The rest of American music history that doesn't get discussed in the Hollywood/NYC revisionist worldview.
And for the record, Wynonie Harris wasn't the first to "make" Good Rockin’ Tonight, that song belongs to Roy Brown, its author.
Posted on 01/26/2009 12:19:12 PM PST by a fool in paradise
A CROWD gathers around crumbling walls that are a small evolutionary step up from a miserable pile of bricks...
This structure is a landmark of pop culture that never received the sendoff it deserved. Yet people are gathered here on a cold afternoon in mid-November not for a memorial service but to help resurrect King Records, the label that was once the home of James Brown, Nina Simone and Charlie Feathers.
King started as a so-called hillbilly label in 1943; moved into “race music” — the onetime name for what became rhythm and blues — around 1945; and attempted in ways great and small to merge both audiences until it essentially shut down a few years after the death of its owner, Syd Nathan. It never achieved the household-name status of Stax or Motown, but the crowd wants to change that....
...like many of those assembled today, he recorded for King, the independent label where Charlie Feathers cut “One Hand Loose” and the R&B singer Little Willie John cut “Fever.” King is where “The Twist” was first laid down, by Ballard, and where Wynonie Harris made “Good Rockin’ Tonight.”
Now Cincinnati is rediscovering a landmark it barely knew it had. The occasion is the unveiling of a historical marker, financed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, celebrating the site as a historic address. Also announced at the event were plans to establish a King Records Center, including a recording studio, in the neighborhood. (Later this year the University of Illinois Press will publish “King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records,” by John Hartley Fox.)
Enough about New Orleans, Memphis or Nashville, and other, better-celebrated cradles of popular music. For Cincinnati, it’s star time...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The rest of American music history that doesn't get discussed in the Hollywood/NYC revisionist worldview.
And for the record, Wynonie Harris wasn't the first to "make" Good Rockin’ Tonight, that song belongs to Roy Brown, its author.
In other news, the flight from Cincinnati continues.....
FANTASTIC! I LOVE hearing about stuff like this.
Yep - I fluttered off years ago...fortunately it was before the race riots.
King, Federal and Deluxe label complex, were top notch. Many great 50’s RnB hits and collectors items.
>>King started as a so-called hillbilly label in 1943; moved into “race music”<<
“I wish EVERY day was Negro day!”
I get a kick out of the movie Hairspray.
On a related note, I have just about every Mom and Dads album made. I thought (pretty much still do) that they really sucked until I listened to them one day and realized how much they sounded like Guy Lumbardo. IOW, for their day, they were not bad. Which means that ANYTHING from that period that still comes off as entertaining and good was absolutely spectacular at the time!
>>In other news, the flight from Cincinnati continues.....<<
I remember listening to the riots on police scanners directly from Freerepublic.
We ‘got out’ just a few months before that happened. Told my previous neighbors in Pleasant Ridge ‘a race riot is coming’ and I’m sure they thought I was ‘nuts’.
Couldn’t help but remember that as I watched it play out on television.
I remember Charlie Luken, mayor, impersonating Neville Chamberlain....
The same guy who called some music “race music” was also the guy who called another music “hillbilly”. Only “hillbilly” never appears in quotes and is not explained as “so-called hillbilly music”.
It was Atlantic Records that reclassified such music as “Rhythm and Blues”. I don’t know who finally changed the term from the pejorative hillbilly to country-western.
Note too that while it seems offensive to call them “race music” and “hillbilly music”, BMI was willing to publish their songs whereas ASCAP practiced open discrimination against both classifications of music.
This is why when rockabilly and jump blues crashed together in rock and roll, ASCAP alleged a conspiracy to deny them the hit songs (that they REFUSED TO PUBLISH). They wanted to know why BMI had all the hits.
What do you expect from a city that once elected Jerry Springer as its mayor?
Sadly the inmates are still running the asylum there while clueless ‘leaders’ fritter away resources like the absurd Underground Railroad museum (smack in the middle of a sports/entertainment complex - shrewd!) and The Banks - a full 20 years after the entertainment options on the Ohio side of the riverfront vanished or migrated across the river.
The Banks is another white elephant disguised as civic pride and downtown development. There are far too many cooks in the kitchen with no guarantee of customers or foot traffic (especially considering what we discussed previously).
All this Celebration, FL-inspired mixed-use stuff sounds wonderful and makes a nice 3-D model to show off but how realistic is it?
Springer was mayor over 30 years ago. At the time, nobody outside of Cincinnati knew who he was...’outside’ including the strippers of Newport Kentucky....(chuckle)
Bottom line is I live 60 miles east, two counties away from the city of my birth...and you couldn’t pay me enough to return.
Whats really amusing - if you escaped - is the city is going bankrupt, the county is going bankrupt, and the Cincinnait Bengals are getting millions of dollars from the county for upkeep of the stadium for the Bungles.
Thats right folks, the county (Hamilton) is required to pay for all maintanence issues at the stadium...buy up any unsold tickets for each home game.
Its hard to imagine anything more screwed up for taxpayers, outside of NYC or anywhere in California.
By the accounts I’ve heard about Syd Nathan from the musicians who recorded for him, they almost had to come to blows with him to get him to pay them money received on sales.
In Seattle they are still paying for a stadium that has already been torn down.
The Underground Railroad museum is suffering exactly the fate those of us that were against said it would...if you bother to visit it once...there is no reason to return. The proponents claimed it would be ‘self sufficent’.
Right now those same idiots are begging for millions to keep the doors open. And because of the racial context, even if it closes, the city will NEVER be able to tear it down and rebuild something positive in its place.
Bottom line: Cincinnati is quickly becoming ‘lil detriot’. And it will never recover, just as Detriot never recovered from the riots in the 1960’s.
(chuckle)
That makes me feel better, thanks!
Houston had it’s own PC revitalization project called “El Mercado del Sol”.
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