King Records: Rockin' before Sunrise

Syd Nathan

"I want to tell you all about Deacon Jones / He got so high, they had to take him home. Here's the truth about Elder Brown / He stole all the chicken and ran to town, cryin, Amen, there's good rockin' at midnight!"

- "Rockin' At Midnight" Roy Brown 

It is by no way blasphemous to assert that there was indeed rockin' to be dug, before truck-driving Memphis teenager Elvis Presley found magic on Union Avenue.

The rockabilly sound struck that day by Elvis, Scotty Moore, Bill Black - and, overseeing the conception, Sam Phillips - was a kissing cousin to the nascent Rock'n'Roll played by Chuck Berry and Bill Haley. But Rockabilly was also of pronouncedly Hillbilly Country and rhythmic Blues character.

Rockabilly's more rural-bent influences like Hank Williams and Western Swing luminary Bob Wills are frequently pointed up. But too often neglected in genre overviews is the significant contribution of Rhythm and Blues, generally, and of Cincinnati's King Records, specifically.

The online History of Rock notes that when Memphis-area stations played Wynonie Harris's late '40s version of Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight," a young Elvis Presley would "sit on his bed and listen to the radio, transfixed."

Among the first songs Elvis recorded once signed to Sun was a cover of the Brown classic that had so captivated him. And Johnny Burnette and the Rock'n'Roll Trio may have delivered "Train Kept A-Rollin'" to a wide audience, but they were reinterpreting bandleader Tiny Bradshaw's King Records original.

The swagger and beat-down rhythms that would later assume popularity as Rock'n'Roll features first percolated in the Rhythm and Blues juke joints that dotted the postwar South. And inklings of the music-to-be were also heard in horn-saturated Northern scenes. In 1952, for example, Philadelphia's Haley covered Jimmy Preston's 1949 R&B "Rock The Joint."

True believers have steadily known Rock'n'Roll to encompass celebratory attitudes and sensual frankness. It isn't defined solely by tempo and volume level. While it is true that, in the music's earliest days, its mixing of formative elements was unrefined and even tentative, the sound drove listeners into delirium. Society itself would soon be shaken.

The hard-driving style, whose appeal owed largely to its organic genesis and experiential familiarity, had at first no proper name. At least, not the one by which it would later be known. "Race music" was a derisive, sometime sobriquet. The late guitarist Paul Burlison, a witness to the conception, called it simply, "good-time music."

So, it had some evolving, stylistic cross-pollinating, and self-definition to accomplish before assuming its eventual title. But the explosive, world-changing potential was in nightly evidence. Dancers knew it. So did Syd Nathan.

Nathan had tried his hand at operating radio and photo-finishing concerns without success. He founded King Records in 1943. King was in its early days a Hillbilly label, and would later be known as a Rockabilly one.

Charlie Feathers, Mac Curtis, Bob and Lucille, and Joe Penney all waxed enduring songs there. (The Federal and Deluxe imprints were associated with King. And Queen Records had preceded it.)

But between the Hillbilly and Rockabilly recording periods, King specialized in Rhythm and Blues. The label committed to tape icons like Roy Brown, Bullmoose Jackson, Wynonie Harris, and Billy Ward and the Dominoes. That these artists have as valid a Rock'n'Roll parental claim as do any others is beyond disputing. One need only listen to their output to know that bloodline's true course.

Beginning in 1947, Nathan's label produced a host of jumpin' sides whose influence endures. The sound was typified by harmonious, crack musicianship. Much of it can be understood to blend the African beat-centered tradition with the European melody-emphasizing one. That was the precise geo-musical union that Rock'n'Roll enshrined, adding uniquely American accents.

Many key players had come up mastering their grooves on the juke joint circuit. Years of midnight sessions had schooled them in the bawdy ways of rockin'. They knew what audiences dug. What charged their souls and hustled their shoes. And that sweaty, hardscrabble road training instilled King wax with vibrant, startling being.

