It was home to the Godfather of Soul and the soul of country music. It pointed the way to rock and roll, funk, and left its mark on what has come since. King Records, the fiercely independent, fully integrated brainchild of the cigar-chomping iconoclast Syd Nathan, set the world on its ear. But who remembers that now? Can we save the memory of this homegrown musical powerhouse? A case for the return of the king.
James Brown was feeling good. Regally sprawled in the back of his limo, the vest of his well-cut black suit drawn tight over his barrel chest, he was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning. The date was June 5, 1997, and Brown was making a pilgrimage back to the old King Records building on Brewster Avenue in Evanston. The singer was still rebuilding a career derailed by the time heâd given the state of South Carolina (15 months in prison, 10 months on work-release) for his 1988 conviction on assault and weapons charges. But on this sunny late-spring day, all that was forgotten. Brown was basking in his happiest memories of King Records and Cincinnati.
King Records was where, in 1956, a Georgia sharecropperâs son began to reinvent himself as Soul Brother No. 1, the Funkiest Man Alive, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, the Godfather of SoulâJAAAAAAMES Brown! Working withâand sometimes againstâKing owner Syd Nathan, Brown had created an unprecedented body of work. King Records was where Brownâs intense passion transmuted R&B into modern soul and where he almost single-handedly invented funk.
Now Brown was going back to where it all started, his first visit to the King site in almost 30 years. Dwight Tillery, a city councilman at the time, was spearheading an effort to transform the King Records building into a community center/recording studio/technical training facility. The plans were fluid at best, and the funding nonexistent. But to pump up interest (and donations), Tillery was bringing in the biggest gun imaginable.
The idea of Brown helping Cincinnatiâs inner-city kids wasnât new. The first time I met Brownâbackstage between shows at Bogartâs in the early â80s when I was music editor at The Cincinnati Postâhe was having his âprocessâ refreshed by his personal hairdresser, a wizened, motherly black woman who was hovering over him when I was admitted to the room. Brown, looking surreally comical with his hair in curlers, immediately revved into a 15-minute discourse about how wonderful Cincinnati was, how important King Records was to the career of âJames Brownâ (he referred to himself in the third person) and how âJames Brownâ wanted to give something back, to do something for the kids.
On the way to King records, the curlers were gone but the riff remained the same, delivered in the same trademark staccato, sandpaper-and-charcoal voice. I was the only journalist sharing the rideâan honor due, Iâm sure, to the fact that I used my music column to beat the drum for Cincinnatiâs music heritage in general and King Records in particular. As we rode, Brown reminisced about his good old days with âMr. Nathanâ and talked about reviving King. It could be a place where heâd record more hits; a place where under-privileged kids could get a shot at the music business. James Brown was making a comeback; so could King, he believed.
As we pulled into the dead end street where Brewster Avenue overlooks I-71, Brown morphed into a kid himself. Shaking with excitement, he pressed his face against the limoâs side window. âThere she is! There she is!â he shouted, pointing at the weathered brown building.
He got out, discreetly deposited a wad of gum in the outstretched hand of one of his minions, and greeted a small crowd of media, politicians, and fans. (âNow thatâs the real sign of a superstar,â I remember thinking, âyour own personal gum handler.â) Brown spoke just a few words but conveyed the excitement he felt on this historic occasion. Had his rose-colored glasses been less thick, however, he might have tempered his glee when he saw the weeds growing through the cracked sidewalks and the peeling, crap-brown paint covering the buildingâs Spanish mission facade. If he noticed any of those things, they made no impression. Brown strode into 1540 Brewster as if it was 1968 inside.
His victorious grin dropped the moment he stepped into the shabby semi-darkness. There were no offices, studios, or anything else that had been King Records. The building that housed what many consider the 20th centuryâs most important American independent record label was stripped to the bare brick walls; it was nothing but a dusty, rundown warehouse.
