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2. Fame and Fortune Of all the early Detroit groups, the Diablos, featuring Nolan Strong, may have been the most revered. Their entire recording career was spent with struggling, Detroit-based Fortune Records, owned by Jack and Dorothy Brown. Jack was a former accountant, and Dorothy, who usually went by the name Devora, was a pianist, poet, and songwriter. In 1946, after unsuccessful attempts at breaking into New York’s Tin Pan Alley, the Browns started their own music publishing company (Trianon Publications) and the Fortune record label, with the goal of getting Devora’s songs recorded.1 In the beginning, they worked out of their westside home at 11839 Twelfth Street, and tried to emulate the success of the major pop labels such as Columbia and RCA. “When we ‹rst started, we did everything wrong and lost about $3,000, which was all we had,” Devora Brown recalled in a later interview.2 Fortune did score one early regional pop hit in 1947 with her composition “Jane (Sweet As Summer Rain),” by a Bing Crosby–styled crooner named Russ Titus, backed by the Artie Fields Orchestra. “Devora came in to a club where I was playing and said she’d written hundreds of songs,” recalls Fields. “They had hired a singer from Canada to record one and needed backing musicians, so we took the job.”3 According to Fields, the Fortune session took place at Tom Saffady’s short-lived Vogue Record Company studios on Eight Mile Road near John R in Detroit. “That’s the label that made those records with a colorful picture embedded in the disc,” says Fields. “They recorded some wellknown artists like Clyde McCoy, and they had a great studio but went out of business after just a year or so. Their sound quality was excellent, but the records were too expensive, and because they were so durable, they didn’t get additional buys from jukebox operators.” After ceasing production in April 1947, the parent 11 company, Sav-Way Industries, began using the machines that trimmed the plastic records to make toilet seats.4 By 1951, the Browns had rented a storefront location at 11629 Linwood Avenue, in the middle of a block of other small shops just off Elmhurst, in a mixed black and Jewish residential neighborhood . They installed their own studio and turned to recording country music with such artists such as the York Brothers, Skeets McDonald, and Roy Hall, who appealed to the many white southerners who had moved north to work in automotive-related jobs. The Davis Sisters (including Skeeter Davis) made a few demos at Fortune before signing with RCA. Their recording of “Jealous Love” in 1952 gave the Detroit label another regional hit.5 Despite the various styles of music they recorded, the Browns had always favored classical music in their home.6 Jack Brown had done a John Lee Hooker session at Toledo’s Sweeney Sound Engineering , supposedly in 1948, prior to “Boogie Chillen,” though the two sides (“Curl My Baby’s Hair” and “609 Boogie”) were not released until ten years later.7 Aside from that session, the Browns were “absolutely ignorant of black records.”8 One day in the fall of 1953, some kids who attended Central High, just across the street from Fortune, came in to cut an R & B demo. Nolan Strong was the tall, handsome leader, as well as lead singer. He had named his ‹ve-man group the Diablos, after a book he was reading in school called El Niño Diablo (The Little Devil).9 The other group members included tenor Juan Guiterriez, baritone Willie Hunter, bass Quentin Eubanks, and guitarist Bob “Chico” Edwards. Born in Scottsboro, Alabama, on January 22, 1934, Nolan moved with his family to Detroit when he was very young. In 1950 he founded the Diablos. Like Hank Ballard, Nolan admired Clyde McPhatter.10 According to Devora Brown, her husband Jack was out of town the day the demo was recorded: “When he heard it, he said ‘I never heard such a high singer, he might be too high.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so, it might be an extra point for him that he sings so high.’”11 The demo session won the Diablos a contract, and in the spring of 1954 they recorded “Adios My Desert Love,” penned by Devora. It was a romantic, up-tempo number, driven by Latin rhythms under Nolan’s lilting lead vocal. On the bridge, Strong is heard softly...

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