Rhythm & Blues, Blacks &Jews

...What's he saying...

...CHICAGO'S LEONARD and Phil Chess were street-wise South Side Chicago greeners...

...What's he saying...

...African American music is fluid, stretching and highlighting time through syncopation, or playing the rhythm between the beats...

...Who's going to buy that...

...I particularly enjoyed listening to blues records in one of my black friend's homes...

...Tall and skinny, Rupe was a star Hebrew pupil at the local temple, which offered him a scholarship to rabbinical school...

...He was one of the Henry Fords of the record industry...

...This new style was dubbed rhythm and blues, or R&B...

...Forty to fifty percent of Specialty's business was gospel," Rupe says...

...Southern black men, accompanying themselves on guitar, were performing slow, plaintive laments and churning, danceable party songs...

...T h e once-skeptical Chess heard the ka-ching of countless Chicago cash registers...

...It was considered one of the first crossovers of black music to white teenagers...

...Price urged singer Richard Penniman to send a demo tape to Rupe, who in 1955 recorded the young man, under the name Little Richard...

...That moment in music time—and the niche market— vanished when barriers fell between black and white music, in part because of the success of the Jewish independent producers had in mainstreaming their artists...

...Handy's "St...

...But the independent record business was dominated by young Jewish men who started out with nothing, men in short-sleeved white shirts and skinny black ties who were equally fluent in black slang and Yiddish, and who could have just as easily sold appliances and bowled with a B'nai B'rith lodge...

...His first "office" was a cigar box, rented for $2 a month on someone's desk, where he received mail...

...Wexler's talent as a producer was to adopt whatever role a performer needed from him...

...Syd Nathan owned three labels, King, Queen and Federal Records, in Cincinnati...

...T h e first 3,000 copies of W a t e r s ' "I Can't Be Satisfied" sold out in two days...

...In the Roaring Twenties, black musicians took their bluesy horn jazz north, exposing it to a wider public that included young white musicians such as Benny Goodman in Chicago...

...There was a rough-and-tumble atmosphere...

...Write a letter!'—unless it was life or death—'Write a letter...

...Meanwhile, out in Los Angeles, Art Rupe was trying his hand at the record business...

...If there had been Grammies, it would have taken them all home...

...I 'm the one who's paying for everything, so I don't think it's wrong that if the gamble pays off, that I should expect to make more per record than you the artist do, because if the gamble doesn't pay off, I lose more than you do...

...Particularly in the 1970s, when rock music began to take over and extraordinary jazz men couldn't get recording contracts, Granz recorded them with Pablo," Hentoff explained...

...You'll find yourself around, not on, the beat...

...In New York, Moe Asch owned Folkways Records, Alfred Lion co-owned Blue Note Records, M i l t Gabler founded Commodore Records and Norman Granz owned a series of labels, most notably Verve Records and Pablo Records...

...When he was kid in Berlin, he got hooked on black musicians," Hentoff explained...

...The music is improvisational, allowing the musician to express the feeling of the moment...

...They gambled on local, regional and sometimes national musical tastes...

...Rupe sold Jukebox in 1946 and opened Specialty Records...

...Across the river, Herman Lubinsky had Savoy Records in Newark, and Fred Mendelsohn owned, at various times, Savoy, Regal and Herald Records, all in New Jersey...

...Broke and unemployed, his third choice of career was producing records to sell in small stores in Watts and other black neighborhoods...

...Sure, Jews weren't the only whites involved in black music...

...W h e n he couldn't get his foot in the door, he tried to get a job writing for Bob Hope and Red Skelton's radio shows...

...While Rupe was striking gold in L.A., back east in Newark, Herman Lubinsky was producing hits with a slightly different formula...

...Both Nathan and Lubinsky thought the same way...

...Lou Chudd had Imperial Records...

...Jazz musicians were devising a new improvisational style dubbed bebop, which sounded best in smaller groups...