The tour only took a few minutes, but by the end Brown seemed to have aged a decade. Trailing behind him with a small troupe of photographers and reporters, I could see his shock deepen with every step. He practically raced up the rickety stairs to what once had been his personal office; it was empty, his massive âJBâ monogrammed desk long ago junked. By the time he emerged back into the sunlight, the eternally upbeat music legend looked like a broken man.
âThey destroyed it. They destroyed it. Itâs gone,â he moaned, slipping back into his limo to avoid reporters. Then the Godfather collapsed onto his seat and did not look back.
TRUE, WHATÂ JAMES Brown was mourning was only a building. But Cincinnati currently faces a much more far-reaching and devastating cultural lossâthe legacy of King Records, and with it our hard-earned status as one of the worldâs most important music cities.
In the years since the late music legend visited King, the city still has done almost nothing to acknowledge the label. Thereâs not even a historic marker on Brewster Avenue. At a time when virtually everything ever recorded is available on CD or digital download, little of the music King released from 1943 to 1968 has been reissued in the United States. And most tragically, as our collective memories grow dimmer, we are daily losing Kingâs most important non-renewable resourcesâthe musicians, producers, engineers, and office workers who created the music and built the label. James Brown died in December 2006 at 73; in 2007, we lost Brownâs co-vocalist and right-hand man Bobby Byrd, as well as Ron Lenhoff, who engineered many of Brownâs hits. When the Cincy Blues Society paid tribute to King at its 2007 festival, few original King stars could be found; even fewer were in shape to perform.
Cities like Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis, and even Cleveland have mined their musical heritage to create tourist attractions and brand themselves as historic music meccas. Can Cincinnati afford to landfill this piece of our past? Can we afford to ignore the good things our musical history says about us as a city? As recently as December, an article in The Columbus Dispatch focused on Cincinnatiâs repressive reputation, citing the 2001 riots and dredging up such golden oldies as the Mapplethorpe trial and Marge Schottâs racist soundbites. King Records represents a very different Cincinnati, one where the mid-century creative classâdozens of young white and African-American musicians and techniciansâworked together in one of the cityâs first integrated businesses, creating a musical and cultural revolution that still resonates.
If we ever needed to remember King, itâs now. Only problem is, very few folks around here seem to know it happened.
IFÂ YOUÂ CARE about these kinds of things, it probably will not surprise you to hear that the legend of King Records has not gone unrecognized outside Cincinnati. Syd Nathan, the companyâs founder and owner, was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. (Also inducted that year was Bootsy Collins, the cityâs most visible King supporter, who started working at the label in 1966 as a 15-year-old bass wunderkind.) In 2006, Nathan was also inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Associationâs Hall of Fame. Heâs the only non-performer enshrined in both hallsâa tribute to the incredible musical diversity of King.
In more than 20 years covering music for The Post, The Cincinnati Enquirer, and The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Iâve witnessed the resilient power of King firsthand. When I was interviewing Peter Frampton in April 2001, the British rock star was a brand-new Cincinnatian, having moved here the previous summer. Like nearly every other guitar hero of the 1960s and â70s, heâd teethed on Eric Claptonâs early recordings, including âHide Away,â Claptonâs first featured cut with John Mayallâs Bluesbreakers. Frampton knew âHide Awayâ and even knew the original Freddie King version. But he didnât know it had been originally recorded for Kingâs subsidiary label Federal in his new hometown. Asked to record that guitar showpiece with the original drummerâCincinnatian Philip Paulâfor Hidden Treasures, a benefit album for the Inclusion Network, Frampton jumped at the chance, happily donating his time.
