RHYTHM & BLUES

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

A warning that applies to this volume more than most. The independent labels of this decade kept casual ledgers or none, registered copyrights under invented names, and advertised sales figures nobody audited. Session dates and personnel for many sides rest on the memories of participants interviewed decades later, on disputed discographies, or on both, and label paperwork (where it survives) frequently disagrees with the musicians’ recollections about who played, when, and for how much. This book has preferred the version its sources agree on, named the teller where an account is one person’s own telling, and said so where the record is silent. The million-seller claims are treated throughout as advertising.

General histories. Arnold Shaw, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues, the fullest survey, built substantially on Shaw’s own interviews with the label owners and artists, with the strengths and hazards of that method. Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City, the founding scholarly account of how the independents fed rock and roll, and his Making Tracks, on Atlantic. Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues, the sharpest argument about the business and radio side. John Broven, Record Makers and Breakers, an oral history of the independent label men that this book’s distribution, pressing-credit and jukebox detail leans on repeatedly.

Label and city studies. Rick Coleman, Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n’ Roll, for New Orleans, J&M and the Imperial operation. Preston Lauterbach, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n’ Roll, for Houston, Don Robey, Evelyn Johnson and circuit economics. Louis Cantor, Wheelin’ on Beale, for WDIA. Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis and Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n’ Roll, for the Memphis Recording Service, Sun, and the Presley transaction, including the careful handling of the Keisker recollection, which this book follows.

Memoirs and biographies of participants, all to be read as interested accounts: Jerry Wexler with David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues, the source of Wexler’s claim to the 1949 chart rename; Ruth Brown with Andrew Yule, Miss Rhythm, for the Atlantic years and the royalty campaign; Chuck Berry, The Autobiography; Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller with David Ritz, Hound Dog, for the Thornton session and the credit dispute; Johnny Otis, Upside Your Head!, for Central Avenue and the revue; John Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll, on Louis Jordan; Gayle Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout!, on Sister Rosetta Tharpe; John A. Jackson, Big Beat Heat, on Alan Freed, the Moondog litigation and the dances.

The trade press of the period (Billboard and Cash Box, weekly, 1942–1955) for chart positions, the June 1949 rename, the jukebox listings, the reports of white teenage buying, and the industry’s own contemporaneous descriptions of itself. The chart caveat in Movement Four applies to every chart figure in this book: these were small-sample trade surveys, not audited sales counts.

On the business mechanics. The statutory two-cent mechanical, the compulsory licence, the 1909 coin-machine exemption and the absence of federal copyright in sound recordings before 1972 are matters of statute; any standard history of American music copyright sets them out. The ASCAP–BMI history is documented in both organisations’ own accounts and in the radio-industry histories of the licensing war. Session-scale figures are from American Federation of Musicians rate histories as cited in the general sources; contract percentages, fees and deductions are the ranges those sources’ interviewees describe, and are labelled illustrative wherever this book does arithmetic with them.

Where figures are disputed, the size and even the fact of various advances; the sales of The Honeydripper, The Fat Man and The Things That I Used to Do; what Big Mama Thornton was paid for Hound Dog; the authorship shares behind several famous credits; the exact circumstances of the Rocket 88 amplifier and of Johnny Ace’s death, the text says so at the point of the claim rather than choosing quietly. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. They are the record, and in this decade they are frequently the story.