...The music swings, that difficultto- define quality in which the melody and rhythm create a sense of propulsion at any speed...

...At first, the label released records by leading jazzmen...

...Rupe, born Arthur Goldberg, grew up in racially-mixed McKeesport, Pa., just outside of Pittsburgh...

...Another New York exec was Milt Gabler, a record store owner who founded Commodore Records in 1937...

...Only in hindsight did it become clear that the label owners were part of a much larger movement—that of Jews who played key roles in developing and popularizing African American music: blues, jazz, r h y t hm and blues, and soul...

...Nathan began with white country music, but soon added "race" music in order to increase his market share...

...Then, throughout the 1950s, the label produced R&B hits, often with the songs of Jewish songwriters J e r r y Leiber and Mike Stoller, who-were later inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame...

...Nathan also operated Federal Records, which scored a hit with the Midnighters' sexually suggestive "Work with Me, Annie...

...Music publishers and record labels were necessary and hardly inherently evil, argues Sidran, also has a doctorate in American studies...

...Still others studied black music academically...

...His guitar playing was piercing—reminiscent of the acoustic blues of the Mississippi Delta, where he grew up—and loud...

...Overweight and a careless dresser, [Nathan] hardly looked like the man who could transform a defunct icehouse into one of the country's giant record independents," writes Arnold Shaw...

...It's folk music from the soul, the heart, the kishkes and, yes, the sexual organs...

...These men—and occasionally women— came from all over the country...

...Paul Reiner owned Black & White Records...

...There wasn't any more altruism at the time than there is today in the music business...

...Instead, he headed west to get into the movie business...

...that is, the white music world...

...Shellac, imported from Asia, was in short supply due to the war with Japan...

...The renamed Chess Records gave the world the newly electrified and still w i l d l y popular Chicago blues...

...You've probably heard of this new genre—the territory of Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and the late Ray Charles...

...We wanted to sell records...

...In search of new talent, Rupe was one of the first label owners to gravitate toward New Orleans...

...My father was tough," Marshall says...

...It wasn't until they started turning out discs that white producers realized there was crossover potential into the larger music world...

...On that trip, Rupe signed singer Lloyd Price...

...The three major record companies of the time —Columbia, Victor (RCA), Decca, and new kid on the block Capitol—had pulled out of black music in order to cut down their use of shellac, a major component of records at that time...

...1," sold 70,000 plus copies, a respectable amount in the 1940s...

...They were tumelers—shmoozing, hanging out in delis...

...By the late 1940s, popular music had become an industry, and the industry was changing...

...Having worked among the newcomers, the Chess brothers saw an untapped potential audience...

...In New York, jazz joined with dance, literature and the visual arts in a crescendo of black culture known as the Harlem Renaissance...

...Lubinsky was the cheapest [guy] in the world," record producer Ralph Bass told Shaw...

...Little Richard, who quickly became a nationwide sensation, was one of the first major crossover artists...

...In Los Angeles, Art Rupe founded Specialty Records...

...Jewish immigrant Alfred Lion co-founded Blue Note Records, one of the world's most influential jazz labels, in 1939...

...Penniman's very first session produced the manic hit "Tutti Frutti...

...People forget these J e w i s h fellows in the business were entrepreneurs who spent their money to make hit records," Art Sheridan, head of a small independent Chicago label called Chance in the 1950s, told journalist Mark Lisheron for an article published by the now defunct CommonQuest magazine...

...Charges that the "little guy" label owners made more money in many cases than the artists they recorded—particularly in blues, R&B and soul—have haunted them since the 1940s...

...Chess began to come close to me," Waters later told Living Blues magazine...

...The Jewish R&B producers gambled on the talent they found...

...into an i n t e r n a t i o n a l l y known independent recording company that produced influential blues, jazz, doo wop and rock 'n' roll, paving the way for the British Invasion of the 1960s...