In October 2007, I was at Ricky Skaggsâs showcase at the International Bluegrass Music Associationâs annual gathering in Nashville, where the bluegrass phenom spent about five minutes extolling the great bluegrass records made at King. He spoke with feeling about how important the recordings of the Stanley Brothers and Reno & Smiley were to him, and recalled listening to King artist Wayne Raney broadcasting over WCKY when we he was a kid. After his homage to King, Skaggs and his Kentucky Thunder band tore through a pair of Stanley Brothers classics recorded for KingââHow Mountain Girls Can Loveâ and âA Lonesome Night.â Another King side cut by the Stanleys, âA Man of Constant Sorrow,â was the model for the Grammy-winning version George Clooney lip-synched in the Coen Brothers film O Brother Where Art Thou?. Ralph Stanley was also on that 2000 soundtrack, winning the best male country vocal Grammy for his eerie âO Death.â
Thatâs an awfully big slice of the worldâs musicâJames Brown, the Stanley Brothers, Freddie King, Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Ricky Skaggs, Bootsy Collinsâall linked to King Records. And yet Dwight Tilleryâs original ideaâa museum and community center memorializing Kingâseems to have gone up in smoke. There are some true believers fighting to keep the King name alive. Radio host Lee Hay has been interviewing original King musicians and playing their old records on WVXU; Brian Powers, a reference librarian at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, is organizing a symposium and exhibition for the downtown branch in May to celebrate the labelâs 65th anniversary; and Collins, his wife, Patti, and several othersâincluding Shake It Recordsâ Darren Blase and Cincinnati State Development Director Elliott Rutherâformed Cincinnati USA Music Heritage Foundation late last year. The nonprofit group intends to raise awareness of our cityâs place in music history; one early idea includes an exhibit at a new downtown restaurant that Collins and restaurateur Jeff Ruby are talking about opening.
But thatâs not much, considering what our neighbor to the north has accomplished with far less history to work with. In Cleveland, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum has become part of the cityâs brandâthe lens through which it promotes itself. âHad Cincinnati gotten its act together,â says Hall president Terry Stewart, âit probably could have made a play for the Rock Hall.â
THEÂ MOREÂ YOU know about music history, the more important King Records and Cincinnati become. In the 19th century, the same Ohio River that brought goods and commerce also brought fiddlers, banjo pickers, and blues guitarists. Meanwhile, the printing tradition of our German founders evolved into a huge music publishing industry around the turn of the 20th century. In 1894, Billboard magazine first rolled off the presses here, covering the burgeoning circus, minstrel show, and vaudeville circuits, and eventually growing into the bible of the recording industry.
In the 1920s, a Cincinnati-born performer, Mamie Smith, scored a hit with âCrazy Blues,â becoming the first African-American to record a blues vocal, and New Orleans master musician Jelly Roll Morton came here to cut piano rolls for the Vocalstyle company on Sixth Street. In the 1930s, thanks to business-friendly Herbert Hoover, WLW had a 500,000-watt signalâcarrying the sound of the Cincinnati music scene all over the nation. By World War II, WLWâs Midwestern Hayride had become the Grand Ole Opry of the nationâs midsection and debuted on the fledgling medium of television by 1951.
Stewart says that Cincinnatiâs fertile music scene in the middle of the 20th century compares favorably to what was going on in New Orleans and Memphis at the time. There were two different kinds of music bubbling up: the âhillbillyâ records coming out of Appalachia and the ârace musicâ of black America. At King Records, Stewart says, âSyd Nathan was in many ways putting those pieces together and cross-pollinating rhythm-and-blues and country-and-western.â
That cross-pollination paved the way for a hybrid called rock and roll. Black and white have always been the primary colors of American music and nobody mixed them up like King. It was American independent labels that led the original rock revolution. The best known example is Sun Records in Memphis, the recording company that gave the world Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and many other first-generation rockers. But King predated Sun by almost a decade. When Elvis recorded âGood Rockinâ Tonightâ in 1954, he was covering Wynonie Harrisâs 1948 hit on Kingâs R&B label, Federal.
âWhen youâve got a label that had Wynonie Harris and James Brown and all those vocal groups and great rockabilly, you had the two sides of the coin,â says Stewart. He ticks off the great independent record labels of the 1940s and â50s: âModern, Atlantic, RPM, Imperial, Dotâyou still donât have the magnitude of what was coming out of Cincinnati.â
Darren Blase, co-owner of Shake It Records in Northside, puts it even more bluntly. King, he says, âis the egg and the seed of rock and roll.â He concedes the validity of Memphisâs claim to be the âBirthplace of Rock and Roll,â but says that King artistsâpeople like rockabilly pianist Moon Mullican, blues shouter Wynonie Harris, and jump blues singer Roy Brownâinspired rockâs freshman class. âTake Moon Mullican away from Jerry Lee Lewis and take Wynonie Harris and Roy Brown away from Elvis Presley, and those guys wouldnât have made the records that they made at Sun Records,â Blase says. Listen to them today, and you can hear where rock came from.
