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CHAPTER TWO

Records and Rock ’n’ Roll

The coming of rock ’n’ roll to Birmingham produced a surge of activity in the newly established commercial recording business. After World War II many new entrants to the record industry were created to take advantage of postwar innovations in sound recording, in which tape recorders replaced the expensive, sensitive machines that cut recordings onto acetate discs. As Ken Shackleford found out, all you needed was a tape recorder, a mixer, and some microphones, and you could set up a recording studio 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 traveling the country promoting Heart’s records, Ed Boutwell and Glenn Lane joined the organization and learned how to be recording engineers on the job. Ken Shackleford: “I was a loan office [at a bank] and I was working every day. I was the absentee owner. Glenn Lane and Ed Boutwell did the engineering.” Ed Boutwell started recording music in 1956: “I was working for Channel 13 TV and WAPI radio doing production and people would ask us to do a jingle. So we did not know what we were doing, but we did it. We had a lot of fun. I did a lot of jingle recording up there and just commercials … the only recording instruments were at the radio stations.” Shackleford: “The studio was busy all day. We had a little tape duplicating thing. Loop tape thing, we were dubbing some of those and staying pretty busy doing sessions. Basically it was people coming in and asking to do some sessions.” To get into Heart Studios you had to go through the blood bank, full of “riffraff” waiting to sell plasma, and walk upstairs. When you entered the studios you found yourself in a big room with worn carpeting, and glass dividers to isolate the sound as it was recorded. Gary Sizemore and Ken Shackleford would be lounging in the office with cigarettes and coffee, telling stories, while Ed Boutwell would be setting up the microphone and checking the levels on the mixer consol. They often used a single microphone, and only one or two tracks to record on. Re-recording was unknown. Henry Lovoy recalled, “You had to do everything in one take … We just did the whole thing. I don’t know how many cuts we made, I remember that we had to unplug the air conditioner, because it would pick up on the microphones … I remember that the studio was dark and shabby looking. They had some baffles. I was literally squished behind a baffle, singing on this microphone … We were in and out of the studio in two hours. They gave me an acetate copy.” They learned quickly; each recording session was a learning experience. Charlie Colvin: “There were very few professionals here … I can go to Nashville, and I can cut four decent sides in three hours [the industry standard]. It would take me two days to cut four sides here.”

Birmingham’s Rock ’n’ Roll Recordings

Strolling into these primitive recording studios came the young men who were the pioneers of rock ’n’ roll in Birmingham: Baker Knight, Sammy Salvo, Dinky Harris, Bobby Mizzell, and Jerry Woodard. Thomas Baker Knight was the first of them. A few trial recordings (called demonstration records or “demos”) made in Reed Studios brought him to the attention of Alan Bubis of the independent Kit label: “He came to see us play and he took us to Nashville to Owen Bradley’s studio, and we cut five or six sides. It was all done awfully fast!” Making “Poor Little Heart” and the upbeat “Bop Boogie to the Blues” “was a good experience but nothing came of that. We came back to Birmingham and he came down again with a microphone that Bradley’s studio had leant him and we went to another studio and recorded ‘Bring My Cadillac Back.’” This was sold to Decca Records, and “it sold forty thousand copies in two weeks.” This was the hit record that all rock musicians dreamed of: “It was my very first professional song and it didn’t take long / before the record was playing on every jukebox in town,” Baker Knight wrote later in a song. “We had a big page ad. In Billboard, but the stations stopped [playing] it because they said it was a commercial for Cadillac!” The next recording sessions were carried out in Decca’s studios in New York City, and the Nightmares released three singles on Decca in 1957. This showed how fast the system could work when it smelled talent.

