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The Atlantic Records Story

© Barney Quick

There is a very large corporation called America Online that has within its sprawl a great deal of American communications business history. To talk about AOL's various components for very long is to evoke large figures such as Jack Warner and Henry Luce. A little more deliberation conjures two other names in the same pantheon. They are Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, the guiding forces behind Atlantic Records for its first three-plus decades.

Atlantic began as one of the wave of independent black-music labels that appeared right after World War II. It was a contemporary of Herman Lubinsky's Savoy label, Chess in Chicago, Syd Nathan's Cincinnati-based King, Art Rupe's west coast Specialty label and a host of others. Like them, it operated out of cramped quarters and on a shoestring budget.

Brothers Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun were sons of Turkey's ambassador to the United States in the 1940s. They grew up in Washington and developed a love for the music they heard in the city's black clubs, ballrooms and theaters. They began hosting jam sessions at their father's embassy on Sunday afternoons.

Ahmet was a dashing figure given to fashionable attire. He had a suave demeanor and a way of relating to nearly any social circle. (Industry colleagues knew him to be a first-rate practical joker as well.) In 1947 he teamed up with Herb Abramson, another Caucasian aficionado of black music formerly with the National label, to start Atlantic.

They cut a few jazz records, but found their true calling with a 1949 release, "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee- O-Dee" by Stick McGhee. It's a raucous stomp, a lowdown party record. The next big success was Ruth Brown's "Teardrops From My Eyes," a jump number on which she was backed by Budd Johnson's orchestra. Brown was in a bag similar to that of Dinah Washington. She made a kind of pop blues that began Atlantic's crossover appeal among whites. The label soon contracted another black female singer, LaVern Baker, who had a bit more of a raw r&b edge.

Ertegun had been friends with a Billboard reporter named Jerry Wexler for a few years by the dawn of the fifties. Wexler was an intellectually inclined Jewish New Yorker, the son of Polish immigrants. He was an atheist, left-leaning in his politics and as generally nervous in the way he carried himself as Ertegun was relaxed. Wexler had begun haunting the ballrooms of Harlem as a teen and was every bit as much of a black-music fan as the Erteguns or Abramson.

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