by 1946 quinn had dropped the gulf records brand and founded a new company, Gold Star Records, which became one of the earliest and most successful independent record labels in the South. More importantly, it was the fi rst in Texas devoted to country, blues, and Cajun music—and the fi rst to produce a national hit.
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Under the Gold Star name, Quinn scored a major success with his premiere release. It came unexpectedly from an old song, the title of which Quinn had incorrectly documented as “Jole Blon” (#1314). That was his double misspelling of the French phrase “Jolie Blonde” (“Pretty Blonde”), the title of a traditional South Louisiana waltz lyric. The performer was Harry Choates (1922–1951), whose surname was also misspelled on the fi rst pressings of the disc label within the artist identifi cation “Harry Shoates & & His Fiddle” (yes, the ampersand was incoherently doubled too). A native of Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, Choates had grown up across the Sabine River in Port Arthur, Texas, a Cajun stronghold approximately ninety miles east of Houston. Accompanying himself on fi ddle and backed by a string band, Choates sang on his Gold Star debut disc with such plaintive enthusiasm that many listeners, whether they could translate the French lyrics or not, wanted their own copies of “Jole Blon.”
The result was a commercial success that twice in 1947 (January and March) hit the number four spot on the Billboard charts for “Most Played Juke Box Folk Records.” In so doing it also signaled the arrival of Gold Star Records on the national music scene. That recording was the fi rst and only Cajun song ever to make Billboard’s Top Five in any category—hence, its long-standing reputation as “the Cajun national anthem.”
Initially, however, Gold Star’s “Jole Blon” was only a regional hit, which introduced a new problem for Quinn to solve. Triggered by heavy airplay on a Houston radio station, the sudden local demand for copies quickly over-stressed Quinn’s capacity to make them in the little one-man pressing plant he had recently set up. Assessing the desperate situation, he realized the need to press more discs faster and to deliver them for sale while the record was still popular. So, despite his inclination for working solo, Quinn wisely arranged a licensing agreement with Modern Records, an independent West Coast company that thereafter handled much of the pressing, national distribution, and promotion of this erstwhile Gold Star single.
The strategy worked, for thousands of people far beyond the upper Gulf Coast were soon buying “Jole Blon” or punching its number on jukeboxes.
It would later also be leased and reissued outright on other labels, including not only Modern (#20-511), but also Starday (#187), D Records (#1024), and Deluxe. Surely a novelty to many, this recording nonetheless established the beloved Cajun song as a country music standard. As Texas Country Music Hall of Fame member Johnny Bush (b. 1935) says,
When I was a young boy living in Kashmere Gardens [in northeast Houston], my parents played Harry Choates’ “Jole Blon” on our Victrola, and that was a g o l d s t a r r e c o r d s
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Harry Choates, Austin,
ca. 1950
giant smash hit in our area! It must still be a big hit today because if people come to your show and see fi ddles on the bandstand, you can’t leave without playing it at least once that night.
In search of similar hits, Quinn subsequently recorded Choates numerous times, singing in French and in English, before the latter’s untimely 1951 death. Some of the resulting tracks were issued on Quinn’s Gold Star label; others were recorded by Quinn but issued on labels such as Starday, Hummingbird, or D Records. Among those titles are several blatant attempts to capitalize on “Jole Blon,” including a version of the same song delivered in English, plus “Mari Jole Blon” (“Jole Blon’s Husband”), “Jole Blon’s Gone,”
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and “Jole Brun” (“Pretty Brunette”). However, none of these follow-up releases sold much, nor did any of the more than forty other Choates tracks that Quinn ultimately recorded.