Sammy Anselmo had begun singing as a child: “I could do imitations. The whole family would have me do it at parties. They would say, ‘All right, Sammy, go out there and sing.’ Then I would do [Enrico] Caruso. They tried to teach me Italian. I couldn’t understand it. I made up the words as I went along. My father was an opera singer. He used to have an Italian [radio] hour every Sunday in Birmingham. He would broadcast from the back of the hotel … When I was in the army [in the early 1950s], I used to go to the library and listen to opera.” His brother George picked up the story: “Sammy went into the service in Fort Nix, New Jersey. New Jersey was a Yankee town where they were singing country & western. Country & western has a kind of soul sound. Maybe that is what it was with those service boys. I went to visit him while he was on active duty. He was singing at a local club with a boy [Horace Wheat] from Georgia. There had to be three to four hundred people in there. They were standing on a circular stage in the middle of the club singing country & western music. I didn’t know that my brother could sing country & western because he had never sung it before.” Sammy: “I would do Webb Pierce and Jimmy Reed stuff. I would do the harmony and Horace would sing the lead. The club invited us to come in on that Sunday. They wanted us to do a radio show … I got up and I had a smooth voice back then. About two hours later the whole parking lot was full. That was my first professional experience. It was professional, but not professional. We drank all that we wanted and had a good time. We didn’t make any money.”

When Sammy came back to Birmingham after his stint in the service, he took up singing professionally. His experience shows how important the radio deejays were in the music business: “We were introduced to Joe Rumore. He was a country & western disc jockey. I also met Dan Brennan. I was on Dan’s show first. Horace and I got up and did some country stuff. The next thing you know, Joe told me that he needed a singer with Curly Fagan [Joe’s right-hand man]. I said yeah, I’ll be glad to. So I started singing with Curly. We got more involved with Joe after that.” George: “Joe was a very powerful man in music. If he thought you were good, he gave you a push.” Sammy: “Yeah, he sure did.” George: “Joe was a personal friend of Sammy’s. He was Sicilian also. Joe played a lot of country & western. He played Roy Acuff and Roy Orbison. He didn’t get into that kind of rock stuff. Dan Brennan was playing all the rock stuff. When Sammy was doing country & western — that was just a step into rock ’n’ roll. That was all back in 1956.” Sammy: “It was rockabilly. ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is more rockabilly than it is rock ’n’ roll.”

After playing some gigs and appearing on radio, the next step for any aspiring musician was to cut a record. Sammy: “We wanted to do ‘One Little Baby’ as a rockabilly song. That was the first one. We cut that in Joe Rumore’s basement. He had a studio in his basement. There was recording equipment in Joe Rumore’s basement as nice as RCA’s studios.” George: “Joe Rumore was nice enough to do it. I had hired a studio, out in Irondale [suburb of Birmingham]. This guy really screwed it up. His name was Homer Milam. He had a little old studio at the time — it is out on Highway 78 … This is when I went back up to Nashville with a master tape. RCA would press for other people. I was going into my own distribution.” George had decided to start his own record label. He had the support of Joe Rumore and the example of Sun Records: “I started thinking: what is there to a record company? Just looking at that piece of plastic, I knew it wasn’t worth much. With some machinations behind me, I figured out how to start a company. Up to that time I had never heard anyone doing that … I figured: Well, hell, I’ll start my own company … The name on the label was Mark V Records. I went from Birmingham to Dallas, Texas. I came back through Dallas and went through Little Rock, Memphis, then back to Birmingham. In between here and there I hit every radio station I could see. I used to hand out these small lighters. They looked like miniature Zippos. They said ‘Sammy Salvo’ on the side, with a musical note. They were really cheap. I got about five hundred made. They were really pretty … In 1956 I was only twenty-one years old. I only needed about four hours of sleep and I was driving and talking all of the time. I was on the road for about two weeks. I was using whatever I could to get them to play it and pass it on to everybody. I never told them he was my brother. I was out there selling records and getting them hot. I really learned a lot then.”

George Anselmo was doing such a good job of pushing Sammy’s record that RCA began to take notice: “Steve Poncio [a record distributor in Houston] heard the record and made me order some more. I called RCA and they shipped ten thousand more. They assumed Sammy had a hit, since he was selling so many records. It was breaking in Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I stayed in Houston for about a week. That darned thing just took off. Within three days it was number 8 on the Top Ten [local radio chart]. When I got back to Birmingham, Steve had called me. They wanted to buy my rights [to Sammy and his record] for ten thousand dollars. They wanted to give Sammy 5 percent and they wanted to give me 10 percent of the sales. They wanted to know where Sammy was. I told them that he had gone to Nashville, because Chet Atkins wanted to sign him up. He signed for RCA that day. I caught him at the Biltmore. He said, ‘Yeah, I signed.’ I said, ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’ I was driving up to Nashville. I was looking at the contract. It was so thick. I knew that there was no way of breaking it.”