INÂ THEÂ 1940s, Nathan, who was then a dry goods salesman, had been having success selling used records in his downtown store. Customers were mostly the newest Cincinnatians, working-class Southern blacks and whites drawn here by the good-paying factory jobs of the WWII boom. In 1943, Nathan decided to make his own records to fill that demand, and enlisted a couple of country singers from Midwestern Hayride, Grandpa Jones and Merle Travis. Renting a studio, he recorded them as âThe Sheppard Brothers.â Those first King records didnât sell, but Nathan knew he was on to something. In 1945, after raising funds from family and friends, he leased an old icehouse in Evanston and launched his label.
Nathan was a virtuoso businessman. His first masterstroke in opening King was the realization, derived from his days as a downtown shopkeeper, that there wasnât that much difference between working-class whites and blacks. He was able to make the connection between down-home blues and down-home country and successfully cross-marketed songs he published in both genres to both markets. The second was his decision to create King as an entirely self-contained record company. The Brewster Avenue facility included studios, offices, pressing and mastering plants, printing presses for labels and album covers, an art department and photo studio, a music publishing company, and loading docks. Nathan had his own fleet of trucks to deliver his records and a network of three-dozen branch offices nationwide, which allowed him to get his product out faster than the competition.
It was a winning strategy in the 1950s, the heyday of the âcoverâ record, when producers would take a tune originally sung by a black artist and have it recorded by otherâusually whiteâperformers. Itâs a practice that most students of pop music history regard as racist, but then as now, the most important color in the record business was green. And Nathan knew how to make money. His distributors would tip him off about a regional R&B hit that was starting to sell; Nathan would get a copy and have one of his artists replicate itâblack or white, whoever he thought would sell. Then heâd ship the finished product to his distributors immediately, beating the original into stores, onto jukeboxes, and to the top of the charts. With Kingâs copies priced at bargain rates and pushed by Nathanâs network of distributors, they often outsold the originals.
King artists themselves were often covered by other labels. Otis Williams had been a sophomore at Withrow High School when the success of his vocal group at local talent shows drew Nathanâs attention. More interested in sports, Williams reluctantly agreed to record for King only after Nathan convinced his mother it was a good idea. He was the lead singer of The Charms when they scored a hit with âHearts Made of Stoneâ in 1954. Then they saw the Fontaine Sisters, a white pop group, ride a Dot Records version to the top of the charts the following year. But Williamsâs group had enough of a hit with it to go on the road and play the âpopcorn circuitââblack movie theaters featuring live music between films.
âHe bought us a car, bought us some clothes, gave us some money and said, âGo,ââ Williams remembers of Nathan. The gesture was not as magnanimous as it sounds; those expenses were taken out of their royalties.
NATHANÂ CONTROLLEDÂ EVERY aspect of the business, and that often meant marathon recording sessions that ran until he was satisfied that heâd gotten what he wanted. âYou were there 20 hours a day,â recalls singer Jimmy Railey, who recorded in the early 1960s with Hank Ballard, originator of âThe Twist.â
âSyd would tell you âI donât care how long it takes. Weâre gonna make a record today,â â recalls former King session drummer Philip Paul. âWe would have to do it maybe 20 times, but we would get it.â
Nathanâs first goal was to maximize profits, and he didnât care how he did it. At its worst, that strategy led to the cutthroat business practices that made enemies of rival companies and resulted in poor-sounding records due to his practice of recycling shellac to make King 78s. But it also brought social change. Nathan wanted men and women who could make and sell the most King records and he didnât care what color they were. His right-hand man from the late-1940s to 1960âthe labelâs most productive yearsâwas an African-American, Henry Glover. Along with Glover there were African-Americans in lower-level management positions, as producers and arrangers, as well as office and pressing plant workers, making King arguably the first integrated record label, as well as one of Cincinnatiâs first integrated companies of any kind.