Like his relatively short lifespan, Choates’s stint on the Billboard charts was brief; there would be no second act for him. There would be, however, other hits for Quinn and his record label. Though Choates was the man who fi rst put the “gold” in Gold Star, Quinn would have to discover other artists to achieve commercial success again.
one of the most influential singers and guitarists in postwar blues history, Texas native Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins (1912–1982), had already made his fi rst recordings when Quinn met him and they began their uneasy professional affi
liation. In 1946 Hopkins had been recruited by Houston-based
talent scout Lola Anne Cullum (1903–1970) to travel to California, where, accompanied by pianist Wilson “Thunder” Smith, he cut a total of six tracks, his earliest, for the Los Angeles–based concern Aladdin Records. During his affi
liation with that label through early 1948, Hopkins recorded over forty songs, the majority of which were produced in sessions staged in rented studio space back in Houston. Quinn Recording Company was conveniently located in close proximity to the Third Ward, the southeast Houston neighborhood where Hopkins (who reputedly disliked traveling) resided for most of his life, and in 1947 Hopkins fi rst came there to record, yielding four tracks issued on Aladdin. Observing the interest of a West Coast company in this down-home local blues singer, Quinn seized the opportunity.
Hopkins soon was making records directly for Quinn and Gold Star. Their sporadic relationship continued through the demise of Quinn’s label in 1950.
During that span Hopkins recorded over one hundred songs at Quinn’s Telephone Road studio, reportedly usually at a fl at rate (for example, seventy-fi ve or one hundred dollars cash) per session.
Hopkins’s
fi rst Gold Star release (#3131) was a remake of a song previ-
ously recorded in California for Aladdin: “Short Haired Woman,” backed with “Big Mama Jump.” Almost immediately in demand on jukeboxes in the African American districts of metropolitan Houston, it became a bona fi de regional hit. Its success also prompted Quinn (who still used the now-misleading slogan “King of the Hillbillies” on the labels affi xed to his records)
to create a completely new category of Gold Star recordings, the 600 series.
It was devoted to blues music performed by black artists and intended for distribution primarily to black audiences—what was called the “race records”
market at the time. “Short Haired Woman” was thus the commercially successful follow-up to “Jole Blon” that Quinn had been seeking, and Hopkins was his dark-skinned new star.
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Lightnin’ Hopkins, inside Gold Star Studios, 1961
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Other Hopkins records produced by Quinn likewise garnered national attention on the Billboard R&B charts. For instance, in November 1948, “T-Model Blues” (Gold Star #662) peaked at number eight. Moreover, in February 1949, Hopkins’s performance of the poignant sharecropper’s protest song “Tim Moore’s Farm” (which Quinn had licensed to Modern Records) peaked at number thirteen. The many songs Hopkins cut for Quinn established his reputation as an innovator with wide appeal among black audiences. Those tracks, licensed and reissued on CD in 1990 by Arhoolie Records as The Gold Star Sessions, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, are today ranked by many afi cionados to be essential recordings by one of the greatest blues artists of all time.
Consider, for example, a Paste magazine article by Steve LaBate entitled
“Just for the Record: 10 Classic Sessions and the Studios That Shaped Them.”
Purporting to recognize “the greatest albums and singles . . . crafted in the polyphonic pantheons of the music industry,” it memorializes the sessions and studios that produced acclaimed masterpieces such as Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys (1966), Abbey Road by the Beatles (1969), “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye (1971), and The Unforgettable Fire by U2 (1984). Notably, only two recordings made before 1966 are commemorated, both from 1948: the Nashville session for “Lovesick Blues” by Hank Williams and the Houston session for “T-Model Blues” by Lightnin’ Hopkins. Though few Houstonians might have believed it at the time, Quinn’s modest Telephone Road studio was producing music that impacted popular culture at large—then and now.
Having occasionally harnessed Hopkins’s fertile, improvising genius was crucial for Gold Star Records. It was the payoff for the risks Quinn had taken in spontaneously producing a session whenever Hopkins dropped in, usually without advance notice, and off ered to record immediately for cash on the spot. As Chris Strachwitz explains in an interview:
Lightnin’ liked to make records, and no wonder, when he could sit down a few minutes, make up a number, and collect $100 in cash. And local record producer Bill Quinn had him doing just that. Whenever Lightnin’ needed some money, he would go over to . . . Gold Star Studios to “make some numbers.” And he had a fantastic talent to come up with an endless supply of these numbers. Many were based on traditional tunes he had heard in the past, but all of the songs received his personal treatment and they came out as very personal poetry.
