Have You Heard the News? Cincinnati’s King Records Finally Gets Its Due
November 26th, 2008 | 4:00 pm est |
It is an old, nondescript industrial building in Evanston, a struggling, mostly black suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. Clearly visible from along I-71, the former icehouse is tagged here and there with graffiti and looks like any of the hundreds of similar ancient, non-residential structures located in the town Longfellow once called “The Queen City of the West,” but between 1943 and 1971, it was home to a “King.” King Records specialized in markets the major labels weren’t interested in — country and western, rhythm & blues, gospel, and more. The label launched a slew of artists and records that had intractable impact on American music, ranging from Homer and Jethro to Jackie Wilson to James Brown to the original version of “The Twist” by Hank Ballard. King Records closed its doors in 1971, and since then, the old King building at 1540 Brewster Ave. either sat empty or used for storage. For quite some time, there has been a frustrating effort on the part of Cincinnati’s music lovers to install a plaque on the King building, without much interest from civic leaders. However, on Sunday, November 23, a large group of musicians, volunteers, educators, reporters, and prominent Cincinnati citizens converged in front of the old icehouse to join Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum president Terry Stewart in unveiling a plaque designated to honor King Records.
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King was founded by ex-record store owner Sydney Nathan to exploit the popularity of honky tonk, hillbilly, and later bluegrass music, then burning up the airwaves on regional, Cincinnati-based radio stations such as WLW and WCKY, but being recorded by practically no one for public consumption; Louis “Grandpa” Jones was King’s first artist. By 1945, Nathan had identified rhythm & blues as another niche market to address, and these records proved so important to his business that he hired African-American arranger and composer Henry Glover as his chief of A&R in 1947. In 1949, King Records officially adopted an interracial workplace as a core value of the company, initially to combine the then customary two segregated company picnics. This led not only to a happy workplace, but fostered a creative environment where black R&B artists were constantly intersecting with white cowboy singers and often sharing the same backup band. The resultant balance of friction and cooperation played a major role in the development of rock ‘n’ roll; beyond that, King’s passionate advocacy of James Brown led to the funk revolution of the 1960s. By 1960, King was the sixth-largest record company in the world, and unique to the business, as all of its operation was in-house; according to Darren Blase, proprietor of Shake It Records in Cincinnati and an early booster for the drive to place a marker at 1540 Brewster Ave., “They made everything in this building except for the shipping boxes.”
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If ideas move forward on the shoulders of giants, and that is certainly true in the world of American pop music, then Stephen Foster’s shoulders are the ones at the bottom of the heap, because he is the first truly American songwriter. Drawing both from the transplanted song traditions of the European émigrés and the rhythmic sophistication of African-American spirituals and folk pieces, Foster cobbled together a truly multicultural base for popular American music in the 1840s, turning out such enduring compositions as “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks at Home” (probably best known as “Swanee River”), “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Oh! Susanna,” and “Old Kentucky Home,” pieces that dressed up aspects of the frequently risqué and racist minstrel tradition in fine new clothes (with the offensive parts thankfully excised). Foster was the founder of the pop music you hear on your car radio, whether it’s country, rock, or rap, because all of these forms draw on the cross-thatching of traditions that Foster first joined into a single stream of American music nearly 150 years ago. As a cautionary tale, Foster was also the first American songwriter to get royally fleeced by the music business, and he died in 1864 with only 38 cents to his name, a forgotten resident of the Bowery. Foster’s songs have all too often been viewed through the lens of nostalgia (a device Foster deliberately employed and willingly exploited), but their deceptively simple melodies and rich cultural histories full of merging rhythms from different continents make them a good deal more than that, not only the first true American songs, but also among the best. Their amazing longevity proves the point, because in pop music nothing survives without utility.
