Soul of the Man: Bobby "Blue" Bland

4. Army Blues: 1952–1954

49 4 Army Blues 1952–1954 50 Bobby Bland’s first love, country and western music, was, at mid-century, the heart of the Nashville and southern white music scene, while the new rhythm and blues sound was becoming the soul of Memphis and the southern black music world. Bobby, of course, was in Memphis and at the center of the new black music, where his friends, B.B. King and Rosco Gordon, were making huge hit records. In 1952, at the age of twenty-two, Bobby Bland signed a recording contract with Memphis’s new independent record label, Duke, a bond that would span the next twenty years and propel Bobby to the loftiest heights of black and pop music stardom. The only other independent record labels in the South in 1952 were in Houston (Macy’s, Freedom, and Peacock), Jackson, Mississippi (Trumpet), Nashville (Nashboro-Ernie Y and Bullet), and Gallatin, Tennessee (Dot). Also in 1952, Sam Phillips launched Sun in Memphis, after his earlier recording efforts had been leased or sold to out-of-town labels, primarily Modern and Chess.1 His “handshake deal” with Chess had become strained. “I truly did not want to open a record label,” he says, “but I was forced into it by those labels either coming to Memphis to record [Modern] or taking my artists elsewhere [Chess]”.2 This still left a lot of available musical talent on Beale Street and in and around Memphis, or so thought WDIA program director, David James Mattis. He knew the Beale Streeters through the work of B.B. King, Rosco Gordon, and Johnny Ace at WDIA, and he knew WDIA’s recording facilities were going to waste every evening when the station shut down at sunset, before it went to 50,000 watts and a 4:00 a.m. to midnight format in 1954. And most importantly , Mattis knew himself well enough to know that he was an out-and-out workaholic and a night owl who was up for most any challenge. “Routinely, when the control board operator arrived about 3:45 a.m. to turn on the equipment for the four o’clock sign-on,” reported co-worker Louis Cantor, “it was not unusual to discover Dave—bright-eyed and bushy-tailed—still inside the Army Blues: 1952–1954 51 station from the previous evening. He would have been up all night working on a Goodwill or Starlight Revue script. “He claimed he did his best work in all-night sessions—especially when WDIA was off the air, from midnight until 4:00 a.m. The place cleared out, and he was not distracted; work tools were a bottle of gin and a typewriter.”3 When Mattis proposed the idea of starting a record company to his wife, he remembers her saying, “Well, the kids need their teeth straightened, so let’s take a shot at it.” “I went up to Forest City [Arkansas] in 1949,” Mattis recalled in a 1984 interview with George Moonoogian and Roger Meeden. “I did a blues show. That’s where I met Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson and Little Junior Parker. They used to come over and buy fifteen minutes once a week. They’d pay for this time. That was the standard thing in black radio. They’d make all that noise and leave happy. My wife liked [pianist-vocalist] Willie Love [probably Billy “Red” Love] because he’d always thank everybody for ‘those lovely little requesses.’ I always thought Sonny Boy Williamson was one of the cleverest of any of them and that Howlin’ Wolf was the dirtiest! Rosco Gordon told me he was getting ‘hosed.’ It was just a do-gooder thing,” Mattis said of his decision to start a record company.4 “Nobody paid us any royalties,” Gordon explained. “All you got was front money. . . . You got as much as you could up front, because it was understood that nobody would pay you a dime once the record came out. Didn’t matter if it was the biggest hit of the year. . . . Sure I cut for two people at the same time. Who wouldn’t under those rules?” So, David Mattis, with no previous record company experience but with lots of energy, local talent, and an empty recording studio, launched the TriState Recording Company in the spring of 1952, with the help of Bill Fitzgerald of Music Sales, a Memphis record...