House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music)
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Similarly inching toward retirement was Quinn, Daily’s favorite Houston studio owner. Following his long run of engineering sessions for Daily and others, by 1963 he was reducing his role in studio operations, where he would eventually serve only as landlord before ultimately selling and entrusting the Gold Star legacy to new ownership. As musician Glenn Barber sums it up,
“Bill recorded in that big room for a few years and then retired in the early
’60s and leased the place to J. L. Patterson and lived in his house next door.
He would come over pretty often and watch things but didn’t have much to do with anything.”
An era was passing in Texas and beyond—that wild time in the mid-twentieth century when the fi rst generation of maverick studio owners and old-school independent record producers such as Quinn and Daily could collaborate with young talent and limited budgets in hopes of making a hit.
d a i ly ’ s d o m i n a n c e a n d d r e c o r d s 8 1
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9
Little Labels
b l u e s , c o u n t ry, a n d s h a r k s
hile the hundreds of sessions produced by Pappy
Daily had dominated much of the Gold Star Studios sched-
ule during the late 1950s and early ’60s, proprietor Bill Quinn certainly did have other clients. Some of those were small label owners trying to replicate the commercial success that Daily had achieved with Starday and D Records. Others were individuals, bands, or loose affi liations of people collaborating on a common music project—representing a widening diversity of genres. Some may have even been con artists playing the so-called “song-sharking” game. And of course, there were also various high school or college marching or stage bands, which utilized the big room expansion. Whichever the case, for many musicians who came to Gold Star Studios to record during this era, it was an initiation experience—the fi rst time they ever cut studio tracks. Some of those performers went on to establish famous careers in music.
Of all the record company owners who rented Quinn’s space and services, the only one who could rival Daily’s clout was the African American mogul Don Robey. He owned fi ve Houston-based labels between 1949 and 1973—
and his Gold Star Studios connection is explored more fully in Chapter 11.
Most of the rest had far less success. Yet even among those, there were several historically signifi cant recordings.
For instance, one aspiring independent record company owner was the musician Henry Hayes (b. 1924). Though he had a distinguished thirty-year career as an educator in public schools, Hayes also recorded on many Houston sessions, usually performing on saxophone, with his own band. The resulting singles were released on various labels, including Quinn’s old Gold Star imprint, as well as Savoy, Peacock, Mercury, and others.
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Quinn had engineered Hayes’s very fi rst session as a bandleader, staged at the original Telephone Road site in 1947 or ’48—that is, right around the time that Quinn had started recording black men playing the blues. The result was a 78 rpm Gold Star Records single (#633) off ering two Hayes originals,
“Bowlegged Angeline” and “Baby Girl Blues,” with the performance credited simply to Henry Hayes and His Band. On some of the subsequent recordings for other labels, Hayes led his group (billed variously as the Four Kings, the Rhythm Kings, or the Henry Hayes Orchestra) as the backing ensemble for his protégé, piano-playing vocalist Elmore Nixon (1933–1973), or other singers.
However, Hayes truly made his mark on recording history when he and a partner, M. L. Young, launched their own “look-see” label, Kangaroo Records.
In Roger Wood’s book Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues, Hayes sums up their start:
A friend of mine . . . was also a music teacher, . . . So we decided that we was going to put our funds together and start a little record label. . . . And the idea was to put out records on diff erent talent, build ’em up, get some company interested, and then get a lease with them. . . . Kangaroo Records, that was my idea, Kangaroo Records—because it jumped!
Because Gold Star Studios was well established, relatively inexpensive, already familiar to Hayes, and close to the Third Ward (where he and most of his musicians resided), it was a natural site for those Kangaroo Records sessions. And Quinn was manning the booth when Hayes went there in the spring of 1958 to make the fi rst recordings of two postwar masters of Texas blues guitar, Albert Collins (1932–1993) and Joe Hughes (1937–2003).
Those sessions yielded the debut singles for both artists, issued by Kangaroo Records on 45 rpm discs: “The Freeze” (#103) backed with “Collins Shuffl
e” (#104) by Albert Collins and His Rhythm Rockers, as well as “I Can’t Go On This Way” (#105) backed with “Make Me Dance Little Ant” (#106) by Joe Hughes and His Orchestra. The Hughes record was reviewed in Billboard magazine in June 1959, but remains an obscurity to all but the most informed fans (who often cite it nonetheless as “Ants in My Pants”). Today its main import lies in its status as the earliest recording by an ultimately widely admired blues artist—as London-based writer Paul Wadey puts it, “a favourite amongst European audiences.”
On the other hand, “The Freeze,” a magical instrumental groove, soon became a regional hit that even reportedly inspired a local dance craze. Moreover, it served as Collins’s signature tune throughout the rest of his career, which would escalate to international blues superstardom by his fi nal decade. Its potency also triggered a succession of various other cold-themed metaphors l i t t l e l a b e l s
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that Collins would employ to defi ne his guitar playing—what he called “ice picking”—including later album titles such as Iceman, Frostbite, Cold Snap, Deep Freeze, and Don’t Lose Your Cool, to cite only a few. Today “The Freeze” is generally considered a modern blues electric guitar classic.