John Rumble, senior historian of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, interviewed Glover many times before the former King executiveâs death in 1991. A former trumpeter with big bands and the smaller jump-blues combos that followed WWII, Glover was as urbane and educated as Nathan was rough-hewn and streetwise. Gloverâs specialty was working the fine line between country and rhythm-and-blues, co-writing âBlues Stay Away From Meâ with the Delmore Brothers and Wayne Raney and producing the hit record of the song. He also worked with Moon Mullican, whose mix of country and boogie piano inspired Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as traditional country artists like banjo picker Grandpa Jones.
This is where Nathanâs recycling of King-published songs resulted in musical cross-pollination, Glover told music historian Arnold Shaw in the latterâs book, Honkers and Shouters. âYou couldnât sell [R&B singer] Wynonie Harris to country folk, and black folk werenât buying [western swing singer] Hank Penny,â said Glover. âBut black folk might buy Wynonie Harris doing a country tune.â
Playing drums on many of those sessions was Philip Paul, a New York musician whom Nathan drafted out of Tiny Bradshawâs band to be Kingâs house drummer in the late 1940s. Paulâwho is 82 and still plays every weekend at the Cincinnatian Hotel in the Billie Walker Trio alongside his partner from the King days, bassist Ed Conleyâhas fond memories of Nathan. He and his wife of more than 50 years, Juanita, a former dancer at the Cotton Club, Cincinnatiâs premier black nightspot of the 1940s and â50s, still live in the Evanston house that Nathan helped them buy close to the studio, so that Paul would be available for impromptu sessions.
Paul played on more than 350 King recordsâeverything from blues, jazz, and doo-wop to bluegrass, country, and rockabilly. He remembers when James Brown first came to the label. âHe and the guys were out in the hall singing âPlease, Please, Pleaseâ and Syd Nathan said, âWhat is that shit theyâre doing?ââ The songâBrownâs first King singleâwas a major hit, proving that Nathanâs instincts werenât infallible.
Nathan was often wrong when it came to his top-selling artist. When Brown wanted to release a live album recorded at Harlemâs famed Apollo Theater, Nathan refused to pay for it. Soul music was singles-oriented; few fans bought LPs. A live album was even more risky, because the crowd noise and stage patter made it difficult to edit single cuts for radio. âIt was unheard of at that time,â says Brownâs former road manager, Speedy Brown (no relation). âPlus it was extremely expensive compared to doing a studio set. But James was so sure of what he was thinking that [he said], âWell, if you donât want to do it, I can.ââ Released in 1963, Brownâs Live at the Apollo was a huge hit and continues to be revered as one of the greatest live albums of all time.
THE 1960s BROUGHT a new generation to King. Nathan had taken a liking to a young Jewish kid he found in the charts department at the New York offices of Billboard and invited him to intern at King for the summer and live at Nathanâs home. Today, Seymour Stein, who credits Nathan for turning him into a record man (see âShellac in My Veinsâ), is known as one of the founders of Sire Records and a key player in the careers of Madonna, the Ramones, Talking Heads, and dozens of other artists. Around the same time, a teenage musician from the West End named William âBootsyâ Collins was making his way to King Records. Bootsy and his older brother Phelps (also called Catfish) were playing clubs at night and hanging out at King after school. Bootsy remembers the night they were approached during a club date by King producer Charles Spurling. âHe said, âYeah, yâall guys got a real tight rhythm section. Why donât yâall do a few demos with me, why donât you come by King Records?â And we were all like, âWow, King Records!â It was like Motown. It was, like, the big deal.â
Bootsy and Catfish went on to back such seminal King artists as Hank Ballard and Marva Whitney. Then, in 1969, they moved up to the big leagues, becoming James Brownâs backup band, the first incarnation of the JBs. It was a short but powerfulâsome would even say paradigm shiftingâapprenticeship during which they recorded âSex Machine,â among other massive funk classics, with Brown. (Indeed, as Rickey Vincent puts it in his book Funk: The Music, The People and the Rhythm of The One: âBy the time Bootsy and Catfish left the band in March 1971, the JBs sound had elevated The Funk to an essential level of stanky groove.â)
But by then, as a creative entity, King was no more. Syd Nathan died of a heart attack on March 5, 1968, and the label was quickly sold to Starday in Nashville; then Starday-King and its publishing companies were sold to Lin Broadcasting, which sold it again in the early 1970s. James Brownâs contract went to Polydor Records, while the rest of Starday-King was bought by the Tennessee Recording Corporation, a partnership of Kingâs vice president, Hal Neely, publisher Freddie Bienstock, and pioneering rock songwriters Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. When this failed, the interests were again split up, the publishing going with Bienstock while the master recordings went to the International Music Group, which sporadically produces low-quality, bargain-priced King reissues to this day.
