King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records (review)

Syd Nathan never meant to change the world. When he founded King Records in Cincinnati in 1943, it was not his intention to strike a blow against the racially segregated American society and culture of the post-World War II era. All he ever wanted to do was make money by making records for "the little man."

But as Jon Hartley Fox argues in this history of King Records, Nathan's record company offered a wide range of music to different segments of the American working class that not only tapped into various vernacular musical forms but also often subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—broke down the boundaries between genres. Thus, King became a major producer of country, bluegrass, blues, rhythm and blues, gospel (both black and white), jazz, rockabilly, and early rock and roll music. Nathan, however, refused to segment his performers or his audience into such arbitrary categories, and if a song were a hit by, for instance, one of his country artists, he would often have it recorded and released by one of his rhythm and blues performers. On the one hand, this practice demonstrates Nathan's business savvy, as Fox says, since King's in-house publishing company owned the copyright to the song, so the more often it was recorded, the more profit the company made. On the other hand, though, "this 'recycling' of songs in different styles also reflected Nathan's belief that it was the song that drove a hit record—not the artist or the beat or the arrangement or anything else. People bought the song. To Nathan it seemed logical that if country fans found a song appealing, R&B fans would like it, too" (p. 198).

Drawing largely from personal interviews with former recording artists, producers, and other employees, Fox makes clear that King was Syd Nathan's company, and as such, it was an expression of his personality. Nathan could be loud, obnoxious, abrasive, and vulgar. He did not always understand the music of his artists—he hated, for instance, James Brown's "Please, Please, Please," complaining "this is the worst piece of shit I've heard in my life," and that all Brown was doing was "stuttering, just saying one damn word over and over" (p. 1). But the company combined Nathan's business acumen with his keen understanding of his audience. Learning the hard way, Nathan eventually vertically integrated his company until King owned its own recording studio, pressing plant, shipping department, sales distribution outlets, and printing shop to handle promotional materials, record labels, and album designs.

As important as the company's structure, though, was Nathan's knowledge of his audience, an understanding derived from his early experience working in a record store. Working in the border city of Cincinnati, Nathan's main customers were either southern blacks moving northward in the Great Migration or whites from the mountain regions of Kentucky and Tennessee. Naturally gregarious, Nathan talked endlessly with his customers and developed a deep understanding of their musical tastes. Furthermore, Nathan realized that even in Jim Crow America, "if people liked a record, they bought it, and the race of the performer was mostly irrelevant....He had both black and white customers at the store and saw with his own eyes that white people sometimes bought blues records and black people sometimes bought country records" (p. 197).

This experience went into creating the business culture at King, which was almost entirely color-blind. Nowhere was this better personified than in King's long-time producer Henry Glover. A black man, Glover was equally at home producing country records by Moon Mullican or Cowboy Copas as he was working with rhythm and blues artists like Wynonie Harris. And in the King spirit of cultural syncretism, Glover encouraged the artists to cross racial lines freely, earning for instance one of Harris' biggest...