By 1959 rock ’n’ roll was in full swing in Birmingham as its recording studios produced a stream of up-tempo dance music with a pounding beat and loud guitar accompaniment. Pat Riley and the Rockets cut “I Need You Baby” and “Little Bop a Little.” Lawrence Shaul and the Aristocats covered Little Richard’s ribald hit “Tutti Frutti” and another R&B standard, “Hey Little Mama.” Paul Ballenger and the Flares produced several records, including one just called “Pig.” Reed’s output in 1959 shows the diversity of music in Birmingham: rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly, country ballads, comedy numbers, and sacred songs. Gene Cole with Clyde’s String Masters recorded “Coal Miner’s Blues,” and the Jubilaires quartet produced their version of the old blues and vaudeville standard “Birmingham Jail.” Sacred music was recorded by several other quartets: the Rhythm Masters recorded “Rainbow of Love,” the England Brothers covered “Jesus Save Me,” and Wallace Odell and the Chordaires did “Walking Towards Heaven.”
Country music dominated Reed’s output in 1959, especially when it leaned toward pop. They made covers of hits like Hank Williams’s “I Don’t Like This Kind of Livin’,” Mason Dixon’s “Cold Cold Heart,” and Newt James’s version of Hank’s big hit “Jambalaya.” Country music fans enjoyed comedy numbers such as Ronnie Wilson’s “You Love That Guitar More Than Me” (backed by Jerry Woodard) and Country Boy Eddie’s “Hang in There Like a Rusty Fish Hook.” Rock ’n’ roll was man’s music, with female voices only as backup, but Birmingham had a few women rockers such as Abby Lee, whose “Waitin’” is a classic of rockabilly. The sound is raw and powerful. She also recorded “I Want Your Lovin’” for Reed. Patsy Tidwell was another female rockabilly singer from Birmingham with two records on Reed: “I Dig You the Most” and “Sit and Rock and Roll Blues.”
Reed and Fad Records were Birmingham’s own versions of Sun Records: small operations run by entrepreneurs in the same mold as Sam Phillips and staffed with local talent. The pioneers of commercial recording in the New South formed a business and social fraternity; Ken Shackleford, Ed Boutwell, Charlie Colvin, and Gary Sizemore knew Phillips personally and did business with him over the years. They are full of engaging stories about this legend of rock ’n’ roll, oblivious to the fact that it could easily have been one of them. Yet it was not to be, and for one simple reason: Sam Phillips and later Rick Hall found success and a measure of immortality by recording African American artists and by incorporating a lot of black music into the records they produced. All of these Alabama record producers shared an appreciation of African American music, but this was the segregated South, and nowhere was segregation stronger than in Birmingham, Alabama. As African American bass player Cleve Eaton pointed out, “They did not let blacks into the studio then.” The idea that a hybrid form of country and R&B — an amalgam of white and black music — could be the music of teenage America, which seems so logical today, was frighteningly novel in the Deep South of the 1950s.
CHAPTER THREE
The Garage Bands
Rock ’n’ roll had been pioneered by the front man — the handsome singer — and the first wave of Birmingham rockers followed this pattern: Baker Knight and the Knightmares, Sammy Salvo, Pat Riley and the Rockets, Jimmy Wilson and the Flames, and so on. Elvis had been their inspiration and guiding star — southern boy done good. Henry Lovoy was five years old in 1953: “That’s when rock ’n’ roll was getting started and so was I. I was singing and dancing at dancing school and in various hospitals and army bases surrounding the Birmingham area and other cities in the Southeast. I was dubbed as Little Elvis and my mother painted on my side burns and I gave Elvis a run for his money at the age of six.” In the 1960s rock ’n’ roll became the music of youth; and youth was in the ascendant as the mighty baby-boom demographic reached puberty and its discretionary income rose. Musician Doug Lee of Dogwood: “Our generation changed it so much, back then pop music, rock music whatever you want to call it, was played by kids for kids … Back then it was all kid music.” The next wave of amateur rock ’n’ roll musicians were younger and less experienced than the first, and they did away with the handsome front man and formed guitar groups.
A powerful new technology was driving these changes. A pounding boogie-woogie piano or raucous saxophone had been the siren calls of rock ’n’ roll, but these were difficult instruments to master and quite expensive to buy. The electric guitar, on the other hand, was cheap and easy to play. As thousands of mass-produced Gibson Les Pauls and Fender Telecasters rolled off the assembly lines, more aspiring young musicians were tempted to buy into this technological revolution. Gradually the electric guitar became the voice of rock ’n’ roll, replacing pianos and saxophones for the leads, and cumbersome standup basses with new electric Fender Precision basses. Musical instrument shops stocked the new instruments, and even retail outlets like Sears and Montgomery Ward started to sell them. The Chicago Pawn Shop downtown provided many of the instruments for start-up bands. Entry into the world of professional musicians had always been guarded by the high value put on virtuosity. Rock ’n’ roll and cheap electric guitars changed all that. You could master the three or four chords that underlay rock music in a matter of months; energy and enthusiasm was more than a match for virtuosity in guitar bands. Guitarists like Buddy Holly provided the example for millions of young men: they copied his playing note by note as they craned over their portable record players or got closer to the television.
All over Birmingham in the waning years of the 1950s thousands of hours of grass cutting, errand running, and room cleaning were converted into the dollars that would finance a trip to Forbes Music or Nuncie’s Instruments. “I had to mow a lot of lawns to get that guitar!” remembered Terry Powers of the Bluedads and the Alabama Power group. His rock ’n’ roll upbringing took pretty much the same path as many other Birmingham musicians’: “When I was a baby my mother put a radio in my room to help me sleep at night. So I started off listening to all that old rock ’n’ roll … The first guitar I ever played was when my uncle moved to Clanton [Alabama]. He pulled it out and started to play all these hillbilly songs and I could not get over it. I was just infatuated; he was my hero. I started playing guitar when I was six. My first guitar idol was Chet Atkins and also Buddy Holly. Ahhh, the sound of Buddy Holly!” Electric guitars were easy to obtain; they were traded, mail-ordered, or picked up at pawn shops. Buying one was a high spot in many musicians’ memories of the 1960s — nobody ever forgot that first electric guitar, how much they paid for it, and how it looked. Keith Harrelson still remembers the wondrous day when his brother Mark came home from Nuncie’s with a brand-new Fender precision bass — the product of many months delivering papers. Keith was impressed with how the shiny new instrument looked with its pearly white pick guard and lustrous brown finish, sparkling like a jewel in a bed of crushed red velvet in its fitted case.
All over Birmingham, back