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CHAPTER ONE

Rock ’n’ Roll Comes to Birmingham

Rock ’n’ roll came to Birmingham in the form of recordings — shiny black lacquered 78 rpm promotional discs sent to radio stations by the record companies. Station WVOK went on the air in Birmingham in 1947. An AM station of 10,000 watts, it covered most of North and Central Alabama as well as good portions of Georgia and Tennessee. It was the work of the Bends and Brennan families, and Dan Brennan was there from the beginning: “When we signed on, a Capitol transcription library was our only source or primary source of entertainment. Big 16-inch discs, and they had some interesting programming, among others they had Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, some others, Pee Wee Hunt. They had a number of singers and some country & western, Tex Ritter and some of those people, Nat King Cole and the King Cole Trio. They would have maybe four or five selections on each side, and it would be just an opportunity to play them. The other form of music was a 78 rpm record … The only company that gave us records in the beginning was RCA. We did get some help from them, but most of the others did not. We actually had to purchase records. When we first signed on, we played a form of pop music; the Capitol library was pop. We did have some country & western too, but it was primarily pop, then within the first couple of years we had switched over to country & western. Partly because of audience demand, and partly because some of the live bands we had on the air were country & western.

“We had dances and we had bands that would perform at the Bessemer City Auditorium. We just did that as a means of kind of spotlighting the groups that were playing on the air. We gave them an opportunity to make a few dollars and also to make the station look a little different. Not many stations in town had any live functions like that that they participated in. We played records while the bands took a break. I remember one of the dances at the Bessemer Auditorium. I remember the first record, first true rock ’n’ roll record I played: ‘Rock around the Clock’ by Bill Haley. I remember people did not dance — they looked like they did not know what in the world they were hearing. I knew at the time [1955] it was still, it was very popular already in some parts of the country, but our audience we had on that dance floor did not know what it was. Our first exposure to rock ’n’ roll was really rockabilly. It was kind of Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and some of those Sun recordings. As a matter of fact, we played a combination of country & western and rockabilly in the beginning and it was probably a transition to rock ’n’ roll music.”

Baker Knight was in a rockabilly band called the Nightmares in 1955, with Shuler Brown on bass, Nat Toderice and Glen Lane on saxophone, and Bill Weinstein on drums. They had, in his words, “a country rock sound” with steel guitar and piano. “We had started a band when Elvis came out and I had learned to play guitar well enough to get a band going.” Knight said they were “the first rockabilly band in Birmingham … and the American Legion [venue] in Leeds [a community close to Birmingham] was the first time the Nightmares played.” Later on they played “the Mountain Brook Lodge, which had mostly pop groups, and the people came rushing in to hear rock ’n’ roll, people had never heard it before … People would come and stand around bandstand and stare up at us, whatever songs were popular, ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ black music, I could sing that stuff … R&B [rhythm and blues] brought them together, Bo Diddley stuff, people loved it — it was something different.”

The radio stations playing that “Bo Diddley stuff” in Birmingham were some of the few African American stations in the country. As the South was segregated, Birmingham’s biggest radio stations — WAPI, WBRC, and WSGN — broadcast to a predominantly white audience. The first inroads into the segregated airwaves were short programs devoted to African American sacred music, featuring the gospel quartets whose sweet harmonies and soaring lead vocals appealed to both races. William Blevins, Nims Gay, and Sadie Mae Patterson all broadcast gospel shows on white radio in the early 1940s. The African American businessman A. G. Gaston sponsored Birmingham’s Gospel Harmonettes on WSGN. On April 19, 1942, WJLD started broadcasting from Bessemer. It carried gospel shows, popular music, and news. In 1946 a white disc jockey called Bob Umbach began the Atomic Boogie Hour, playing rhythm and blues and imitating the patter of black deejays, just like Dewey Phillips in Memphis. It was the only station in Birmingham that broadcast black music. The Atomic Boogie Hour was so popular it often ran for hours every day, and it lasted until 1953.

