Photograph courtesy AfroChine
When Yemi Oyediran began working on a concert series inspired by King Records, he knew there was a bigger story waiting to be told. The result is King of Them All, a new documentary exploring the legacy of the legendary record label, which premiered on PBS on October 10.
The son of Nigerian immigrants, the filmmaker moved from Cleveland to attend the University of Cincinnati. Despite having offers from other universities, he knew that at UC, he would have the opportunity to study engineering while not sacrificing his passion for music.
“I have multiple generations of my family that are musicians back home in Nigeria,” Oyediran says. “UC allowed me to have the opportunity to work in both because of that, I got to have one foot in music and one foot in my engineering career.”
Photograph courtesy AfroChine
Music is the reason he was introduced to the world of filmmaking. His longtime friend and business partner, JP Leong, taught him how to create promotional videos for his jazz performances. Soon after, the duo took their video production to the next level by creating a concert series that attempted to recapture the feel of King Records. They spent more than a year recreating the label’s catalog, recording songs on tape to make sure they sounded as they did in the 1950s and ’60s.
“We would cover some of their tunes, then we eventually [turned] it into a concert series,” Oyediran says. “We did one in the basement of the CAC in the Black Box, we did another one at The Lodge in Kentucky, and then we did another one at The Comet Bluegrass All-Stars, where we gave the audience of 300 people headphones and we got them to experience what it’s like to be in a recording studio. We wanted the King Records experience.”
Photograph courtesy AfroChine
As Oyediran and Leong continued to learn about the deep history of King Records—a label founded by Syd Nathan in Evanston in 1943 and launched the careers of musicians like James Brown, Hank Ballard, and Little Willie John—the concert series evolved. The pair began adding more narrative aspects, such as an interview with legendary studio drummer Philip Paul.
The team recorded 44 songs and began cutting them together with interviews they had done. After sharing the videos, a lot of the feedback Oyediran and Leong received was that people wanted to hear more about the story of King Records and its artists.
Oyediran too had become enamored with the history of King Records, spending years digging through city archives to have a better understanding of the cultural and political landscape of the era. He wanted to use that to convey how America’s diversity and the lived experiences of its citizens have always benefited the creation of art. He firmly believed that having a multiracial and multigendered team working on this film would offer a range of perspectives that would produce the highest quality of work.
Photograph courtesy AfroChine
“I’ve learned so much about our city,” he says. “I went through every era, every generation of Cincinnati to understand what the politics were. What was race like?”
Oyediran wanted to explore the juxtaposition between a racially divided America and a racially integrated music industry.
“African Americans who [came from] the South and Appalachians who moved away from poor communities and moved into urban centers, once they got there, they had something they didn’t have before—economic freedom,” Oyediran explains. “[King Records] was racially integrated not because they were nice but because it made business sense.”
The team eventually crafted four versions of the film, presenting one version to PBS with the help of Cincinnati Educational Television (CET), which advocated for the film after it was submitted during PBS’s open call for emerging filmmakers. The film was one of 10 films selected from 500 submissions.
King of Them All will be available to streaming for free on the PBS website until Nov 7, after which it will be moved to the PBS Passport streaming service.
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