...Sam Cooke was a gospel singer and recorded gospel for us for seven years...

...I think one thing these guys all had in common was that they loved the business," adds Sidran...

...Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf championed a rough, rhythmic, melodic sound...

...Stubby-fingered, cigar-smoking, copyright-hungry and notoriously cheap, Lubinsky was running a small record store in 1942 when he started Savoy Records...

...Jewish small businessmen took their place in what was often a 'nickel and dime' business...

...In Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music, written with David Ritz, Wexler recalls working with LaVern Baker, Ruth Brown, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke, Etta James and his big three: Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding and Ray Charles...

...I call it swindling, but most people call it smart business when you can take advantage of some one who don't know no better...

...Rupe approached his new business methodically...

...The Chess story is typical of the wild independent record business that developed around the emerging black music of the 1940s and '50s...

...Leonard Chess's knowledge of black Chicago led h im to join Aristocrat in 1948...

...He arrived in the birthplace of jazz in 1952, attracted by singer/pianist Fats Domino...

...The '40s were a time when even bright Jews could not easily find a place in the WASP world of communications," Arnold Shaw writes in Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues...

...Later, when his brother Phil joined him in the record business, they sold the Macomba...

...He was no angel...

...Leo, Edward and Ida Messner had Aladdin Records...

...You couldn't make a g-d damn phone call with Lubinsky...

...Singer/songwriter/producer W i l l i e Dixon called Leonard Chess "a maneuverer...

...We recorded his hit 'You Send M e . '" Rupe, who became personal friends with some of his artists, couldn't believe his success...

...The swing jazz of the big bands also transferred to smaller groups, which emphasized speed, the back beat, an emotional singing style and lyrics about urban ghetto life...

...Wexler matched Redding with the Stax Records studio band in Memphis, Booker T. & the MGs...

...Hum a line of "St...

...I had no idea that it would ever appeal to many white people...

...Rupe also recorded Percy Mayfield who wrote the hits "Hit the Road Jack," and the anti-racism Please Send Me Someone to Love" as well as many others...

...The songwriters reveled in black culture, claiming even before they graduated high school that they didn't write songs for whites...

...But despite it all, I have no ill feeling toward any of them...

...In 1939, he recorded Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit," a controversial ballad about lynching written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish New York schoolteacher...

...As rural blacks migrated to cities, the blues blended with classical (white European) piano music to produce ragtime, the intricate, syncopated style that sounds like J.S...

...The little guys got out of the way, often selling at a profit...

...African American music began with the southern slaves, who transformed the syncopated drumming and a cappella folk songs of their African heritage into field hollers—rhythmic call-and-response songs—and spirituals—religious songs that identified with the Israelite slaves in Egypt and expressed faith in salvation in heaven...

...Journalists wrote critically, and lovingly, about the musicians...

...Some went so far as to collect scrap records that the pressers could melt and turn into new ones...

...Etta J a m e s crooned R&B hits like "I'd Rather Go Blind" while Koko Taylor had a blues hit with "Wang Dang Doodle...

...Until then, the main market for black music had been blacks...

...Moreover, Jews aren't responsible for "the system, the economics, and the way the economy has never been based on justice for all...

...What bonded us was a culture shaped by our similar economic status, not our ethnicity...

...In the beginning, producing 78 rpm "race" records, which were sold by the song, didn't look very profitable...

...Buying stacks of records, a metronome and a stopwatch, he timed the recordings' introductions choruses, repeat choruses, and analyzed the lyrics in order to find out what worked in the most popular songs...

...Think of Ella Fitzgerald's giddy scat singing...

...Chess brought in his brother Phil as a partner, after founding partner Evelyn Aron left the company...

...Its called Soul...

...It was called 'nigger' music, and one of my friends called me a 'nigger lover.' I've never forgotten that...

...Aristocrat usually recorded jazzy blues with horns, but this session featured a lone singer and his guitar, accompanied by a bass fiddle...