In 1949 Shelley Stewart got a job with the newly opened WEDR, a white-owned station aimed at the black audience, and as “Shelley the Playboy” he brought the exciting sounds of R&B and rock ’n’ roll to an awed audience of teenagers. Ed Reynolds, who managed WJLD, started WEDR radio in 1949 — another station aimed at the African American audience. By the 1960s WENN was the premier radio station in Birmingham programming African American music, with two of the city’s most popular deejays: Shelley Stewart and “Tall Paul” White. Record collector Ben Saxon remembered: “You grew up listening to WJLD and WENN and Shelley the Playboy and Tall Paul.” “Can I get a witness!” roared Shelley over the air after he played a hot song, and thousands of Birmingham teenagers agreed with him. As one of them said: “We was all listening to Shelley.” Baker Knight: “B. B. King was just starting in and they were playing his records on the black radio station … This was 1952. I was over at the black radio station before white people knew that they had such things … We went over to the black radio station, and that was unheard-of in those days, and we’d listen to B. B. King records.” The black stations had an illicit attraction: “You had to get closer to the music,” remembered David Bryan, and this meant traveling to the black sections of town, ducking down in the car as you traversed the mainly African American Northside. If you could not get the signal, you were left out of it. Tony Wachter: “So it is strange how cut off we were. I felt extremely cut off. Even though WENN was broadcasting in my youth, if they were I didn’t know what it was — we could not get it.”

Listening to the radio at night was one of those shared rock ’n’ roll pleasures. Ben Saxon: “I don’t know how I first started listening. Transistor radios were just coming out. I had one that was in the shape of a rocket ship. It was only AM, of course. The nose was the pull-up antenna … I had a really strict father, who would make me go to bed at eight at night. I would take the radio with the earphones and have a great time listening to the music until I went to sleep.” On a clear night you might be able to pick up Louisiana Hayride coming from KWKH from Shreveport, or B. B. King playing records at WDIA in Memphis, the “mother station” of rhythm and blues.

As rock ’n’ roll became more accepted, more radio stations began to program it. Loud, brash, Duke Rumore (“the loud mouth of the South”) established himself as the leading rock ’n’ roll disc jockey at WSGN — the major player in Birmingham’s radio in the 1960s. Vocalist Henry Lovoy and Ben Saxon remembered him and “all that New Orleans soul and R&B that he used to play. It was kind of like an Alan Freed of the Birmingham area. He brought that new sound here to us.” Bob Cahill: “You could listen to black radio, but I don’t think other than in the morning when you were going to school, because for most teenagers the Rumore brothers probably had their ear in the afternoon. The reason was that they would play the latest, and if Duke said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a new record from somebody,’ everybody would listen and he would play it at 4 [p.m. — after school].” Davy Roddy was another popular rock deejay. Fred Dalke: “One of the biggest things in the ’50s and ’60s was that radio had personality, they had radio personalities, as compared to today — a lot of these deejays are clones. In those days every deejay that became big and popular had their own way of doing things, like Dave Roddy, and they called him ‘Rockin’ Roddy,’ and he was on WSGN and he was like the deejay to listen to, he was cool, and all the kids listened to him on Friday nights.”

Disc jockeys were well connected to their audience; they did their business in person, meeting the listening audience in the numerous promotional activities they arranged. Duke’s brother Joe Rumore of WVOK — at 50,000 watts the most powerful station in the state — had one of the most recognized voices in Alabama. His daily presence on air made him a family friend for those who listened in: “I couldn’t get through the day without Joe,” said one of them.¹ Joe would deal with as many as 250 letters from his listeners every day. In 1954 the two brothers opened Rumore’s Record Rack on 1802 Second Avenue, which gave them a retail outlet for the records they played on air. Deejays played a more personal role in music than they do now; they were there on the stage introducing the artists, making appearances at retail stores and record hops. Ben Saxon and Henry Lovoy agreed, “We had a radio family at one time in Birmingham. Back then you knew or felt like you knew Dave Roddy or Dan Brennan or Joe Rumore. They were your friends.”