Strachwitz had originally visited Houston in 1959 as a neophyte producer specifi cally hoping to meet and record Hopkins—a mission that would lead to the founding of Arhoolie Records, for which Hopkins eventually made numerous recordings. Consequently, the California-based Strachwitz developed g o l d s t a r r e c o r d s
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a long friendship with both this iconic Texas bluesman and Quinn, whose facilities he sometimes rented and used over the years. Of the relationship between Hopkins and Quinn, Strachwitz says, “Just occasionally Lightnin’
would talk about Quinn, you know. He referred to Bill as ‘the right sucker’ [or]
he was ‘mister money bags.’ Of course, he appeared to call him these things in an aff ectionate way.”
Aff ection notwithstanding, the Hopkins-Quinn affi
liation was often
somewhat strained, particularly because the singer nonchalantly ignored previously signed Gold Star contracts whenever another opportunity arose to make a record with—and collect more cash from—someone else. As Alan Lee Haworth points out in The Handbook of Texas Music, ultimately “Hopkins recorded for nearly twenty diff erent labels.” Nevertheless, as Alan Govenar asserts in Meeting the Blues, the many tracks Quinn documented for Gold Star Records constitute Hopkins’s “fi nest work.” As such, those Hopkins recordings at Quinn’s studio are both aesthetically and historically signifi cant—and not exclusively in relation to the blues genre.
For instance, Hopkins’s Gold Star sessions yielded one track that signaled the incubation of a new genre of music along the upper Gulf Coast. The song titled “Zolo Go,” produced around 1949 or ’50 as the B-side to “Automobile”
(#666), is one of the fi rst recordings ever to use an approximation of the word
“zydeco” to refer to a musical form. On it Hopkins eschews guitar and instead accompanies himself on organ, evoking the sound of an accordion and a Creole backbeat.
As Roger Wood states in Texas Zydeco,
The “Zolo Go” title was surely assigned by Quinn after the session, most likely based on his misunderstanding (he was a Caucasian native of Massachusetts, after all) of the exotic word that he had heard Hopkins articulate in the studio. As Chris Strachwitz says in his liner notes to the CD
Lightnin’ Hopkins: The Gold Star Sessions, Vol. 1, “. . . Lightning is singing about his impressions of going out to a zydeco dance. When Bill Quinn heard this, he probably had no idea what zydeco was or how to spell it.”
Along with Clarence Garlow’s 1949 hit “Bon Ton Roula” on the Houston-based Macy’s label (#5002-A), the novel Hopkins song helped to introduce zydeco—the word and the sound—to larger audiences.
Though Quinn’s Gold Star Records label would fold before other producers started deliberately recording the accordion-based black Creole music now recognized as zydeco (the standard spelling of which originated also in Houston), the aforementioned single by Hopkins is a seminal track. Among other things, it signifi es the early presence of this newly syncretized musical 2 6
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form in the Gulf Coast’s largest city. Incidentally, after Quinn quit the label business and moved his recording facility to his Brock Street residence, his renamed Gold Star Studios would host Clifton Chenier (1925–1987), a longtime Houston resident and the eventual “King of Zydeco,” on many sessions for the Arhoolie Records label. But more than a decade before Chenier would cut the tracks that ultimately defi ned this vibrant new genre, Hopkins and Quinn were already, despite the awkward spelling, spreading the word.
meanwhile, quinn’s willingness to pay cash to record Hopkins attracted many other African American blues singers to his studio. The most notable and prolifi c among these were Lil’ Son Jackson and L. C. Williams, but Quinn also issued singles credited to Thunder Smith, Leroy Ervin, Lee Hunter, Buddy Chiles, Andy Thomas, Perry Cain, and others. Some of the backing musicians who appeared on these tracks include Elmore Nixon, Leroy Carter, Luther “Ricky” Stoneham, Buster Pickens, and Skippy Brown. The roster of performers on the Gold Star 600 series reads like a virtual “Who’s Who” of mid-twentieth-century East Texas blues. These recordings are now invaluable historical documents tracing the fusion of the country blues sound with modern urban infl uences.
