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8 chapter King of Them All Cast of Characters Colonel Jim Wilson, King Records branch manager Billy Butler, guitarist on “Honky Tonk” Henry Stone, De Luxe Records Seymour Stein, King Records apprentice Julius Dixson, King Records songwriter Don Pierce, Starday-King Records Freddy Bienstock, Tennessee Recording and Publishing Co. also featuring Syd Nathan, King-Federal Records For any record collector visiting Cincinnati, Ohio, there was always one essential pilgrimage to make: to the site of the old King Records factory complex in the Evanston neighborhood. I could almost smell the history as I walked around the exterior of the 9,000–square foot edifice, once an ice plant. The section where the recording studio was housed was still visible into the twenty-first century, while by the parking lot ran a small creek where guitarist Jimmy Nolen used to smoke joints in between James Brown sessions. Here was where blues and R&B stars such as Wynonie Harris, Little Willie John, and Freddy King recorded their big hits; where Cowboy Copas, the Delmore Brothers, Hank Penny, and Hawkshaw Hawkins ruled the country roost; where Bill Doggett and Earl Bostic cut album after instrumental album; and where top vocal groups the Dominoes and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters got their start. Yes, 1540 Brewster Avenue was Syd Nathan’s royal palace, and spiritually it impressed, still. King Records became a driving force in the independent record business because Nathan recognized the huge potential in the regional sounds of hillbilly and then race music. In Cincinnati, a railroad hub city straddling the North and South divides, he was perfectly located for the music and for setting up his distribution system. Myopic, but i-xvi_1-592_Brov.indd 131 11/19/09 10:44:17 AM 132 regional sounds only in the physical sense, the bespectacled Nathan was in the same rough, tough, bombastic mold as his perennial adversary, Herman Lubinsky of Savoy Records. In his mind, the supremely confident Nathan played out the early label slogan: The “King” of Them All! Syd Nathan was a scheming wheeler-dealer, one of the smartest, in fact. For all his bumptiousness, he was aware of the need to have good people around him, including family. He could not have wished for a better lawyer than the loathsome Jack Pearl, while another trusted adviser was Howard Kessell, president of Royal Plastics Co. (the pressing plant division). On the creative front, Henry Glover and Ralph Bass were a formidable A&R team. During the 1930s, Nathan tried his hand at several ventures, from wrestling promotion to photo finishing. His ascendancy began in 1942 when he opened Syd’s Record Shop at 1351 Central Avenue in Cincinnati, offering used 78–rpm records that he would buy cheap from jukebox operators. The turning point came when he acquired the record stock, mostly hillbilly, of his former radio shop boss, Max Frank. What impressed Nathan most of all was that he was drumming up good business in record sales in what was supposed to be a retail and cultural desert. Quite by accident, he had uncovered the blue-collar workforce of largely rural Kentuckians and Tennesseans employed at the Cincy factories. Among Nathan’s customers were future King hillbilly stars Alton and Rabon Delmore (the Delmore Brothers), Grandpa Jones, and Merle Travis, who would record collectively as country-gospel act Brown’s Ferry Four. Kentucky-born Travis would prove to be an immense guitar-picker influence in a commanding line through Scotty Moore, Chet Atkins, Joe Maphis, James Burton, and Reggie Young. King Records was launched innocuously in November 1943 with crudely manufactured 78s by the same Grandpa Jones and Merle Travis, who were recorded in a makeshift studio in Dayton, Ohio. The next August, Syd Nathan raised $25,000 from family members to give his label the necessary capital for expansion, including the acquisition of a five-year lease on 1540 Brewster and the construction of a small pressing plant. Displaying precocious ingenuity, he would secure pre-orders for his early releases from sixty-nine jukebox operator accounts spread throughout the South, right down to Big Spring, Texas.1 A constant source of hillbilly talent was provided by the popular Boone County Jamboree show (renamed Midwestern Hayride in 1945) that was being broadcast over 50,000–watt Radio WLW, Cincinnati. The show was a good promotional outlet, too. Sensing that he couldn’t survive on hillbilly music alone and seeing the opportunities in the race market on his travels, Syd Nathan ushered in Queen...

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