A recording contract with RCA! One of the biggest record companies in the world — the label that had made “Heartbreak Hotel” a global hit and Elvis Presley a star! Sammy Salvo was over the moon: “I was so excited to be signed on RCA. I got 3 ½ percent. It was the kind of deal they gave brand-new artists. That was of the retail sale price. They gave me a three-year deal.” George: “I wasn’t excited because I had the thing sold for $10,000. I knew that we would be getting more from the other day [working with Poncio and selling their own records]. I was very humble. I told Chet Atkins that he didn’t need my brother, because of all the big names that he had. I told him I would like the contract back. He said he was sorry, but it had already been worked.”

When he got to Nashville, Sammy was given four songs (enough for two double-sided 45 rpm singles) and spent a week rehearsing them before going into the studio. During a lunch break a deejay brought in a demo of a song called “Oh Julie.” This song had been written by singer Ken Moffet and released by Ernie Young of Ernie’s Record Shop on his Nasco label. A local group in Nashville called the Crescendos performed it. Chet liked the song and told Sammy to rehearse it: “We cut it. It only took us three takes. It was a really easy song. We did that, then we did the other three songs.” On the B side of the RCA single, he recorded Wayne Handy’s “Say Yeah,” which had been released on the Renown label. “Oh Julie” is a ballad done in rock ’n’ roll style, but many stations played “Say Yeah” because it was an up-tempo dance tune. The Crescendos’ version of “Oh Julie” beat Sammy Salvo’s record into the Billboard Top Five in December 1958. Sammy made it to number 23.

The outlook for Birmingham rock musicians in the late 1950s was promising. Baker Knight and Sammy Salvo had achieved the rock ’n’ roll dream of a contract with a major record company. Jerry Woodard, a young singer who got his musical training in his father’s Church of God ministry, was the next budding star to record in Birmingham. Jerry could sing both church music and country. His friend Jerry Grammer noted the similarities with Elvis Presley, who could sing gospel songs with the best of them. Charlie Colvin had no doubt: “Jerry Woodard was wonderful, probably one of the most multitalented singers of the guys who came out of here. Jerry is dead now. He cut ‘I’m Just a Housewife’ for RCA, and he cut a lot of demos for me.” Pianist Bobby Mizzell: “I met Jerry at WHTB in Talladega, Alabama. He had a radio program there, like I did. I just remember we both liked rockabilly and early rock ’n’ roll boogie and all that stuff, so we got together because of that … We cut songs at WHTB … and the people there made little 45 demos for us … Jerry Woodard and I both left Talladega because of Country Boy Eddie, he had a show on WBRC-TV and WAPI-TV … This is how we first got recognition in Alabama, through the medium of television there.” Country Boy Eddie: “I always wanted to be what I called a ‘radio star.’ I met Happy Hal Burns and he kindly helped me along … I was on in the morning from about five to seven, and at night from seven to ten. That was during the time when rock ’n’ roll came along. Even though rock was hot, I still had the number 1 show in Birmingham … At that point I wanted to get on television … So I went to this fellow named ‘Big Hearted’ Eddie Right. He had a used car lot … so I got him to sponsor me on Saturday night on Channel 13 … From there I went to Channel 6 TV … That was in 1957, and I stayed on there from 5 a.m. until 7 a.m. through 1993 … I think it was the longest-running country music show with one host in America.” Bobby: “When Jerry and me came to Birmingham, the first club we played was the Starlighter, then we played Pappy’s Club and the Escape Lounge too.” In 1957 Woodard recorded his first singles in Birmingham: “Six Long Weeks” / “Blue Broken Heart,” backed by Jerry Reed on guitar and Charles Matthews on piano, followed by “Downbeat” / “Our Love and Romance.” In 1958 he recorded “Who’s Gonna Rock My Baby” for Reed Records, which became his best-known release. This song was the lament of a young rock ’n’ roller conscripted into the army (and the fate of Elvis that year). “She’s a Housewife, That’s All” was a slower country song about the way many teenage love affairs ended up in tedious domesticity. These two tracks were good enough to be picked up by RCA, and Chet Atkins re-recorded them in 1959.