Granted, some of these records made little or no profi t for Quinn. But there were some commercial successes too. For instance, in November 1948, Lil’ Son Jackson’s “Freedom Train Blues,” the fl ip-side to “Roberta Blues”
(#638), climbed to number seven on the national R&B charts. Born as Melvin Jackson (1915–1976), the singer-guitarist known as “Lil’ Son” ultimately recorded at least ten of his compositions on the Gold Star label in 1948 and 1949, including “Ground Hog Blues” and “Bad Whiskey, Bad Women” (#642),
“Gone with the Wind” and “No Money, No Love” (#653), “Cairo Blues” and
“Evil Blues” (#663), and “Gambling Blues” backed with “Homeless Blues”
(#668). These records, some of which were released as late as 1950 or ’51, did well enough to elevate Jackson’s status as a regional blues star to that of Hopkins. However, by 1949 Jackson had left Houston (a city he had come to from Dallas, specifi cally to audition and record for Quinn), and he recorded thereafter only for Modern Records and the Imperial label.
Though not as big a player on the national scene as Jackson, L. C. Williams (1924–1960) was regionally popular during his affi
liation with Gold Star
Records, producing at least eight tracks for Quinn. He had started out as a sideman drumming for Hopkins and others. But he soon became a vocalist, one who could imitate his mentor so well that Quinn identifi ed him as “Lightnin’ Jr.” on his fi rst record. After initially affi
liating with Quinn’s
label, Williams later recorded locally for various others (including Eddie’s, Freedom, Jax, and Mercury).
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Conrad Johnson (1915–2008) was a saxophonist who went on to become one of the most distinguished music educators in Texas history. Aff ectionately known to several generations of musicians as “Prof,” Johnson directed the multiple-award-winning Kashmere High School Stage Band, among other achievements during
his thirty-seven years in public education. After retirement from teaching, he continued, well into his nineties, to lead his own orchestra and to record. But back in 1947, Johnson too launched his recording career at Quinn’s studio.
His song “Howling on Dowling” (the title of which alludes to a Houston street) appears on a 78 rpm Gold Star single backed with “Fisherman’s Blues” (#622). Performed in a fully orchestrated, upbeat style with witty lyrics, it evokes the popular mid-century sound of national phenomenon Louis Jordan. This record also establishes that Quinn’s 600 series not only featured the down-home blues of guitar-wielding singers such as Lightnin’ Hopkins but also the more refi ned big band sounds of jazz and early R&B.
The blues artist best known as Peppermint Harris (1925–1999) also got his start on Gold Star Records. Actually born Harrison D. Nelson Jr., he moved to Houston in 1947 and reportedly soon met Hopkins, who introduced him to Quinn. Shortly thereafter, he cut “Peppermint Boogie” backed with “Houston Blues” for Gold Star (#626). Since clever monikers were popular in blues music, Quinn credited the 1947 record to Peppermint Nelson as a promotional tactic. The nickname stuck for a while, but when a subsequent producer mistakenly recalled the name as Peppermint Harris, that replaced the others.
Harris would go on to make hit records on various labels, settle in California, and establish himself as a songwriter. But like so many others, he launched his career with Quinn.
Another such expatriated Texas artist was Houston-born saxophonist and bandleader Curtis Amy (1927–2002), who become an acclaimed session musician and jazz artist in his own right after moving to the West Coast.
However, his rookie outing in the studio occurred in 1947 when he recorded
“Realization Blues” and “Sleeping Blues” on the Gold Star label (#618). These tracks, credited to Curtis Amy and His Orchestra, off er big band blues rendered in a jazzy style. Amy later established himself, fi rst in New York and then in Los Angeles, as a fi rst-rate sideman on popular recordings by the likes of Ray Charles, Carole King, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Lou Rawls, the Doors, and many others.
House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) Page 5