While the folk revival of the 1960s encouraged women to join in, to play guitars and write songs, the male domination of rock ’n’ roll continued into the 1970s. Acoustic guitars were open to both sexes, but electric guitars — the mainstay of rock ’n’ roll — were considered boys’ toys. Electric guitars and amplifiers are complex technological systems that have always been a male preserve in America, and the great power of amplified guitars meant that only strong males could control them. The absence of women in rock prompted feminist writers such as Patricia Kennealy-Morrison to question the core values of this musical culture. In her wonderfully titled article “Rock around the Cock,” she articulated her own fantasy of becoming a guitar hero — a heresy to the rock establishment and its audience.24 But punk challenged both the concept of a guitar hero and the gender conventions of rock ’n’ roll, opening up rock music to all races and both genders. Punk allowed women to get their foot in the door and participate: The music and the business have been much the better for it. Nowadays young female guitarists are courted not only by the popular music industry but also by the manufacturers of electric guitars.
The technology of rock music has changed drastically over the past three decades. When this project started, you still bought music in record stores, and very few bands thought of using a computer to record music or to reach out to their fans. Aaron Beam’s oral history of music in Birmingham happily spanned the most significant changes in the popular music industry since Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Here was a chance to evaluate these changes from the perspectives of the musicians rather than put it into a context of the history of technology. In fact, all the changes in rock music and the music industry in the twenty-first century seemed better illustrated by the experiences and opinions of musicians than by any scholarly interpretation. This realization returned the focus of this project back to the interviews themselves: no longer the basis for the narrative, but the narrative itself. And this is the book you have before you. A history of rock music in Birmingham told by some of the people who played it, listened to it, and tried to make a living from it. A history of rock music in Birmingham that explains how it changed lives and how it reflected individual identities and perceptions of the city itself. Although it has plenty of rags-to-riches episodes, it is not a story of success aimed to boost the reputation of the city and attract more investment and tourist dollars; rather, it follows the cycle of raised and lowered expectations. It relates the experiences of professional musicians rather than rock stars, and how their dreams and desires were translated in the harsh realities of the music industry. It is a story not about rock ’n’ roll’s triumph but of its evolution and survival.
CHAPTER ONE
Rock ’n’ Roll Comes to Birmingham
Rock ’n’ roll came to Birmingham in the form of recordings — shiny black lacquered 78 rpm promotional discs sent to radio stations by the record companies. Station WVOK went on the air in Birmingham in 1947. An AM station of 10,000 watts, it covered most of North and Central Alabama as well as good portions of Georgia and Tennessee. It was the work of the Bends and Brennan families, and Dan Brennan was there from the beginning: “When we signed on, a Capitol transcription library was our only source or primary source of entertainment. Big 16-inch discs, and they had some interesting programming, among others they had Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, some others, Pee Wee Hunt. They had a number of singers and some country & western, Tex Ritter and some of those people, Nat King Cole and the King Cole Trio. They would have maybe four or five selections on each side, and it would be just an opportunity to play them. The other form of music was a 78 rpm record … The only company that gave us records in the beginning was RCA. We did get some help from them, but most of the others did not. We actually had to purchase records. When we first signed on, we played a form of pop music; the Capitol library was pop. We did have some country & western too, but it was primarily pop, then within the first couple of years we had switched over to country & western. Partly because of audience demand, and partly because some of the live bands we had on the air were country & western.
“We had dances and we had bands that would perform at the Bessemer City Auditorium. We just did that as a means of kind of spotlighting the groups that were playing on the air. We gave them an opportunity to make a few dollars and also to make the station look a little different. Not many stations in town had any live functions like that that they participated in. We played records while the bands took a break. I remember one of the dances at the Bessemer Auditorium. I remember the first record, first true rock ’n’ roll record I played: ‘Rock around the Clock’ by Bill Haley. I remember people did not dance — they looked like they did not know what in the world they were hearing. I knew at the time [1955] it was still, it was very popular already in some parts of the country, but our audience we had on that dance floor did not know what it was. Our first exposure to rock ’n’ roll was really rockabilly. It was kind of Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and some of those Sun recordings. As a matter of fact, we played a combination of country & western and rockabilly in the beginning and it was probably a transition to rock ’n’ roll music.”
Baker Knight was in a rockabilly band called the Nightmares in 1955, with Shuler Brown on bass, Nat Toderice and Glen Lane on saxophone, and Bill Weinstein on drums. They had, in his words, “a country rock sound” with steel guitar and piano. “We had started a band when Elvis came out and I had learned to play guitar well enough to get a band going.” Knight said they were “the first rockabilly band in Birmingham … and the American Legion [venue] in Leeds [a community close to Birmingham] was the first time the Nightmares played.” Later on they played “the Mountain Brook Lodge, which had mostly pop groups, and the people came rushing in to hear rock ’n’ roll, people had never heard it before … People would come and stand around bandstand and stare up at us, whatever songs were popular, ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ black music, I could sing that stuff … R&B [rhythm and blues] brought them together, Bo Diddley stuff, people loved it — it was something different.”
The radio stations playing that “Bo Diddley stuff” in Birmingham were some of the few African American stations in the country. As the South was segregated, Birmingham’s biggest radio stations — WAPI, WBRC, and WSGN — broadcast to a predominantly white audience. The first inroads into the segregated airwaves were short programs devoted to African American sacred music, featuring the gospel quartets whose sweet harmonies and soaring lead vocals appealed to both races. William Blevins, Nims Gay, and Sadie Mae Patterson all broadcast gospel shows on white radio in the early 1940s. The African American businessman A. G. Gaston sponsored Birmingham’s Gospel Harmonettes on WSGN. On April 19, 1942, WJLD started broadcasting from Bessemer. It carried gospel shows, popular music, and news. In 1946 a white disc jockey called Bob Umbach began the Atomic Boogie Hour, playing rhythm and blues and imitating the patter of black deejays, just like Dewey Phillips in Memphis. It was the only station in Birmingham that broadcast black music. The Atomic Boogie Hour was so popular it often ran for hours every day, and it lasted until 1953.
In 1949 Shelley Stewart got a job with the newly opened WEDR, a white-owned station aimed at the black audience, and as “Shelley the Playboy” he brought the exciting sounds of R&B and rock ’n’ roll to an awed audience of teenagers. Ed Reynolds, who managed WJLD, started WEDR radio in 1949 — another station aimed at the African American audience. By the 1960s WENN was the premier radio station in Birmingham programming African American music, with two of the city’s most popular deejays: Shelley Stewart and “Tall Paul” White. Record collector Ben Saxon remembered: “You grew up listening to WJLD and WENN and Shelley the Playboy and Tall Paul.” “Can I get a witness!” roared Shelley over the air after he played a hot song, and thousands of Birmingham teenagers agreed with him. As one of them said: “We was all listening to Shelley.” Baker Knight: “B. B. King was just starting in and they were playing his records on the black radio station … This was 1952.