Popular Entertainment in the 1950s

Much of Birmingham’s live music at this time was being played by dance bands — not the great swing bands of the 1940s, but smaller, more flexible groups. Harrison Cooper started playing saxophone at Ensley High School in the 1930s: “I organized a little Lombardo-type band. Guy Lombardo. Everyone liked him then. So we just got bitten by the bug and his music, and started copying his arrangements and we were just teenagers. We played Birmingham, but it was actually after high school. So we had this real professional-sounding band and we would broadcast on the local radio stations WBRC and WAPI and just go all over the country. The signal went out and we would get letters about going to different places to play … We played all around Birmingham at different clubs, the hotels, dances at the country clubs. It was a very danceable-type band. In 1935 we were playing at the Ritz Theatre and there was this girl and her husband who liked our band a lot and they were moving to South America … They liked our band so well that they told us when they left that they would try and book us down there. Sure enough, they did. We went down there in January of 1935 and stayed for six months in Buenos Aires. That was really the climax of that band. After we came back from South America we played around Birmingham for a while and I guess it just kind of wore off. We all just went in different directions.” After graduating from school Harrison Cooper joined Herbie Kay’s band in Chicago: “I played with that band until I was drafted in World War II. Then when I got into the army I organized a band there. I was fortunate to have a band all during the war. We had a big Glenn Miller–type band at that time. That was about 1941–45. That was about the swing time. There was Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and there were a lot of big bands at that time. So after the war was over I came back to Birmingham and stayed about six months, and then I decided to go back up to New York, and when I got there I got a job with Benny Goodman. I was with Benny for about two years, and I came back to Birmingham to organize my own band here. That was about 1947. So I picked up where I left off years ago. We played all the places around Birmingham. The Pickwick Club was very popular. They had a big dance hall in the back of the hotel. It was very popular, all the high school proms were held there and it was just a very busy place. We also played at downtown at the Municipal Auditorium, we played a lot of dances there. The Thomas Jefferson Hotel, the Tutwiler, they all had ballrooms. Country clubs like the Fairmont, Hillcrest, Birmingham, Mountain Brook, we played a lot of those places, a lot of those social dances. We were a busy bunch.”

Tommy Charles had started training his voice for opera, “but I saw people around me who had less voice than I did making a lot more money and having a lot more fun singing ballads, pop … Don Cornell [vocalist of the Sammy Kaye band] was an influence, Sinatra was an influence, Perry Como, who is a guy you haven’t heard of. Bing Crosby, of course.” Charles was soon making a name for himself as a radio personality: “I made national radio with a band called Horace Height, which was a national touring band that was on CBS, and I made them in 1953 … Back then I sang everywhere … I played here at Mike’s South Pacific, and also played at Carmichael’s [nightclub] … And Carmichael was a real hip kind of guy, dressed in real fancy clothes, and he introduced me … and I came roaring out from the sidelines and the band’s playing the introduction to my song and I grab the microphone off the stand, and I’m going to put on a show, then I knock my tooth out and it falls on the floor.” The life of a musician in the 1950s was “with whiskey and people having a good time … But some of the things I could tell you, you couldn’t put in a book. Because back then, performers just got women. I don’t know why … and I don’t mean it with anything illicit necessarily, just women like to meet performers. And the sexual revolution hadn’t taken place yet, so it was not a big deal.”

In the 1950s the record companies and radio stations served the adult audience. Dan Brennan: “We really wanted to get, for our clients, more of the adults than we did the young children. We reached them with rock ’n’ roll too. I think as many adults liked Elvis as did the youngsters. I don’t think our goal was ever to try and just reach teenagers or anything like that … So while the first listeners might have skewed toward the younger age groups, the final result was a family audience … So for commercial reasons it was more profitable to us to sell our sponsors’ products to adults than it was to sell them to youngsters.”

Birmingham had many dance bands and venues for them to play. Vocalist Cousin Cliff: “I want you to write down Harrison Cooper first … He is a pianist and is just wonderful … Dewitt Shaw, he had one of the best bands in Birmingham. He really played most of the dances around here, he and Harrison Cooper. They used to play the old Pickwick [Club] … Buddy Harris had a real nice dance band that was real sophisticated, but they were not real big though … Another person would be Tant, Buddy Wallace Tant … Eddie Stephens had a band also … He had a big band, about fifteen or twenty pieces. He used to play at the Cascade Plunge and the Cloud Room. Do you remember Cascade Plunge? They used to have those big dances out there called convocations of social clubs … Just a lot of big bands out there … Ted Brooks is another person, boy, he was really good … in fact, he played shows with me at the old Shades Mountain Country Club … Lou Mazzeret was a band director, and he used to play down at the Blue Note Club. That used to be downtown. Henry Kimbrell is another one. He used to play at all those society functions … Back when I was going to school, Woodlawn [High School] and all, we used to have sorority and fraternity parties. We used to have lead-outs, where all the boys bring out the girls through this pretty arch and all, and they have this big theme and usually have big bands.”

The scores of bands that played the big hotels downtown, the dinner and dance clubs like the Pickwick and Blue Note, the country clubs and private supper clubs, all depended on providing music for dancing. Harrison Cooper: “Bill Nappi had a dance band that was pretty big. It was a dance band mainly. These were all mostly dance bands that were around here. There was Paul Smith. There were a lot of little old bands like that around Birmingham at that time. They were very popular. There were as many dance bands around at that time as there are rock bands that are around now. Everything is rock now; back then everything was dance.”