But according to both Hayes and Hughes, the presence of Collins at that session was a fl uke. The only plan for that day was to record Hughes and a local female vocal group, the Dolls. However, as Hughes was preparing to depart for the scheduled morning studio session, he realized in a panic that he had left his only guitar at Shady’s Playhouse, a Third Ward club where he gigged each night. When he raced to that venue only to fi nd it locked and empty, he turned to his friend Collins, who then resided less than a block away. As Hughes puts it in another interview from Down in Houston, “So I had Albert go out there with me, and that’s how ‘The Freeze’ got cut, by accident. I went by there and got his guitar and took him to the studio.”
Hayes, in the same book, picks up the story from there:
See, I was the producer in the studio . . . and Albert came along with Joe Hughes . . . So the piano player that used to play with Albert told me, “Man, Albert has a number he’s playing out at the clubs—boy, people are going wild about it! Man, you’ve got to hear that number.”
So Albert came out that day, so when we got through recording the others, I told him, I say, “Albert, I heard about this number ‘Freeze.’ . . . A lot of people [have] been going wild for it in the clubs. . . . They’ve been telling me about it, and you haven’t recorded it with anybody. Do you want to record it with me?”
He said, “I guess so.” . . .
We’d never rehearsed on it or anything. So I say, “Well, okay, you start it off , and when you get ready for me to come in on the tenor [saxophone], let me know. Just bow your head, and I’ll come in.” . . . And the fi rst time, he came in, played with the drummer and the rhythm behind him and everything, and then after he played it, told me to come in on the saxophone. Then he came back and played another chorus and played it out.
And the man [Quinn] that was over the studio shouted, “Whoa, that’s a hit!” [Laughs] The fi rst time down! And that’s how I recorded Albert Collins.
Hoping to emulate Daily’s model of success, Hayes planned to capitalize on the fervent initial reaction to this release by enticing a major label into a lease agreement. However, before he could do so, that plan fell through.
When the local mogul Robey observed the frenzy over “The Freeze,” he quickly recorded a blatant cover version performed by guitarist Fenton Robinson (1935–1997) and his band. Robey rushed to issue it on his Duke label (#190), 8 4
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Albert Collins, publicity photo (by Benny Joseph), early 1960s backed with another instrumental titled “Double Freeze.” Years later Collins recorded “The Freeze” again elsewhere. But as for the original track of that song, Hayes bitterly asserts that Robey “just killed that record”—and with it, the Kangaroo label’s best chance for a breakthrough hit.
Of the six songs recorded by Hayes on that fateful fi rst session as a Kangaroo Records producer, two by the Dolls were issued fi rst (#101/102), followed by a pair from Collins and then the two from Hughes. The next two releases, credited to Henry Hayes and Orchestra, featured the songs “Two Big Feet” and “Call of the Kangaroo” (#107/108) and “It Takes Money” and “Stop Smackin’ That Wax” (#109/110). The fi nal Kangaroo release was by Little Joey Farr performing two Christmas songs, “I Want a Big White Cadillac for Christmas” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Santa” (#111/112).
Though Hayes would remain active as a session player and bandleader into the 1990s, he soon gave up on his Kangaroo Records experiment, convinced that Robey’s powerful infl uence over radio DJs, record distributors, and the black Houston music scene in general would make further eff orts futile. But thanks to his relationship with Quinn and Gold Star Studios, as well as that unforeseen chance to record Collins’s original articulation of “The Freeze,” Hayes had made music history, if not much money, with his little label that “jumped.”
Conversely, Quinn’s late-1950s affi
liation with Kangaroo Records only
added to his already impressive legacy as one of the most important sound l i t t l e l a b e l s
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engineers ever to document Texas blues, especially as performed by postwar African American singers and guitarists in Houston. Having recorded seminal fi gures such as Lightnin’ Hopkins, Lil’ Son Jackson, and others in his original studio in the late 1940s, Quinn brilliantly (even if unknowingly) ac-centuated his behind-the-scenes role in blues history by also being the fi rst to engineer sessions for Collins and Hughes, their worthy successors. In the span of ten or eleven years, Quinn thus made some of the most relevant recordings for tracing the evolution of Houston blues guitar.
Sometimes he did so on debut recordings that were unfortunately never released or even pressed. Such was the case with yet another stalwart of the Texas blues guitar sound, Pete Mayes (1938–2008). Playing in a style heavily infl uenced by his role model T-Bone Walker (1910–1975), with whom he fi rst performed on stage at the age of sixteen, Mayes worked with numerous other blues giants from the mid-1950s into the start of the twenty-fi rst century. Some of those who used his talents on stage include Big Joe Turner (1911–1985), Lowell Fulsom (1921–1999), Percy Mayfi eld (1920–1984), Junior Parker (1932–1971), and Bill Doggett (1916–1996). Moreover, Mayes recorded as a session player with numerous groups over the years, and he released his own W. C. Handy Award–nominated album, For Pete’s Sake, on the Austin-based Antone’s label in 1998.
