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The King Records Story - Part 2

© Barney Quick

By the dawn of the 1950s, Syd Nathan’s icehouse on Brewster Avenue in Cincinnati was cooking. His empire of labels covered the country and western, black gospel, rhythm and blues and jazz markets. The likes of Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Earl Bostic, Tiny Bradshaw, Jimmy Witherspoon and Bullmoose Jackson were regularly passing through to do sessions.

Perhaps most importantly, he had expanded his formidable artist-and-repertoire capabilities. Henry Glover continued to play a major role in signing and developing performers. Nathan also hired Ralph Bass after the latter had left Herman Lubinsky’s New Jersey-based Savoy label. Bass is the kind of monumental, decade-spanning figure who probably deserves his own article at some point. While at Savoy, he had worked with Charlie Parker, among others. After leaving King in the late fifties, he went to Chess, where he worked with the cream of Windy City soul and blues acts.

Bass was to the second wave of King r&b giants what Glover had been to the first. As Glover had done by mining talent from Lucky Millinder’s orchestra, Bass looked to Detroit as fertile ground in his search for artists. In this effort, he was greatly aided by the ubiquitous Johnny Otis, who brought Bass such Motor City acts as The Royals, later to be known as Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, whom he discovered at the Paradise Theater, and Little Willie John. Detroit provided a replacement for Clyde McPhatter in Billy Ward and the Dominoes in 1953, a young ex-boxer named Jackie Wilson.

The Dominoes originally came from New York, however. Ward, a former sportswriter and vocal coach, originally put together a group of acquaintances to sing gospel. After appearing on Arthur Godfrey’s talent show, the Dominoes came to Syd Nathan’s attention. Nathan, ever the lover of risque lyrics, had the group do a slyly rocking tune called “Sixty Minute Man.” McPhatter swooped and dove in time to an emphatic backbeat. Low-end singer Bill Brown boasted, “I rock ‘em, roll ‘em all night long.” The group tamed its material after McPhatter took his choked squeal to Atlantic and formed The Drifters.

The Midnighters changed their name from The Royals to avoid confusion with another King act, The “5” Royales. The original leaders were Henry Booth and and Charles Sutton. (Some sources contend that Levi Stubbs and Jackie Wilson were members at the outset.) Johnny Otis composed “Every Beat Of My Heart,” their first record for Federal, the King subsidiary that Ralph Bass ran. When Lawton Smith left in 1953, Hank Ballard, a Detroit sixteen-year-old with a big, unmistakable singing style, replaced him. Ballard led the group through such r&b classics as “Work With Me Annie,” “Annie Had A Baby,” both of which had some difficulty getting airplay, the original version of “The Twist” from 1958, “Let’s Go,Let’s Go, Let’s Go,” and “Finger Poppin’ Time.”