Tommy Stewart, one of the great trumpet players of the swing era, hit the road early: “The snake oil and medicine shows used to come from Atlanta, and a lot of them left with musicians who could read [music]. Plenty of tent shows came through. Over by Parker High School, there was a big old field over there. These guys came through and sell you some Hadecol, snake medicine or something — some of that stuff was colored water. They had live bands and I played with some of them. I made some money when I was about sixteen traveling with a circus … Birmingham was a hotbed for music ever since I was a little boy. You had bands like the Fred Avery Band, John L. Bell, a piano player had a band, John Hands had a band in the 1940s. Fess [Whatley] had a heck of a band. When Sun Ra left [around 1946] his band was still playing here.”

Birmingham’s segregated African American community had its own entertainment. Clarinetist and saxophonist Frank Adams “saw Cab Calloway at the Masonic Temple. I remember seeing him perform on stage. It was a black-only concert. There was no integration at that time. I remember seeing Duke Ellington for the first time at the Masonic Temple … I used to wonder how luxurious it was to see someone at an auditorium. They had a balcony, where we would sit and look out. I was really impressed with Duke’s band.” Tommy Stewart: “The Madison Night Spot on Bessemer Highway was the place; it had a big hall to dance: $2.50 to see B. B. King or Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Ray Charles, Howlin’ Wolf. There were a lot of clubs, five or six clubs along Auburn Avenue, some holes in the wall and some very good. Fess was playing at country clubs. Birmingham was real dirty, but there was a lot going on, the music scene was going strong and a sports scene was really something. Willy Mays — I saw him play at Rickwood Field. Birmingham had a lot of race problems. Fourth Avenue and Seventeenth Street was a black business district full of black businesses, a lot more thriving than you do now. I’d rather be in segregation any day because the music was better — you had four or five big bands, five or six combos making money, with guys working six days a week. On weekends you would go along Fourth Avenue, it was like a brand-new city in the middle of the city. It blew my mind when I first went down there … You could go down Fourth Avenue on Friday night and see the [tour] buses, they got stranded, or stopped to get a motel in the district or stayed in homes. It’s tough now when you read about it [segregation], but then they did not pay any attention — they liked to play, they were making music, they worked regular and they were doing all kind of stuff.” Frank Adams: “Live music was big. Tuxedo Junction was a park where they played. I can think of so many places where musicians played. I can think of so many, like the old Congo Club, which was out on Bessemer Highway. Monroe’s Steakhouse was another one. A lot of people got names for clubs in Birmingham after places that had opened in New York. We had a Cotton Club here … There were sometimes musicians who would sit out on Fourth Avenue and play. It was comparable to the French Quarter … Fourth Avenue was thriving at that point. It was downtown, and it was all that we had. It was the heart of entertainment. You worked all week so you could come into town on the weekend. You spent your money on Fourth Avenue.”

Things were changing for big band players in the postwar entertainment scene. Tommy Stewart: “Jazz musicians from the swing era, when work got slim at the end of the 1940s, a lot of them went into small bands. Louis Jordan was jump jive. His band was the Tympany Five, those smaller bands, he got it from Chick Webb. At this time the small bands were coming up, because there was less costs … Well, there were two factions of small bands: followers of Louis Jordan and [followers of] Charlie Parker. Jazz used to be dance music, popular music entertainment, then Louis Jordan went toward R&B, and jazz became intellectual listening music. R&B would still employ music from big bands. For example, the Clovers and Drifters — their first arrangers were old jazz musicians.” Tommy got hired to play trumpet in R&B singer Jimmy Reed’s band: “I had gone back to Gadsden [about sixty miles from Birmingham] and had formed a jazz band, three or four students, and we went with Jimmy Reed, we were just teenagers. We had sharp stage suits, you know, the Ivy League pants and big-brimmed hats. There I was playing in New York City at fifteen. Here comes my mama … That killed me right there! We played mostly black joints … Jimmy Reed had a big white following. I think the last club my mama pulled me out of was the Birmingham Country Club — she came over there and got me!” Frank Adams landed a spot in the great Duke Ellington band, which kept swing alive in the 1950s, albeit in a more modern form. Erskine Hawkins became an arranger and bandleader for James Brown, who was making a big impression with the African American audience for his soulful stage show. Sonny Blount (aka Sun Ra) worked with Wynonie Harris, a wild R&B singer who inspired Elvis Presley with not only his music but also his outrageous stage act. In 1948 Harris cut a record for the independent King label; “Good Rockin’ Tonight” was a hit and a portent of some important changes to come in the business of popular music.

