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287 I Learned a Lesson I’ll Never Forget By the time Joe Davis began to slow down his musical career, the recording industry must have seemed in utter upheaval to a man who’d spent just over four decades in the business. The ways of doing business so familiar to Davis, such as the power of single record releases and the promotion and distribution of records, were shifting rapidly. There was also an immense boom in the industry with cinema links, record clubs, and shifts in power in the distribution business. Davis had never found it easy after the late 1940s to corner his market, any more than the other small independents, but by the mid- to late 1950s, rack-jobbing, discounting, and “one-stops” had emerged to confuse these patterns even more. By 1960 Congress was forced into investigating the payola scandal and Davis’s old plugging partner, Alan Freed, received a suspended jail sentence for accepting payment from songwriters in return for airplay. Shunned by the music business which once hankered after his plays, Freed died broke in 1965. Many of the men who helped Davis promote records, such as Pinky Vidacovich, a musician and music director of New Orleans’s WWL during the 1950s, were either dying, shifting their business interests, or leaving the record business altogether. Moreover, the “first” generation of black disc jockeys who came on the air in the years after World War II and who supported the music found on independent record labels—men like Bugs Scrugs from Memphis, Sugar Daddy Birmingham from WinstonSalem , Jockey Jack Gibson in Atlanta, and Professor Bop in Shreveport— were slowly slipping away as local radio stations and their formats moved toward a more national sound and identity. Sheet music and music publishing, the core of Davis’s business before entering record production and manufacturing, barely resembled the business he initially encountered as a young man in New York City. Davis Chapter Twelve I Learned a Lesson I’ll Never Forget 288 entered the business before radio broadcasting and when blacks were largely overlooked as recording artists. At that time sheet music publishers largely aimed to sell to a market of homeowners with pianos, as did the Tin Pan Alley composers. In 1920 Pittsburgh’s KDAQ pioneered commercial radio and Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” helped launch a “race record” series, two events that transformed the commercial music industry. By the time Davis’s career wound down in the early 1960s, he’d lived (and worked) through changes as diverse as the tribulations of two Petrillo recording bans, the rise and evolution of regional independent record companies, and the painful and very public payola scandals. The sound of pop music and the role of A&R men in the studios also radically changed since Davis entered the record business in the early 1920s. A&R men once ruled the studio; they brought in the songs and arranged for specific accompanists to work at each carefully timed session . But by the mid-1960s an increasing number of prominent pop music groups like the Beach Boys and the Beatles authored most of their own material, decided which instruments to use, and often wrote their own arrangements. It’s little wonder that Davis quit the business when he did. Albums now took up some 80 percent of the total dollar volume sales, with 45s accounting for the remaining 20 percent. As Variety for January 8, 1958, pointed out, the major labels were “running way ahead in the sales take. They’ve gotten their share of the pop pull and have been cleaning up with the packaged product. It’s this mushrooming field, in fact, that tradesters figure may be the undoing of a lot of indie operations. After having kicked up some coin with the pop clicks, quite a few of the indies have been going for larger game in the album field. It’s this splurge into the packaged food markets that’s making the indies nervous. At the 3.95 tap for a pop LP, the profit margin is pretty slim considering the rising costs in recording, art work, promotion, etc. The majors get by on sales volume, while indies, with a small LP catalog to work with, have found it tough sledding to pull their line into the profit column.” Mike Gross may well have “out-Billboarded” that magazine in its own vernacular but there is no misreading his message, and there is little doubt that via whatever medium, Davis...

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