DON LAW JR.
I always imagine my father as an oddity early on; it certainly wasn’t what he was used to in England. It was very different than anything he had been exposed to, and it fascinated him. It was kind of like what happened later in the ’60s with the British blues musicians who picked up on American blues and then changed the blues form and changed popular music forever. There was a little bit of that same fascination for him, I’m sure, as an Englishman.
But I think who he signed and what he recorded was a function of if he really liked what he heard. In the beginning, he did a lot of blues. A lot of those field recordings were both country-and-western artists.
I talked with my father about the sessions he did with Robert Johnson [in San Antonio, 1936, and Dallas, 1937]. They had to do those recordings in un-air-conditioned venues; they made the record on-site. You had an engineer, and as they recorded, they were actually cutting the record—the final record. It was the engineer, Robert Johnson, my father, and a bottle of whiskey. They would all drink.
At the session in San Antonio, they had a bathtub filled with ice and a fan blowing the air across the ice to keep the records from melting. Field recordings were really pretty crude and primitive.
My father was a quasi-salesman. He had to go try to sell it; he had to get the record distributed, get it out into the marketplace, around to stores and so forth. It wasn’t a very big business back in the ’30s, particularly in the South.
My mother talked about walking down the street with Robert Johnson and my father. She described this really bizarre circumstance, where my father was determined to walk alongside Robert, and Robert was determined not to let him. My father kept stopping, and Robert kept walking farther back. My mother, who was from Texas, said, “Don, he can’t walk with you because he’d be seen as ‘uppity.’ He’d get beaten up.” My father didn’t get it. It wasn’t like where he’d come from, but he had wanted no part of the environment that he left.
When I think of my father, I think of that Jack London passage where he talks about “a sailor on horseback”—a man totally out of his environment. I think of my father as this wrecked English gentlemen in the Deep South, trying to walk along the road with Robert Johnson. It must’ve been the strangest thing in the world: this guy with an English accent recording this Delta blues singer. A “sailor on horseback”—I love that image of cultural dichotomy: the two of them walking down the street; my father bailing Johnson out of jail; that whole nonsense of “I’m lonesome, and there’s a lady here. She wants fifty cents, and I lacks a nickel.”
In 1942, Glenn Wallichs, Johnny Mercer, and Buddy DeSylva formed Capitol Records in Hollywood. The first country recording issued by the new company was Tex Ritter’s “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle.”
KEN NELSON
One day, Glenn came to Chicago and asked Lee [Gillette] what he was doing. He told him, “I’m musical director of [radio station] WJJD.”
Glenn said, “You’re just the guy I’m looking for.” So Lee and his wife moved out to California, and I went back to my old job at JJD. We had live country music at that time. We had Uncle Henry’s Kentucky Mountaineers, Bob Atcher, and several other artists [including Les Paul as “Rubarb Red”]. The program was called the Suppertime Frolic, and it was tremendously popular. Then, the station decided they were going to drop the live musicians, and I had to buy records by the umpteen millions. It was all country records. I bought records from Canada and, even, from England.
Are you familiar with transcriptions [recordings cut to sixteen-inch discs for radio broadcasts]? There was Standard. There was World, which was owned by Decca. There was Lang-Worth and Capitol. When Lee went with Capitol, he started out in the transcription department. He wasn’t producing any records at all. Finally, they decided that they were going to go into the country field. At that time it was called “hillbilly.” So Lee took over the country department of Capitol. Then, they decided he couldn’t do both jobs, and Lee went strictly into country.
Lee went to Glenn Wallichs, who was president of Capitol. He said, “Hey, get Ken Nelson out here.” I had a fairly good knowledge of songs. So Capitol brought me out to take over the transcription department [in 1946].
With the help of Cliffie Stone, Lee really got into the country department.* He brought Tex Williams to Capitol. He brought Hank Thompson, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Merle Travis. Next, Capitol decided that they wanted Lee over in the pop department, and I took over the country department. Lee was probably the greatest producer of that era. He did all of Nat King Cole. He did Kay Starr, Stan Kenton, and Jan Garber. He did Guy Lombardo.
Oh, and Capitol put transcriptions out of business. They started to give away promotion records, started to send them to radio stations. Lee had recorded a song on transcription called “Twelfth Street Rag” with Pee Wee Hunt. The demand for it as a record was tremendous. There weren’t any records [only transcriptions were available]. So they [Capitol] decided to put out a record and to give them away [to radio stations for promotional purposes]. Before that, the radio stations had to buy their records. I know because I was buying them. All the other [transcription] companies said, “Hey what’s going on here?” So record labels started to give out promotion records. The radio stations said, “What the hell? We’re getting all these records free. Why should we pay for transcriptions?” Every transcription company went out of business. Capitol Transcriptions shut down, and I took over the country department.
DON PIERCE
At that time following the war, if you were in an Army uniform and went to Bel Air, which is a very exclusive club, they’d let you play golf. So a buddy and I had both gotten our discharge, and we went to California. We had a lot of fun and played a lot of golf. While we were at Bel Air, they asked if a person could join us for nine holes, and it turned out to be Hoagy Carmichael [actor, musician, and composer of “Stardust” and “Georgia on My Mind”]. He was a charming person, and we had a real good time. Later on, I met him at the Melrose Grotto. We talked shortly, and I told him that I was in the music business. He made one remark to me. “When you’re making stuff,” he said, “keep your eye on the dollar. Don’t get swept away by something that you happen to like.” In other words, don’t be overly artistic.
I first worked in the studio probably in 1946 and ’47. There was a little studio called Crystal down at the Riverside Drive in Los Angeles. Eddie Dean did “I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven” in that studio and “One Has My Name and One Has My Heart.” We were doing business with them, and I produced the Maddox Brothers and Rose there, a number of things. I produced T. Texas Tyler there, and later on, I produced “Deck of Cards” by T. Texas Tyler. But we did that at Radio Recorders up on Hollywood Boulevard.
We did sound checks, and we’d experiment until we got the right balance. I was always a stickler for getting the vocalist isolated to the point where the feed in music didn’t make the lyrics hard to understand. That was always frustrating to me, not being able to understand the lyrics to a song. But other than that I was more concerned with song selection and getting an acceptable recording and