“Good Rocking Tonight”

Written by Roy Brown in 1947, this influential song started off as a jump jive number: swinging tempo, heavy on the beat, and with clearly enunciated lyrics. Brown’s vocal style owed a lot to gospel and influenced singers like Bobby Bland and Jackie Wilson. Brown tried to sell his song to Wynonie Harris. He was not interested, but the song impressed the owner of the independent De Luxe Records, Jules Braun, to sign Brown and put the record out. Released in 1948 it reached number 13 on the Billboard R&B chart, and a year later Wynonie Harris’s cover made it to number 1 on the chart. This attracted some attention from country artists looking for up-tempo songs. Bill Haley was one of them. His cover of Jackie Brentson’s “Rocket 88” had done very well, and he followed this in 1953 with “Rock the Joint,” a pioneer rockabilly record. The beat, structure, and lyrics of the song owed a lot to “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” but changes replaced the names of R&B dances to country dances, and there was a lot more echo effect in the recording and a penetrating guitar solo by Danny Cedrone, which he used again on “Rock around the Clock.”

Country and Rockabilly

Bill Haley was not the only country artist trawling through the R&B charts looking for suitable material for audiences wanting faster tempos and more exciting rhythms. Sidney Louie “Hardrock” Gunter of Birmingham was also trying to cross over. Gunter was a singer who got some of his first gigs on radio — playing guitar behind the Delmore Brothers on the Alabama Hayloft Jamboree show. Gunter formed the Hoot Owl Ramblers in 1938 to broadcast on local radio — allegedly the band came from Hoot Owl Holler in Birmingham. In 1939 he joined Happy Wilson’s Golden River Boys, who had a regular spot on WAPI radio, which helped them get booked into the Princess theater chain, which covered Alabama and Georgia. Gunter acquired his nickname after a trunk lid fell on his head while unloading the group’s gear and he continued unhurt. Much of his music harked back to the string bands and comedy routines of the previous generation of old-time players, but it was changing with the times. He told the story of country music’s postwar transformation in a song he wrote called “I’ll Give ’em Rhythm.” This is a song of two halves: one with steel guitar breaks and lyrics about “purty love songs,” country homes, and the “good ole radio.” But he laments that there’s something wrong — they don’t like my songs, they want rhythm with a solid beat. The song takes off in a faster tempo with roaring saxophones and pounding drums as Hardrock proves he can deliver what he calls “rhythm and blues.” Although it “hurts his soul to dig for gold,” he does it anyway, along with hundreds of his contemporaries, black and white, who were looking for inspiration across the color bar. In 1951, he recorded a song with Roberta Lee, the raunchy “Sixty Minute Man,” which was one of the first country records to cross over and appeal to R&B audiences.

Gunter was so popular on local radio that Manny Pearson, the owner of Bama Records, approached him with an offer to make some records. Bama was a small, independent local label with no offices and no recording studio, so Gunter went to the studios of WAPI to record “Birmingham Bounce,” and “How Can I Believe You Love Me.” The Golden River Boys (renamed the Pebbles for the session), were made up of Hardrock on guitar, Billy Tucker on fiddle, Ted Crabtree on steel guitar, Huel Murphy on piano, Jim O’Day on bass, and Bob Sanders on drums. “Birmingham Bounce” soon became a regional hit and Hardrock played for large crowds as he toured the Deep South. “Birmingham Bounce” is about having a good time in “a town we love called Birmingham.” Gunter’s song rocks along with a pounding boogie-woogie piano and drum beat, yet prominent fiddle and steel guitar breaks mark this disc as country. Gunter’s music sounds like old-time radio with a folksy spoken introduction and down-home banter, but it also has enough rhythm and excitement to qualify for early rock ’n’ roll, even though the trademark twangy electric guitar is absent. Country singer Red Foley recorded a version for the major Decca label that quickly climbed the national charts, finally making number 1 on the country charts for several months.