Jerry Woodard and Sammy Salvo’s hot records propelled them into larger markets, and they were soon performing outside Alabama. Both were asked to appear on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, the most popular music show on television, with a huge audience of teenagers who watched it every afternoon after school. “Oh Julie” propelled Sammy Salvo’s career, and he now lived the life of a teen idol: “There were a bunch of screaming girls. It was fantastic … The first car I ever bought with any money that I made was a 1950 pink Mercury. That was what I used to travel around in. After that I bought a T-Bird. It was special. I didn’t ask the salesman how much it was, I just told him ‘I want that car there.’ There wasn’t all that much money in the business at the time. The companies made a lot of money. They would spend all the artist’s money before he even got a check. For instance, the check that I was supposed to get for ‘Oh Julie’ had been mostly spent when I got it. They spent all the money on promotion pictures and album covers.” George: “The artists paid for their own sessions. The money came out of their advance. Back in the 1950s it cost you forty-two dollars a minute to record.” Sammy: “I had a three-year contract. I had to live with it. I couldn’t have quit. They wouldn’t have let me record [with another company]. It would have been over with. They held me there for three years. It started wearing out for me. The tempo changed to something I didn’t know. I just wasn’t getting any hits. I wasn’t doing the right tunes. I don’t know. Maybe I was out of the groove … I was on my way down. I was singing at a place called the Southern Steakhouse. It was in Bessemer in 1961. There was a knockdown drag-out fight, and I ducked from many a beer bottle.”

Bobby Mizzell and Jerry Woodard cut acetates in Birmingham studios and radio stations in 1958. The duo formed a band (Bobby on piano, Jerry on guitar) and also did session work in studios, backing vocalists Sammy Salvo and Len Wade (whom Bobby recorded on his record label singing a song he had written called “Found Someone”). Bobby and Jerry added other band members over time: Newman Cohely on guitar, Billy Self on drums, Tommy Willingham on drums, Lee Hood Carzle on bass, Johnny Carter on drums, and Sam Newfill on guitar. They backed the big-name singers when they played in Alabama: Buddy Knox, Jimmy Bowen, Mark Dinning, Brenda Lee, George Morgan, Roger Miller, and Tex Ritter. Their first record on Reed was Jerry’s “Don’t Make Me Lonely,” and Mizzell had the instrumental “Atomic Fallout” as the flip side — an appropriate title for a country in the grip of the Cold War. Mizzell played on Jerry Woodard’s “Who’s Gonna Rock My Baby” and on numerous other records cut in downtown Birmingham. Two tracks he produced for Reed in 1959 caught the attention of 20th Century Records and were released on their label. “Heart and Soul,” his best-known song, was issued in instrumental and vocal versions. It had more than a hint of the boogie-woogie piano style that was to make Jerry Lee Lewis famous. On the B side was “Same Thing,” with vocals by Jerry’s brother Lee Wayne Woodard.

Dinky Harris met Jerry Woodard at Birmingham International Raceway, where he was racing his car, “TV6.” Jerry needed work done on his car, Jerry had his tool kit handy, and the two got to know one another while working on the motor. Dinky had been playing music since high school, where he had gotten together with a classmate who played bass and with guitarist Carl Hanson. Dinky was the only member of the band with a day job, so he bought a drum set and they started to play a few gigs. After meeting Woodard, Dinky reorganized his band as the Spades, with Jerry Woodard, Bobby Mizzell, Johnny Carter, and Frankie Benefield. In 1959 they recorded “She Left Me Crying,” written by Jerry Woodard. It was recorded at Homer Milam’s Reed Studios and released on the Fad label, a company formed by Woodard that Jerry, Dinky, and Bobby used as the vehicle to market their music. “She Left Me Crying” was an outstanding rockabilly number — a song described later as capturing “lightning in a bottle.” It became a Birmingham favorite. Duke Rumore had a call-in request show that most teenagers listened to, and “She Left Me Crying” became the number 1 song on the station’s chart.

As rock ’n’ roll became more and more popular, the output of Reed, Heart, and Fad Records increased exponentially. Dinky Harris was recording under many different names: Dinky Harris and the Nuggets (“Linda”), Dinky Harris and the Draft Dodgers (“Who’s Gonna Rock My Baby”), Dinky Doo (“Think It Over, Baby”), and plain Dinky Harris (“I Need You”). Bobby Mizzell formed his own Kim Record label (named after movie star Kim Novak) and released rockers like “Rock and Bop Blues,” “Birmingham Boogie,” and “Knockout” (an outstanding piano instrumental still prized by collectors).

