In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

79 4 RANK STRANGER For Pierce, the decision to stay in Nashville was obvious. He loved the city. He loved the people. He loved the food. He loved the business. He had built a new home. Despite the sour turn of events, there was at least a bright side: Pierce kept the office building he had bought with Daily. He still had half of a very active publishing catalog and was contracted with George Jones for another year and a half. According to Pierce, he was optimistic about his situation from the very outset and knew he could be successful on his own. “I had a lot goin’ for me when I came to Nashville because I knew so much more about making records and distributing records,” he explains. “The guys in town only knew one thing—the studio. But I knew everything. I did coast to coast. Start to finish . I could establish Starday here because I knew how to go from recording the artist to selling the product. These other guys would have to send stuff to New York to get it done but I could do it all right here.” It was with this confidence and swagger that Pierce began tying up loose ends and starting over in the spring of 1958. One loose end involved figuring out what to do with the Dixie 2000 rock ’n’ roll series he and Daily had just recently constructed. The Dixie rock label was first announced in Billboard on January 27, 1958, as a way for Starday to release rockabilly and pop records on a regional scale and, if they were successful, make them available to Mercury Records. That plan never blossomed because the Mercury-Starday merger was terminated around the same time the new label debuted, and it was up to Pierce to follow through with the label’s few scheduled releases. As he recalls, “Mercury never did any promotion for them. We issued those at our cost and expense in an effort to find material we could then send to Mercury. It was a regional scope, but it was a cut above the custom stuff, which is generally pretty crude. The Dixie stuff was pretty good stuff, but we only worked it in a limited area to see if it had any potential.” It did not take Pierce long to realize, however, that despite the quality of his material, he still had no knowledge of how to promote rock ’n’ roll records— and that Mercury, who did, never showed any interest. The Dixie 2000 series 80 RANK STRANGER came to an end after just twenty-six waxings. To Pierce, this was just another “something that we tried which didn’t work out”; but to record collectors, these are among Starday’s most popular and well-known rockabilly records. Among the more collectable platters released in the series were Eddie Skelton’s fuzzrocker “Gotta Keep Swingin’” (2011), Benny Joy’s “Spin the Bottle” (2001), and Big “D” Jamboree star Groovey Joe Poovey’s Jerry Lee Lewis–inspired rocker “10 Long Fingers” (2018). The Dixie 2000 series should not be confused with the other Dixie records being released by Starday at the same time. Pierce continued to manufacture the Hillbilly Hit Parade sets as well as custom pressings, which later became known as the Dixie series. Perhaps inspired by the many artists who chose to use the Starday name on their private pressings, several artists later used the Dixie name on their custom records. The earliest artist known to do this was Tom Crooks and the Rock and Roll Four (Dixie 624) in April 1957, though many others followed shortly thereafter. As the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon continued throughout 1958 and 1959, hundreds of musicians contacted Pierce about pressing their Dixie custom rockers. Perhaps the most sought-after Dixie custom from this period came from a Louisville, Kentucky, man named “Orangie” Ray Hubbard. The record (Dixie 662), an original song entitled “Sweet Love,” was his prize for winning a local talent competition, and has become one of the most infamous rockabilly records ever pressed. Hubbard shares his story: “Here’s the way it goes: they were puttin’ on this talent scout contest to promote this new radio station WBBL. So Clyde Brown calls in Zeke Clements. Zeke put on a talent scout contest and he copied it after The Arthur Godfrey Show. In other words, if you won, you won by applause meter like Arthur Godfrey did...

Share