Bama followed the success of “Birmingham Bounce” with another single in 1950: “Gonna Dance All Night” / “Why Don’t You Show Me That You Love Me.” This record has a place in the history books as it claims one of the first mentions of the term “rock-’n’-roll,” years before deejay Alan Freed popularized it. Gunter remembered later that he had often heard the term at dances, especially after a good up-tempo number. So he started to use it in his introductions—“here’s one you can rock ’n’ roll to”— in order, as he admitted, to be “in with the kids.”² Bill Haley had done the same thing: he had picked up the phrase that formed the title of his song “Crazy Man, Crazy” from the teenagers in his audience. Country singers and their fellow professionals in R&B were incorporating the vernacular of their audiences in their songs and putting both “rock” and “roll” in the lyrics. On “Birmingham Bounce” Hardrock sang, “When the beat starts rockin,’ no one’s blue,” and he added to this on “Gonna Dance All Night” with: “We’re gonna rock ’n’ roll while we dance all night.” While solidly in the country genre — his next Bama release was “Dad Gave My Hog Away” / “Lonesome Blues”— Hardrock was playing rock ’n’ roll and defining it as up-tempo songs that “the kids” can dance to.

Unfortunately for Gunter, his regional hits did not help his career as a recording artist, and he remained in radio and television. In 1953 he returned to Birmingham, where he was a deejay on radio station WJLD. The program director there was Jim Connally, who was related to Sam Phillips, owner of the small Sun label in Memphis. Phillips had expressed an interest in recording Hardrock in Memphis, but Gunter could not find the time to travel up there, so he remade “Gonna Dance All Night” at a Birmingham radio station. The tapes were sent to Memphis, and in May 1954 Phillips released it on the Sun label.

Elvis Presley was another country singer signed to Sun. Phillips always told the story that he was searching for a young white kid who could put over the rhythm and blues that was so popular with his black customers, and Presley turned out to be that person. “Birmingham Bounce” was Sun’s #201 release and soon after came Sun #209, “That’s Alright Mama,” a reworking of bluesman Arthur Crudup’s earlier record. Sun Records were trying to cover all their bases for Presley’s first release, for on the flip side of this R&B cover was a country standard, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” done over in a much faster and louder rockabilly style. Elvis’s second Sun release, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (Sun #210), was a cover of Wynonie Harris’s hit. Birmingham musician Lenard Brown: “See, black people were doing that for so long before Elvis, it was unreal. They [Sun Records] just had the money to put behind it — he was not doing anything different.”

Enter the King

Although the country radio stations steered well clear of “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley knew that they were onto something. During 1954 Elvis continued to perform as “The Hillbilly Cat” (backing Bill Haley and the Comets on one occasion) and playing gigs in Alabama, including one-nighters in Sheffield and Montgomery, and some say a honky-tonk in Prattville. Elvis Presley was gaining exposure, especially after he secured gigs on Louisiana Hayride, a Saturday night country radio show that was broadcast all over the South. One day in November 1955 Ken Shackleford was eating lunch with RCA executive Ed Hines in Gulas’s restaurant in downtown Birmingham. Shackleford was a new entry into the record business: “I got out of the navy and came to Birmingham and went to work in a bank. I won a contest to sell accounts, and I won and got a tape recorder — a reel-to-reel. Being a musician myself, and I met this guy, a saxophone player and he said, ‘You need a mixer.’ So I went out and got a Boken mixer. My friend said, ‘We should go downtown and start a studio.’ I had a friend downtown who had a blood bank, who gave me the upstairs for nothing. We go in and build a studio … We would tape a session and we would send our tapes to RCA [in Nashville] and then they would [custom] press them. We sent them the tape and they did the rest. We knew nothing about soundproofing and recording … The only thing [recording studio] they had at that time was Homer Milam [of Reed Records]. He’s a good friend, but he didn’t have the kind of equipment we did. At the time the best stuff on the market was an Ampex two-track reel to reel … Homer had a three-track, that’s what he did all the Reed stuff on … In the meantime we were recording various people, a session for Marion Worth, who got a Columbia record contract, she was like Patty Page.” While the two were eating, Ed Hines, “the RCA head honcho in Nashville,” blurted out “We bought Elvis’s contract from Sun Records for $35,000!” Shackleford was shocked: “What! My God, did somebody lose their mind?” This was an unheard amount for a little-known singer and the most that any record company had ever paid for an individual artist. An entrepreneur with a background in carnivals and a fake military title called Colonel Tom Parker had taken over managing Elvis from Sam Phillips, and he steered the young man away from Sun Records to RCA — one of the five or six major recording companies. RCA proclaimed their new signing as an up-and-coming star of country music and his first release on their label was a country song, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” (recorded in Sun Studios in 1955). The B side of this disc was the sublime “Mystery Train,” one of the great rock songs, and its relegation to the B side indicates where RCA thought the core audience for Elvis might be. Yet RCA alerted their dealers that Elvis’s records should be catalogued as both pop and country.