Recording continued at Brewster Avenue for a while after Nathanâs death, but King historian Jon Hartley Fox says that by the end of 1969, King was done in Cincinnati. Surprisingly, Nathan, whose desire to control every aspect of his business had resulted in his unique, all-under-one-roof record company, never owned that roof. He leased the building until the day he died. When the company was purchased by Starday, production left town.
The label was dead, but the music lived on and continued to influence young musicians. Chuck D., whose New York hip-hop group Public Enemy has dug deep into James Brownâs output on King Records for samples, remembers growing up in Roosevelt, Long Island, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, loving both the Reds and King Records. âI was a big sports fan, so Cincinnati, to me, meant the Big Red Machine,â he told me before going onstage at the Madison Theater last December as part of a James Brown tribute show. âBut I knew there were some funky records being cut around here. [So you had] Tony Perez and Johnny Bench, and James Brown and Hank Ballard.â
TALKÂ OFÂ BUILDING some kind of King museum persists, but for now itâs all ideas and no funding. However, it looks as if 2008, the 65th anniversary of those first King sessions and the 40th anniversary of Nathanâs death, will at least be a year of remembrance. Jon Hartley Foxâs King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records, is scheduled for publication this year by the University of Illinois Press. While Nathanâs label remains a huge part of Cincinnatiâs music heritage, Fox thinks it goes much further than that. âKing helped shape modern America,â he says.
Some want to use the hallowed ground of the original King building on Brewster Avenue for a museum facility. Given its condition and location, that seems doubtful, but other cities have overcome similar problems. In Memphis, historic Beale Street has been reborn, and the Stax Records buildingâtorn down years agoâhas been reconstructed as the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, the leading edge of a $100 million neighborhood revitalization project. Today, Memphis is a year-round music tourism destination.
There is, however, the possibility that weâve waited too long to celebrate this missing link in the cityâs cultural history. Can Cincinnati garner enough support for an exhibition, let alone an entire museum, honoring music thatâs more than 40 years old? After his disastrous 1997 visit to Brewster Avenue, James Brown had little hope for Kingâs future as we drove away. âThe intention was there,â he said. âBut that is not coming back.â
But Eddie Stubbs, an announcer on WSM in Nashville, who inducted Nathan into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2006, believes we need King now more than ever. âPeople are starved for substance,â he says. âAnd thereâs a lot of substance in the grooves of those old King Records.â
Thatâs the view from Nashville. Closer to home, as our remaining King veterans get older, time is running out. King Records changed the world, paving the way for rock and roll and helping shape country music, bluegrass, soul, funk, and electric blues. Hundreds of hip-hop acts sample those old R&B records, while pickers the world over still copy those bluegrass sides. Shouldnât this city have a pop culture temple where those musicians and their fans can come and worship? A half century ago, hillbilly tunes and race records collided on a side street in Cincinnati. It was a happy coincidence of time and place that transformed music forever. Maybe itâs not too late for those memories to transform the city, too.
Originally published in the March 2008 issue.
Facebook Comments