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Friday, December 15, 2006
ROCK ME TO SLEEP
Little Miss Cornshucks
Carol : 1950
Available on: The Chronological Little Miss Cornshucks 1947-1951
Classic Records : 2003
[Buy It]
My friend Ahmet Ertegun passed away the other day. I only met him once, so calling him my friend says less about our relationship than it does about the effect he had on people. But Ertegun and I spent three or four hours together, in his office at Atlantic Records, high above Rockefeller Center in New York. He was dressed in a cream-colored blazer and dark slacks. He was immaculate, and brilliant. And he had kind things to say, not only about Little Miss Cornshucks (whom he'd loved and recorded privately, for his own collection, before starting Atlantic), but about musicians who're younger than I am. He'd had a few strokes by then, and I endeared myself by knowing many of the names he couldn't quite remember: Bunny Berrigan, Papa Jones. I think it gave him hope that a twenty-something would know those names, and how much they'd meant, and he told me that Elvis Presley (whose contract he'd bid on) was the first white guy he'd heard who didn't sound black, but didn't sound corny, and that Angus Young was a fine and underratted guitarist. He had a lot of hope in kids like Kid Rock.
(Here's what Ertegun had to say elsewhere, about Little Miss Cornshucks:
"In 1943, when I was 19 or so, I went to a nightclub in the northeast black ghetto section of Washington and heard a singer whose name was Little Miss Cornshuks and I thought, 'My God!!!' She was better than anything I'd ever heard. She would come out like a country girl with a bandana and a basket in her hand, and so forth, which she'd set aside fairly early on into the show. She could sing the blues better than anybody I've ever heard to this day. I asked her that night if she would make a record of her for myself. We cut 'Kansas City' along with some other blues and she also sang a song called 'So Long'. She just had such a wonderful sound and I remember thinking, 'My God! My God!' And I didn't have a record company. I just made these records for myself.")
Most of what follows is a tiny chunk of the portion of our conversation I got on tape. We talked for a few hours more when I turned the recorder off, and as I left, he invited me to lunch. "I'd love to," I said, and Ertegun put his hands to his chest and said, "From the heart." I got immersed in my book; he was a busy man. I never called. So from the heart is just how I'll remember him.
* * *
"It was not uncommon among members of my generation (the generation that grew up as wards of the meretricious adulthood of the nineteen fifties) for one to feel one's strong sense of reality through the agency of Negro Music," George W. S. Trow wrote, in a two-part New Yorker profile of Ahmet Ertegun, in 1978. And while Trow now lived reclusively, Ertegun was very much on the scene, acting as a sort of executive emeritus of the record company he'd founded more than fifty years earlier.
It was Ertegun who'd helped Ray Charles find his own, true voice, and in 1954 - the year Elvis Presley first entered a recording studio - records issued by Atlantic, Atlantic subsidiaries, or Atlantic-affiliated labels accounted for seven out of ten of the top rhythm and blues records in Billboard's year-end round up. The original versions of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll," "Sh-Boom," "Such a Night," Save the Last Dance for Me," "Spanish Harlem," "What'd I Say," "Land of 1000 Dances," "On Broadway," "Good Lovin," "Tipitina," and "In the Midnight Hour" were all Atlantic singles. So were "Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee," "Yakety-Yak," "Respect" (both the Otis Redding original and Aretha Franklin's cover), "Tighten Up," "Green Onions," "Soul Man," "Poison Ivy," and "Stand by Me." And by the time Elvis Presley was losing his way through nightly renditions of "Without Love (There is Nothing)" (which had also been an Atlantic single), Atlantic had signed Led Zeppelin, The Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople, Alice Cooper, CSN&Y, Genesis, Yes, Bad Company, and the Rolling Stones.
I sent Ertegun some articles I'd written, asked for an audience.
"Rock and roll was an explosion we couldn't stay out of," he told me, a few weeks later. "It wasn't black. But, you know, we weren't doing opera! It was a similar mode."
Ertegun had himself discovered black music in London, in the early 1930s, when his father was serving as the Turkish ambassador to England and his brother, Nesuhi, took him to see Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington's bands. "There were incredible experiences," Eretegun said, "because the jazz I'd heard on records couldn't compare to the way these bands sounded live." A few years later, Ertegun pere became Turkey's war-time ambassador to the United States, and Ahmet discovered that American whites knew very little about the music he'd come to love. "You couldn't find jazz easily," he told me. "In Washington, there was so much separation. The big bands like Basie's and Ellington's didn't play at the Capitol theatre or the Warner Brother's Earle (where Benny Goodman, Bob Crosby, and the Tommy Dorsey band played). They played at the Howard, which was the Washington counterpart of the Apollo. When I was fourteen or fifteen, we had a dance at the embassy-a dance for kids my age, teenagers. Through a guy named Cleo Payne, who worked at the embassy as a janitor, I hired a jazz orchestra. The band came and played dance music-a bit of what they called pop music in those days, I suppose-but everyone loved it. They'd never been to a dance with a real black orchestra."
The concerts Ahmet and Nesuhi organized at the embassy, at a local Jewish center, and, eventually, at the National Press Club, were among the first integrated events in the nation's capitol. "We recieved letters from Southern senators: 'It was been brought to my attention, Sir, that a person of color has entered your house by the front door. I have to inform you that, in our country, this is not a practice to be encouraged.'" Ertegun says. "My father had a one-sentence reply 'Friends enter by the front door,' he'd say, 'but we can arrange for you to enter from the back.'" In 1945, Ertegun-then studying Aquinas in graduate school at Georgetown-began hanging out in a record shop called Waxie Maxie's, befriended its owner, and took stock of its inventory. In 1947, he moved to New York and, together with a Jewish dentistry student named Herb Abramson, formed Atlantic.
"I went into the music business in order to make records that would sell to a black audience," Ertegun says. "That was the music I knew, understood, and could produce. I was primarily a jazz man, but jazz records did not sell, in large quantities-to anybody. My brother had already run jazz labels out on the West Coast. But when Herb Abramson and I started Atlantic, we wanted to make any kinds of records that would sell. We were really thinking of the R'n'B market. Race records, as they were called. Gospel. Blues. Meaning, black music.
"Most people don't really understand it this way, but black music is what we're talking about. Everything we hear is black music, and imitations of black music. And there's a reason why black music is the only music which has become international...."
* * *
Little Miss Cornshucks - Mildred Cummings - died in Indianapolis, in 1999. She and Ertegun both were born in 1923.Labels: ahmet ertegun, alex, atlantic records
posted by Alex
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