Twenty-one-year old Elvis made the journey to Nashville at the beginning of 1956 and found himself in RCA’s recording studio under the watchful gaze of Chet Atkins. This was a complex of studios, first-rate equipment, and some of the best guitar pickers in the nation — a big change from the tiny, primitive independent studios like Sun in Memphis or Shackleford’s Heart Studios in Birmingham. When “Heartbreak Hotel” was released in January 1956, there was an anxious feeling in RCA’s offices in Nashville and New York that someone had made a big mistake. A few weeks later no one was worrying anymore; “Heartbreak Hotel” was racing up the charts — not just the pop charts, but all the charts. It had reached number 1 in pop and country and number 5 in the rhythm and blues charts by March. Its sales were astounding. Even the black radio stations were playing it. The next time Shackleford and Hines met for lunch a few weeks after that November meeting, Hines said: “Ken, you are not going to believe this but we are shipping records out of Indianapolis in boxcars” — that is, in railroad boxcars instead of in trucks or U.S. Mail packages. The national network of record distributors operated by RCA was spreading the word of rock ’n’ roll in the form of this single disc.

The Rock ’n’ Roll Show

The first national tours of artists playing the new music came to Alabama in 1956, such as Bill Haley, the Drifters, Bo Diddley, and Big Joe Turner, whose “Shake, Rattle and Roll” had been the basis of many successful covers by white artists, including one by Bill Haley. These were the days when a concert was more than one headliner and an opening band, but as many as fifteen nationally known artists all performing on one bill. Music promoter Tony Ruffino: “There was eleven acts on one show and they all did one song. The radio would only play one or two songs. So therefore no one would ever have more than one or two hits.” The next year Alan Freed’s Biggest Show of Stars came to the Deep South with some of the emerging names in what he had labeled rock ’n’ roll: Fats Domino, Paul Anka, Frankie Lymon, Chuck Berry, the Drifters, and the Crickets, led by a bespectacled teenager called Buddy Holly. Ben Saxon remembered that evening: “This was the big show of 1957.” Saxon acquired some photographs and records given to the person who cleaned up the auditorium after the show: “He would help them unload their equipment … He got this kind of stuff from them. He got this one signed by Fats Domino. Here is Buddy Holly. This is 1957, two years before he died … Buddy Holly was it. I will be fifty-two years old tomorrow [1994]. If you took a survey of people that were three years older and younger than me, Buddy Holly would be their favorite artist. Not Elvis Presley. I’m talking about here in Birmingham … I was in Panama City, Florida, the first time I heard him. I was only a kid. I heard him on the jukebox. They had all the black artists, like Muddy Waters, on there. All of a sudden I heard this white voice and did not know what to think. I still liked it. I was adapted to the black sound.”

While the traveling shows of stars were eagerly awaited, they were rare and wonderful events in the lives of Birmingham’s teenagers, who wanted more than a once-a-year rock ’n’ roll fix. So they looked to other entertainment venues. Although television in the 1950s is usually considered to be a force of cultural conformism which illustrated a classless, lily-white version of the American Dream in its family friendly programming, it did provide an important outlet for new music. Elvis Presley’s controversial appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show might have outraged many viewers, but the size of the viewing audience (a quite amazing 82 percent share) made it clear to the entertainment business that rock ’n’ roll was far too popular to be ignored. It is not too surprising that his movements on stage — all learned from black acts he saw on Beale Street in Memphis — were deemed too provocative for the family audience. Yet it was these gyrations that made rock ’n’ roll so attractive to teenagers.

Elvis’s controversial appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show became part of his legend, and the dramatic rise of “the King of Rock ’n’ Roll” owed a lot to extensive exposure on television. Elvis’s first recording sessions in RCA’s Nashville and New York studios were fitted into a crowded schedule of live performances and TV appearances — the Dorsey Brothers’, Milton Berle’s, and Steve Allen’s nationally viewed shows — and a screen test for Hollywood producer Hal Wallis. By the 1950s television sets were installed in millions of American homes and the exposure it gave to music was quickly making it as important as radio in marketing records. Birmingham’s two television stations, WBRC and WAPI, were part of the NBC and CBS networks and carried the syndicated variety shows of Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen. The jubilation or horror that accompanied Elvis’s performance on The Ed Sullivan Show was shared all over the country. That Birmingham was part of this audience, a nation seated in front of blue-tinted screens, was part of the New South’s integration into a national popular culture.