...Chess would always find one way or the other to take my money...

...Jules, Saul and J o e Bihari had Modern Records...

...To get their record orders fulfilled, the new independent producers ingratiated themselves with the record pressers and fit themselves into holes in the companies' press schedules...

...His Pablo Records recorded Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Oscar Peterson...

...The music business, however, was wide open for Jews as it was for blacks...

...Another major coup was Sam Cooke...

...By the 1890s, the hollers and spirituals were combining to form the blues...

...They discovered great singers and produced big hits...

...He became a pioneering I music reporter for Billboard in New York, convincing the magazine to replace the term "race records" with one he had coined—"rhythm and blues...

...In 1956, soul singer James Brown had his first hit, "Please, Please, Please," on King, and the label's recording of Bill Doggett's "Honky Tonk" rose to #1 on the R&B charts...

...Price's "Lawdy, Miss Clawdy" was rated the #1 R&B record in 1952 by Billboard and Cashbox magazines, says Rupe...

...W i t h the multi-talented Charles, he basically stayed out of the way, beginning with Charles's first big hit, "I Got a Woman...

...Wexler worked closely with Leiber and Stoller, like h im East Coast Jews who became sincere "white Negroes...

...He soon had an answer...

...They worked so hard making money, and they were financial geniuses for their times...

...At the same time, the music industry, engorged on rock 'n' roll, became big business...

...E R R Y WEXLER grew up a self-described I jazz record hound...

...New York was also the stomping grounds of Norman Granz...

...Unlike the Chess brothers, he decided to focus on the black urban market, and he carefully studied the kind of music his target audience wanted...

...After working for their father in his scrap yard, they opened the Macomba Lounge and booked small jazz groups, writes Cohodas...

...Even the musicians had no inkling of their music's economic potential...

...Jazz and blues songs were a staple of 78 rpm records in the 1930s and '40s...

...After determining that urban blacks preferred horns and a polished sound, he decided on "a big band sound, expressed in a churchy way...

...Marshall Chess, son of Leonard Chess and a onetime Chess Records executive, disagrees...

...Bluesman Muddy Waters had only recently switched from acoustic to amplified electric guitar in order to be heard in the Windy City's noisy taverns...

...LIKE EVERYTHING small in America, the independent record labels, both R&B and jazz, died out in the 1960s and '70s...

...Nathan developed a plant in which he could record, master, press and produce finished disks, including the printing of album covers...

...Musicians, adds Brace Iglauer, owner of Alligator Records in Chicago, a contemporary blues label, may feel cheated, but they need to see the big picture...

...The melodies, sounds and rhythms in black music combine to evoke key aspects of the human condition: love (think of James Brown's "I Feel Good"), jealousy (W.C...

...Chess snapped, relates Nadine Cohodas in Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records...

...Typical of the independent labels, his Jukebox Records operated on a shoestring...

...And they won, catapulting black music into the forefront of the music business, creating legendary songs, albums, and reputations...

...the rewards of the afterlife (just about any spiritual...

...Rhythm & Blues, Blacks &Jews ANDREW MUCHIN How a Bunch of Upstart Jewish Independent Record Producers Helped Turn African American Music into a National Treasure LEONARD CHESS was dubious about the blues songs that his Chicago company, Aristocrat Records, was recording one April day in 1948...

...The singers wanted to be heard...

...T h e New York-based label bit its stride in the late 1940s, releasing records by bebop pianists Bud Powell and Thelonius Monk...

...That's not to say ifs only about the id...

...In a picture I remember seeing of me with my classmates, I look like a sugar cube in a coal bin...

...Joining Atlantic as a coowner, he supervised the recording of hits by some of R&B's top singers...

...When I got into the business, few white people fooled around with this kind of music," he says...

...In the late 1950s and early '60s, the focus of some R&B switched to singing drenched in the exultant gospel stylings of the black church...