This was the good stuff. People's music. Lowdown and gritty, real-life styling that swung and jumped to everybody's satisfaction, and articulated common culture. It paid no mind to the sterile popular music standards of the day. It didn't need to. It was innately of different class and social background.

Rock'n'Roll would soon integrate this rural, working class, black and white tone still further into the cultural main.

True rockin' could not be grasped as an exclusively temporal phenomenon. As testified of before riotous dance floor crowds, it brought wondrous benefits of a spiritual type. Rockin' cast to the ground artificial inhibitions and elevated to a plane of delight, adherents' embrace of earthy humanity.

Now as then, the joyously converted don't merely listen to Rock'n'Roll, they revel in both it and the certitude that its every downbeat brings respite from the staid and unsatisfying.

Rock'n'Roll's calls to sexuality, combined with enough Hosannas to inebriated bacchanalia to lead astray even the most saintly, provide a magnetically salacious theme upon which to base a specialized CD reissue series. And, as exactly such happy ribaldry was documented in abundance at King, the label's 5-disc, retrospective "Risque Blues" collection offers much cause for wanton abandon.

"I got a little girl, she just loves to ride.

I got a little baby, she just loves to ride.

When I see that woman, I got to run and hide!"

- Orville 'Fats' Noel, "Ride Daddy Ride"

"When you're young and you're on the go,

your ding-a-ling don't ever get sore.

But when you're old, and you've lost your sting,

you don't need that doggone thing."

- Daniel Bartholomew, "My Ding-A-Ling"

Spectacular here in leering R&B glory is a universal message with timeless relevance. An insistent demand for nocturnal interaction. A defiant assertion of virility. Bullmoose Jackson's "Big 10-Inch Record," The Swallows' "It Ain't the Meat, It's the Motion," and the chest-thumping braggadocio of Billy Ward and the Dominoes' "Sixty Minute Man" speak unashamedly of hot-bloodedness.

The instrumental line-ups were sparse, but that was appropriate. Strip-club saxes honked and blared their suggestiveness. Treble guitars splashed vivid hues and urged animation. Rumbling bass key piano negotiations commanded at the center, steeling the whole with senses of definition and direction. 

Tempos included swinging finger-poppin' and slowly seductive. Advancing some songs' party atmospheres were infectious  

handclaps.

"I want a bow-legged woman!" swore Bullmoose Jackson in the song of that title. From Dorothy Ellis came "Drill Daddy Drill." Not to be neglected is Wynonie Harris' "Keep On Churnin' (Til the Butter Comes)." Little Esther intimated passion with the smoldering "Turn the Lamp Down Low."

As dynamic as these records were, it's crucial to underscore that none were slick or over-produced. Rough edges etched deeply their common world character and credibility. Besides, flawless renderings weren't the goal. Besides, good songs are their own validation.

Just as halcyon Sun tracks have been lovingly preserved, so, too, have King ones. In 1972, Chuck Berry scored chart placement by covering the classic "My Ding-A-Ling." A few years later, Aerosmith redid "Big 10-Inch Record." The Stray Cats exhumed Wynonie Harris' "Wasn't That Good" for their second LP.

Two other Harris numbers, "Bloodshot Eyes" and "Lovin' Machine," were revisited in the 1980s by Roy Loney and Jimmy and the Mustangs. "It Ain't the Meat" has long been a bar band staple. And Robert Plant's Honeydrippers saw chart action with their 1990s take on Roy Brown's "Rockin' At Midnight."

A truth to be gathered from King and Syd Nathan is that rockin' should never be merely clean and wholesome fun for the whole family. Without an at least implied sense of edgy danger, a beguiling air of predatory sexuality, Rock'n'Roll isn't authentic and doesn't much matter.

King Records mattered back in the day. And it still does. Average folks living nondescript lives can produce from their frustrations and aspirations a legend for all times.

"Well the old folks do it, young folks, too.

The old folks teach the young ones what to do."

- Wynonie Harris, "Shake That Thing"