Producing a hit record was something like winning at the roulette table: so much of it was chance. Charlie Colvin had been producing Jerry Woodard’s records on the Heart label, but in 1960 he released Woodard’s “You Just Wait” on his Colvin label. The A side was written by Kenny Wallace, and the B side was penned by Woodard’s bass player Henry Strzelecki, who noticed a guy with a big cowboy hat in a restaurant where he was bussing tables (it was Tex Ritter). Henry Strzelecki played in several local bands in Birmingham, including the Four Flickers and the Four Counts. “Long Tall Texan” had a laconic vocal and a certain charm, and its history reveals how the record business worked. Ken Shackleford: “The original song ‘Long Tall Texan’ was done at my studio. Jerry Woodard and Bob Cain had been there all night long. They phoned me early on Sunday morning, and he [probably Woodard] said: ‘We got a hit record.’ We leased the song to Johnny Vincent [who founded Ace Records in 1955 in Jackson, Mississippi], and then Murry Kellum covered it.” Kellum’s version on the MOC label (financed by his parents) was the national hit in 1963. Heart Studios was selling its output to whatever record company, big or small, which was interested: “We would record black artists and send the masters to people like [Berry] Gordy in Detroit, who was struggling just like us.”

By 1959 rock ’n’ roll was in full swing in Birmingham as its recording studios produced a stream of up-tempo dance music with a pounding beat and loud guitar accompaniment. Pat Riley and the Rockets cut “I Need You Baby” and “Little Bop a Little.” Lawrence Shaul and the Aristocats covered Little Richard’s ribald hit “Tutti Frutti” and another R&B standard, “Hey Little Mama.” Paul Ballenger and the Flares produced several records, including one just called “Pig.” Reed’s output in 1959 shows the diversity of music in Birmingham: rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly, country ballads, comedy numbers, and sacred songs. Gene Cole with Clyde’s String Masters recorded “Coal Miner’s Blues,” and the Jubilaires quartet produced their version of the old blues and vaudeville standard “Birmingham Jail.” Sacred music was recorded by several other quartets: the Rhythm Masters recorded “Rainbow of Love,” the England Brothers covered “Jesus Save Me,” and Wallace Odell and the Chordaires did “Walking Towards Heaven.”

Country music dominated Reed’s output in 1959, especially when it leaned toward pop. They made covers of hits like Hank Williams’s “I Don’t Like This Kind of Livin’,” Mason Dixon’s “Cold Cold Heart,” and Newt James’s version of Hank’s big hit “Jambalaya.” Country music fans enjoyed comedy numbers such as Ronnie Wilson’s “You Love That Guitar More Than Me” (backed by Jerry Woodard) and Country Boy Eddie’s “Hang in There Like a Rusty Fish Hook.” Rock ’n’ roll was man’s music, with female voices only as backup, but Birmingham had a few women rockers such as Abby Lee, whose “Waitin’” is a classic of rockabilly. The sound is raw and powerful. She also recorded “I Want Your Lovin’” for Reed. Patsy Tidwell was another female rockabilly singer from Birmingham with two records on Reed: “I Dig You the Most” and “Sit and Rock and Roll Blues.”

Reed and Fad Records were Birmingham’s own versions of Sun Records: small operations run by entrepreneurs in the same mold as Sam Phillips and staffed with local talent. The pioneers of commercial recording in the New South formed a business and social fraternity; Ken Shackleford, Ed Boutwell, Charlie Colvin, and Gary Sizemore knew Phillips personally and did business with him over the years. They are full of engaging stories about this legend of rock ’n’ roll, oblivious to the fact that it could easily have been one of them. Yet it was not to be, and for one simple reason: Sam Phillips and later Rick Hall found success and a measure of immortality by recording African American artists and by incorporating a lot of black music into the records they produced. All of these Alabama record producers shared an appreciation of African American music, but this was the segregated South, and nowhere was segregation stronger than in Birmingham, Alabama. As African American bass player Cleve Eaton pointed out, “They did not let blacks into the studio then.” The idea that a hybrid form of country and R&B — an amalgam of white and black music — could be the music of teenage America, which seems so logical today, was frighteningly novel in the Deep South of the 1950s.