Zero to 180 – Three Minute Magic
Howard Kessel — like the Delmore Brothers — is linked to the King Record Company’s earliest beginnings. In a November 15, 1944 article entitled, “Cincinnatian Ignores Swooners – Puts His Chips on Hillbilly ‘Gittar’ Tunes,” The Cincinnati Post‘s Leo Hirtl explains that “Sinatra may come and Crosby may go,” but
If you discount the first two King releases (King 500 and King 501) — four songs that were recorded north of Cincinnati in a small Dayton sound studio under assumed names, since the two artists involved, Merle Travis and Grandpa Jones were already under contract to WLW — The Delmore Brothers were the
Not much seems to have been written about this endearingly eccentric trucker tune from 1965. Billboard‘s September 11, 1965 edition confirms this is strictly a home-grown enterprise: “Big Eight Wheeler Roll On“ Lee Rose (1965) I love the relaxed delivery and imaginative use of time suspension — “back phrasing” a
These selected highlights from Broadcast Music Inc.’s one-time print periodical, BMI: The Many Worlds Of Music, reflect a particularly vibrant time in music and the arts. BMI’s back pages from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s encompass a wide range of artistic works and public events, some of which have
Love To Know serves up this small plate of trivia about the first women to wear pants: Charline Arthur Cash Box ad Sep. 17, 1955 “Discovered” in the early 1950s by Elvis Presley’s future manager, Col. Tom Parker, Arthur (like Elvis) was photographed almost exclusively above the waist in newspaper
Dave Penny‘s opening observation in the liner notes to Doin’ The Tennessee Wig Walk — the 26-song compilation taken from Bonnie Lou‘s King years — reminds me of Roy Lanham‘s similar quandary of being too jazz for country and vice versa: Too pop to be embraced by the country community
The steel guitar, it needs to be said, was the “special sauce” in early country music of the 1940s and ‘50s. From the soaring glissando and celestial, ringing harmonics to the scorching, breakneck single-note runs and big stacked chords, whose warm, electrified sound (uniquely) spanned the audio spectrum, the steel
Billboard displayed a startling lack of judgment when it made light-hearted reference to Plessy vs. Ferguson — the 1896 United States Supreme Court decision that codified segregation — in an educational piece from 1969 that attempts to demarcate the difference in mission between the Country Music Association and the similarly-named
Judy Lynn – “America’s Western Sweetheart” – would get her one and only 45 picture sleeve, tragically enough, for this cheerful-sounding honky tonk tale in which the singer informs us she has only seconds to live before the “kindly” stranger who offered a ride at the train station prepares to
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