...He released R&B music on a subsidiary he called Queen Records, co-writing the Bull Moose Jackson hits "All M y Love Belongs to You" and "I Can't Go on Without You" using the name Sally Nix...

...He had a string of 11 more hits for Specialty, including "Long Tall Sally" and "Good Golly, Miss Molly...

...Urban brass bands—both concert ensembles and marching groups—added blues to their more formal arrangements, producing early jazz...

...Another independent producer was former department store owner Syd Nathan...

...There was a tremendous amount of ethnic mtermingling," recalls Rupe, now in his eighties...

...We were all poor, and whether white or black, aspects of our culture were the same...

...Chess couldn't understand a word...

...The pair's hits include "Hound Dog," performed first by blues singer Big Mama Thornton, "Jailhouse Rock," "Smokey Joe's Cafe," "Kansas City," "Poison Ivy," "Love Potion, #9, "There Goes M y Baby," and, with Ben E. King, "Stand By Me" and "Spanish Harlem...

...Through his work at Billboard he met Herb and Miriam Abramson and Ahmed Ertugun, owners of Atlantic Records...

...Nathan opened King Records in an old icehouse in suburban Cincinnati in 1945...

...The single most important recording producer and concert producer was a Jew, Norman Granz," writer Nat Hentoff said in an interview...

...His singing was expressive and strong but he slurred his words and had a thick southern black accent...

...Later, label-mates Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry added breakneck rhythms to the blues and produced early rock V roll chart-busters such as "Bo Diddley" and Berry's "Maybelline...

...But he wasn't a thief, and he wasn't a crook...

...Jews got into the record business on a large scale in the late '30s and early '40s because Columbia and the other majors dropped 'race music' in the 1930s," explains jazzman, scholar and owner of Gojazz Records Ben Sidran...

...Think Louis Jordan's "Is You Is, Or Is You Ain't (Ma' Baby...

...What's R&B anyway...

...Recall Billie Holiday's unhurried rendition of "God Bless the Child...

...His other artists included veteran bluesman Lonnie Johnson and singers Ivory J o e Hunter and Wynonie Harris...

...Instead they made it their business to promote the creative sounds that were coming from the black world...

...Success didn't take long: Jukebox's first record, the Sepia Tones' "Boogie No...

...Louis Blues"), sexuality (Ray Charles' "Whafd I Say"), pride (Aretha Franklin's "R.E.S.P.E.C.T...

...Consider this lyric your invitation to a crash course in African American music...

...His artists Roy Milton, J o e Liggins, and Camille Howard all had hits...

...Bach got his mojo workin...

...These ambitious businessmen didn't always have a choice...

...Up in the morning and off to school," sings Chuck Berry, a black rock 'n' roll pioneer, in "School Days," one of many hits he recorded for brothers Leonard and Phil Chess...

...He was dealing with people who didn't know anything about the recording business," Dixon claimed in lAm the Blues: The Willie Dixon Story, written with Don Snowden...

...W i t h Franklin, he scuttled her pop style in favor of her gospel roots...

...Gabler wrote lyrics for Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole, paired Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Armstrong and even handed out cash to needy musicians...

...Nineteenth- century songwriter Stephen Foster died broke, he explains, "because there was no publishing business for music...

...When we enter into our business relationships, all the financial risk falls on me," he says...

...T h e blues derived from the acoustic music that southern blacks played, and had brought with them as they moved north in search of jobs...

...W i t h i n a decade, the Polish immigrants turned the renamed Chess Record Corp...

...But no one in this movement dreamt that the black music they were introducing to the world would inspire generations of musicians, leading to the development of rock 'n roll, and inspiring the music of mega-influential white musicians such as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones...

...Some produced records while others wrote, performed and published black songs, managed entertainers, or ran the clubs where the music could be heard...

...Jews have been drawn to that...

...Big band jazz wasn't earning its keep on the road...

...Louis Blues...