Radio played all kinds of pop music, not just rock ’n’ roll; television networks were wary of delinquent teenagers and their music; and the major record companies were still not fully convinced that rock ’n’ roll was anything more than another passing fad. But Hollywood producers looked at the numbers and realized that the youth market might replace the adult audience lost to television. What propelled Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” into the hearts and minds of American youth was not just the playing of the record at dances like the one at the Bessemer City Auditorium or in jukeboxes all over Birmingham, but in a few minutes of a movie. Blackboard Jungle (1955) was a film about a rebellious group of students at an inner-city high school tormenting an exasperated teacher played by Glenn Ford. “Rock around the Clock” only played for a few seconds in the beginning and end credits (and as a short instrumental interlude in the film), but its impact was immediate and unprecedented. Those who watched the movie in the Alabama Theatre were struck not only by the power of the song, but also by the power of its amplification as it came over the mighty sound system of Birmingham’s picture palace: it was the loudest music anyone had ever heard. Dave Bryan was there: “Oh, yeah, it was loud … It was at the Alabama Theatre, 1956, I saw it; oh, jeez, there were folks, after the first run of it, there was people coming out, around the Alabama Theatre, the word got out about it, there were people around the theater, waiting to get in. It was the start right there of rock ’n’ roll. That’s what took it right there in this town.”

This slight exposure took a B side of a little-known country band and made it into an iconic recording in American popular music. Film and rock ’n’ roll had a symbiotic relationship; the sound and look of the new music quickly appeared in films aimed at the youth market. With his record in the charts, Bill Haley appeared in two movies in 1956. These were cheap, exploitative vehicles quickly turned out by Columbia Pictures. There was no attempt to associate the new music with the threat of teenage delinquency, as was the case with Blackboard Jungle, which scared parents and theater owners alike, and Haley’s Don’t Knock the Rock, which tried its best to persuade audiences that these were good kids after all. Elvis made his first movie right after his first RCA recording sessions and television appearances. In 1956 he started a career in Hollywood that was to eventually eclipse his music. Presley’s first film gave him no opportunity to expand his rock persona, but the next year Jailhouse Rock not only produced some exciting new music, but also served as a primer for rock ’n’ roll stardom, reflecting the meteoric rise of a southern working-class bad boy in the entertainment industry. From the beginning rock ’n’ roll was obsessed with its history, a self-conscious entertainment that dwelt on its origins and focused on its transformative powers. It shifted southern musicians’ aspirations from working on local radio to appearing in films shown all over the country, from buying a new car to owning a fleet of Cadillacs.

Birmingham’s film theaters quickly got into the act by using local bands to help promote rock ’n’ roll films, and by turning their theaters into venues for amateur musicians. Budding rockers Jerry Woodard and Bobby Mizzell secured dates at the West End Theater performing there after movies such as Go, Johnny, Go and Rock around the Clock were presented. The manager of the theater said he booked them for a return appearance because “there was such a demand for the boys” by the audience. Some theaters dispensed with the traditional Saturday morning show of cowboy and adventure serials to replace it with “Teen Time” shows of rock ’n’ roll films with live music. The talent show moved from its origins in radio to film theaters and television studios as the rock ’n’ roll craze caught on.

Each movie brought more converts. Henry Lovoy experienced his initiation at the Alabama Theatre in 1957, where he saw Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock in a house packed with teenagers. Henry had been drawn to music at a very early age: “My wife had my picture in the paper on Sunday because it was my birthday. The picture … was when I was five years old and singing with the Harrison Cooper Orchestra. It was at the Pickwick Club. They used to have a lot of dance receptions, wedding receptions, and other dances. My aunt’s marriage was one of the last receptions there … It had two stages. It had a bandstand stage and a regular stage … They had Elvis movies that played at the Alabama Theatre … I remember going to the premier opening of the Elvis movie. At the end of the movie you could see this clump at the side of the stage. Bands didn’t have much equipment in those days. The band was Sammy Salvo, who was singing his song ‘[Oh] Julie.’ He had about three or four pieces with him. He was dressed up like the Elvis-type guy. He was dressed up in ’50s attire with the white buck shoes and a white coat. His hair was [combed] back … I was sitting in the mezzanine and looking over to watch him. Girls were screaming in the movie. When the movie was over, girls were screaming at him. The girls were going wild. I thought, This is the life for me!”