Enterprise and Society, March 2011
Syd
Nathan never meant to change the world. When he founded King Records
in Cincinnati in 1943, it was not his intention to strike a blow
against the racially segregated American society and culture of the
post-World War II era. All he ever wanted to do was make money by
making records for “the little man.”
But
as Jon Hartley Fox argues in this history of King Records, Nathan’s
record company offered a wide range of music to different segments of
the American working class that not only tapped into various
vernacular musical forms, but often subtly—and sometimes not so
subtly—broke down the boundaries between genres. Thus King became
a major producer of country, bluegrass, blues, rhythm and blues,
gospel (both black and white), jazz, rockabilly and early rock and
roll music. Nathan, however, refused to segment his performers or
his audience into such arbitrary categories and if a song were a hit
by, for instance, one of his country artists, he would often have it
recorded and released by one of his rhythm and blues performers. On
the one hand, this practice demonstrates Nathan’s business savvy,
as Fox says, since King’s in-house publishing company owned the
copyright to the song, so the more often it was recorded, the more
profit the company made. On the other hand, “this ‘recycling’
of songs in different styles also reflected Nathan’s belief that it
was the song that drove a hit record—not the artist or the beat or
the arrangement or anything else. People bought the song. To Nathan
it seemed logical that if country fans found a song appealing, R&B
fans would like it, too.”
Drawing
largely from personal interviews with former recording artists,
producers and other employees, Fox makes clear that King was Syd
Nathan’s company, and as such it was an expression of his
personality. Nathan could be loud, obnoxious, abrasive and vulgar.
He didn’t always understand the music of his artists—he hated,
for instance, James Brown’s “Please, Please, Please,”
complaining “this is the worst piece of shit I’ve heard in my
life,” and that all Brown was doing was “stuttering, just saying
one damn word over and over." But the company combined
Nathan’s business acumen with his keen understanding of his
audience. Learning the hard way, Nathan eventually integrated his
company vertically until King owned its own recording studio,
pressing plant, shipping department, sales distribution outlets, and
printing shop to handle promotional materials, record labels and
album designs.
As
important as the company’s structure, though, was Nathan’s
knowledge of his audience, an understanding derived from his early
experience working in a record store. Located in the border city of
Cincinnati, Nathan’s main customers were either southern blacks
moving northward in the Great Migration or whites from the mountain
regions of Kentucky and Tennessee. Naturally gregarious, Nathan
talked endlessly with his customers and developed a deep
understanding of their musical tastes. Furthermore, Nathan realized
that even in Jim Crow America, “if people liked a record, they
bought it, and the race of the performer was mostly irrelevant. . . .
He had both black and white customers at the store and saw with his
own eyes that white people sometimes bought blues records and black
people sometimes bought country records."
This experience went into creating the business culture at King
which was almost entirely color-blind. Nowhere was this better
personified than in King’s long-time producer Henry Glover. A
black man, Glover was equally at home producing country records by
Moon Mullican or Cowboy Copas as he was working with rhythm and blues
artists like Wynonie Harris. And in the King spirit of cultural
syncretism, Glover encouraged the artists to cross racial lines
freely, earning for instance one of Harris’ biggest hits with a
cover of the country song “Bloodshot Eyes.” As Fox points out,
King’s vertically-integrated structure helped make such risk-taking
possible, since the fact that the company owned its own studio
precluded the necessity to rent commercial studio time, one of the
costliest aspects of record producing, giving artists the freedom to
experiment and take risks without having to worry about wasting
valuable time.
King
Records stood in the forefront of several musical genres in the two
decades after World War II, producing key records by such country
musicians as Grandpa Jones, Merle Travis, the Delmore Brothers, and
the Stanley Brothers, rhythm and blues artists Little Willie John,
Hank Ballard, and James Brown, and blues performers as Freddie King,
Lonnie Johnson and Jimmy Witherspoon. The list is only a partial
one, and Fox’s book occasionally grows tedious in its recitation of
artists and recording sessions. But the portrait that emerges shows
King Records played an important role in presenting an emergent,
democratic, grass-roots culture to a broad audience in post-World War
II America.
No comments:
Post a Comment