LITMIR.BIZ

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in a shop front or office. The Sun record label was the work of a businessman from Alabama called Sam Phillips. Born and raised in Florence, one of the three communities in northeastern Alabama with strong industrial ties to Birmingham, Phillips moved to the nearest city to advance his career in broadcasting. After starting with WLAY radio in Muscle Shoals, he then moved to Decatur, Alabama, and then briefly to Nashville and finally to Memphis in 1944 to take a job at WREC radio. He set up the Memphis Recording Service in a storefront on 706 Union Avenue with the intention of recording “Negro artists … who just wanted to make a record and had no place to go.”¹ He loved the music of his youth, the music he had heard on his father’s farm and in black churches. He recorded B. B. King and Jackie Brentson’s historic “Rocket 88.” Sun was not big enough to market these recordings, so the masters were sold to larger companies such as Chess in Chicago (which released “Rocket 88”) and RPM on the West Coast. Sun was building a reputation as being “the expert in recording Negro talent,” but this wasn’t profitable enough to support a storefront operation with two employees, so Phillips had to make a living recording anything from wedding speeches to bar mitzvahs. “We record anything — anywhere — anytime” was the motto. For $3.98 anyone could make a recording on a fragile acetate disc. In the summer of 1953 Presley walked in to 706 Union Avenue, and there occurred the most fateful meeting in the history of American popular music.

      Birmingham in the 1950s was primarily an iron and coal town, but it had also become the technological center of the region, a communication and broadcasting hub. When Rick Hall decided to set up a recording studio in Florence, he had to come down to Birmingham to get some of the equipment. Soon after the war was over the first independent record companies and studios were established in Birmingham — the work of entrepreneurs who wanted to record local country and gospel acts for limited distribution in northern Alabama. They were small, shoestring operations linked to local musicians and locally financed. The Vulcan and Bama labels were the first two. Both used acetate disc recording equipment in radio stations to record masters, until wire and tape recorders became available in the late 1940s. Charlie Colvin established his first studio in Albertville, a small community in northern Alabama, near Huntsville: “Well, I had a studio in Albertville back in ’49. We took the root direct to disc. Tape was just an invention at the time. Ampex made the first recorder, and I happened to go to Nashville one time. I had written a song, and there was a publisher up there who had run a check on it, and there was this Ampex tape machine and I thought, well, you know, it’s just like wires [wire recorders]. In my studio in Albertville I was recording mostly the gospel groups around. Then I came to Birmingham to get into the business. I left for a while and went to school and then I came back here in ’57. Ken Shackleford and all of them had started a studio called Heart and Soul Studio. It was above a blood bank on Third Avenue … Of course we had mostly black artists. We were right in the middle of Fourth Avenue [the black business district] there: so we had a lot of black artists in there.”

      Charlie Colvin thinks that the first studio in Birmingham was established by Ted Bilch, a guitar player and head of the musicians’ union, probably in his home in Birmingham with Ampex or Presto equipment. Several others started recording in their homes and then progressed to building studios in rented properties. Homer Milam was the pioneer of commercial recording in Birmingham. After operating several small studios in the suburbs, he built his Birmingham studio in two rooms above a restaurant at 1917 First Avenue North in the early 1950s. Described by some musicians as a “dump,” it was old, dusty, and nasty. There was an office and a room with a direct-to-disc recorder in it — a device that inscribed the sound on a flimsy Presto acetate disc. The rest of the equipment was equally primitive — an Ampex tape recorder and “one microphone, one of those all-the-way-round things.” Yet Milam’s Reed label produced some exciting recordings and played a big part in bringing rock ’n’ roll to Birmingham.

      Reed was not the only record company driving the spread of rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly in Birmingham in the late 1950s. Charlie Colvin’s label was releasing records produced at Heart Studios, while Squire Records was releasing rock and rockabilly numbers, including Slick Lawrence’s “Little Mama.” Although the rock ’n’ roll records are the best-known, much of the recording activity of the small labels was directed at the large audience for sacred music in Alabama, where gospel quartets thrived. Arlington Records produced songs of the Birmingham favorite, the Harmony Four, and many other gospel groups. Some of these small labels were formed specifically to record gospel and several were directly linked to the singing groups. Vulcan Records was set up by Peter Doraine in 1955 to record local R&B groups. Charlie Colvin worked closely with Heart Records as a producer and writer, setting up sessions for his singers to make the demos he would hawk in Nashville: “Tony Borders was the first artist that I recorded. I took him to Nashville and recorded a song that he and I wrote … Then we had the first release on Smash Records [one of his labels], which was Mercury’s [one of the larger independents set up in Chicago after the war and then established in Nashville] first ‘Indian Blues.’ I don’t know if they printed up the labels for us … I did a lot of rhythm and blues, recording mostly black musicians. I also had a little white group that was really quite good. They were just kids in high school. God, I can’t remember their names. They were a singing group. I put out a record on my label [Colvin Records] called ‘Let’s Dance.’”

      Many of the records produced in Birmingham were of gospel or R&B groups, and this naturally influenced the sound of the music being made there. Charlie Colvin: “I wish I had some more names but the sound in Birmingham, it kind of went to the … I don’t know what you call it, it was the first teenage sound, came right after the Big Bopper [J. P. Richardson], and Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly. It was that kind of music, but it had more of a teenage feel to it. Birmingham did have its own sound, and most of it was black influence … You had a cross between Memphis and Nashville. That was what the Birmingham sound was back then … I used to go all through the black community and get musicians, and I got pretty good at it at one time. The most fun was looking for musicians and black players. I would go out there and say: ‘Do you know so and so?’ ‘No. No, I don’t know them, they don’t live around here.’ I would say, ‘Well, I heard he did, and I have some money I need to give him.’ ‘Oh, you mean that so and so!’ That was how I would have to find them. It was really fun back then … In Fairfield there was Freddy’s Lounge over there and then the Blue Gardenia. Actually, there was more happening in the black community than there was in the white community … I was the only white guy in the place usually, because I was booking black talent, you know … There was one place that was the Choral, and it was country, and we used to always go down there. I could see all the guys from different bands. There was a lot of country, a lot of good country singers came from here, but I still think that you ought to do a little thing on the gospel that was going on here. It was big here! All-night singings and back then they were on the radio on Sunday mornings … R&B definitely had an influence on most everything that happened in Birmingham. They just had the feel! They called it ‘soul,’ the soul feeling, you know? Excitement! That’s what it was. It was excitement!”

      Ken Shackleford was joined by Gary Sizemore at Heart Studios: “Just out of college — this was before Elvis — I answered an advertisement in the paper for a salesman for RCA Records … I wasn’t making any money, so I quit and went to work for Jake Friedman for Southland distributors … I was selling records: Rumore’s Record Rack, Newberry’s, Loveman’s [department store] was the big album outlet, E. E. Forbes [piano and musical instruments] was big … It’s 1956. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ came out. I am selling records like crazy … People were making lots of commissions on Elvis. I was selling independent records, like Mercury’s ‘Little Darlin’ [by the Diamonds], ‘Searchin” [by the Coasters], I promoted the B side —‘Young Blood.’ We were selling them in batches of a hundred in Birmingham. I took it to all the deejays — Duke Rumore was the first to play it. And then it went national.” Sizemore worked for several independent labels: “There was a lot of payola in those days. I am supposed to offer him [Buddy Dean, a Baltimore deejay] half the publishing, or half the record [sales], and I don’t know what … I went through the same thing with all the deejays, I didn’t know a thing. Time to get back to Birmingham. Then I met up with Ken — that was 1958 or 1959.”

      With Gary Sizemore

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