and somehow made the connection there. Then I remembered what Aaron Varnell had told Bob Wilson and I when we met with him in Nashville during our Case Five investigation all those years ago – that Allen had gone to live with relatives in North Carolina. It was Garry Cape who then told us he had met with Allen at an assisted living facility in Nashville in 2004, but the next time he tried to contact him they said he had moved out to be with relatives, and they were not at liberty to tell him where that was. All of that led to our discovery of this Death Notice in The Charlotte Observer from 2006, that would be Charlotte, North Carolina, Ms. Leeper’s home town. Although at this point it’s ‘purely conjecture’, I can’t help but think they had known each other ‘back in the day’ and had written these songs together way before any of this happened.

I’m attempting to reach Orange’s son, DeMarcus, who had contacted us during our initial investigation, to ask him about all this… stay tuned!

“Any Freakin’ Thing Is Possible…”

UPDATE: I went out and bought us a copy of Chatty Hatty The Legend, the autobiography, in hopes of shedding some light on all of this. Although she mentions her Chatlee publishing company, she doesn’t seem to talk much about her songwriting. In her chapter on managing The Appreciations, neither of the songs in question are listed. She does go on to say “I must mention these good associates as we had record deals and were in constant communication in the business,” then goes on to list thirty one names in no apparent order, other than her own estimation of their significance, I suppose. Our man Allen Orange is the second name on the list (although his location is given as Nashville, which makes sense). The only person mentioned in Detroit is Berry Gordy, and the only one from Memphis is Leroy Little. Not much help in this case, I’m afraid, but still fascinating to see the names of all these movers & shakers in the industry, from Jerry Wexler and Florence Greenberg to Marshall Sehorn and Hy Weiss. As Hatty says herself, “I was BIG!”

Special thanks to Don Bryant, Scott Bomar, Bob Wilson, Mark Windle, Garry Cape, Peter Nickols and Mark Nicholson, without whom this post would not have been possible.