Yet like his good friend Hughes (with whom he collaborated on the album Texas Blues Party, Vol. 2, issued in 1998 by the European-based Wolf Records), Mayes fi rst recorded at Gold Star Studios under the technical supervision of its founder, Quinn. That virgin experience occurred in 1960, and Mayes would not return to the site again until 2006, when he recorded tracks with the Calvin Owens Blues Orchestra for the album Houston Is the Place to Be.
Here Mayes recounts how that inaugural 1960 session came to be and his memories of the place:
We were playing for Van Bevil [at the venue called Van’s Ballroom], and he thought we were great and off ered to pay for us to go into the studio to record a 45. My close friend Percy Mayfi eld, who lived in Louisiana, was hanging around and off ered his services for free to coproduce the project with me. So in either June or July—I know it was then because it was stinkin’ hot outside and it was great to be in a big air-conditioned studio—we went over to Gold Star. Big old room with a hardwood fl oor and high ceilings. We got a great sound with my band. Van paid for the session, and we cut a song called
“I’ll Tell the World” and an instrumental track.
Over forty years later, Mayes has no regrets about making that recording and says that he learned a lot from both Mayfi eld and Quinn. “I don’t know 8 6
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why, but we never got to release it,” he says, “and nobody knows where the master tapes or any of the acetate dubs went. . . . It was a great experience, but I wish we still had that master!”
Though few people probably ever got to hear that Mayes recording, the fact that it existed—even if only briefl y—underscores again the crucial role that Quinn and Gold Star Studios played in documenting African American blues players in the South’s largest city.
Similarly, Quinn’s studio was involved in recording tenor saxophonist and jazz bandleader Arnett Cobb (1918–1989). Though in the 1940s he had moved to (and recorded in) New York as a member of Lionel Hampton’s band, Cobb never lost sight of his Texas blues roots. Writer Keith Shadwick aptly characterizes Cobb’s style as marked by “blues phraseology and wild swoops and hollers.” As further evidence, in 1984 Cobb shared a Grammy Award for best traditional blues performance for his collaboration with B. B. King (b. 1925) on the MCA album Blues ’n’ Jazz.
In mid-1963, while home from the East Coast, Cobb brought a band of like-minded musicians into Gold Star Studios to record. Included in the group was special guest Don Wilkerson (1932–1986), a tenor saxophonist best known for his own recordings on the prestigious Blue Note label, as well as for his acclaimed work on stage and on recordings with Ray Charles (1930–2004). Together Cobb and Wilkerson delivered a full session of musical improvisation. As far as we know, this was the only time these two artists ever played together in a studio-recording situation. The supporting players included Duke Barker on drums, Paul Schmitt on piano, Buel Niedlinger on bass, and Cleon Grant on percussion. The results were preserved on a tape that was archived at the studio and only recently discovered. Though material from that session has not been released for public consumption, the primary heir to the Cobb estate has been exploring options for issuing it as an album.
Based on the conversations (captured on tape) between the players and the technicians, we infer that this project was self-produced by Cobb. That may explain why it was not released, for not only did Cobb maintain a busy schedule of professional work nationwide and abroad (including numerous recording sessions for other producers), he also suff ered a series of health problems that could have caused him to shelve this project.
This intriguing reel of tape features about a dozen diff erent tunes, with multiple takes of some numbers, as well as some busted takes and interven-ing studio chatter. To hear Cobb and Wilkerson trading solos is remarkable, and the sonic quality of the recording is excellent for that time. We hope that someday soon it will be made available on CD, but as for now, it remains an unpublished yet valuable cultural artifact from Gold Star Studios.
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of the numerous small start-up labels that recorded at Gold Star Studios in the late 1950s, if they were not focused (like Kangaroo Records) on blues, they were most likely to be doing country or pop. One of the
most unusual of the country-based labels was Sarg Records. Founded by a former U.S. Army Air Corps sergeant named Charlie Fitch (1918–2006), the company was based in Luling, Texas, located approximately 140 miles west of Houston. There he operated the Luling Phonograph and Record Store, which also served as the headquarters for his jukebox business. As Andrew Brown has documented in the richly detailed book that accompanies The Sarg Records Anthology, Fitch ultimately released 150 singles over a span of twenty-fi ve years, producing his fi rst session in December of 1953 and the bulk of his catalogue by 1965. In so doing, as Brown puts it, Fitch “single-handedly ensured that at least a portion of the music of South Texas at mid-century would be preserved, and the musicians themselves remembered.”
Some of those regional musicians who made their recording debuts on Fitch’s label would subsequently become famous stars elsewhere. Perhaps the best example is Willie Nelson, who did his fi rst work as a studio guitarist for a pair of two-sided Sarg recordings by Dave Isbell and the Mission City Playboys in August 1954 (#108 and 109). This session was produced at Houston’s ACA Studios and engineered by Bill Holford, Quinn’s friendly cross-town rival. Of course, Nelson would fi nally record under his own name a few years later when he joined the D Records roster, which led him to Gold Star Studios.
Another
fi gure who got started with Sarg was the almost equally legendary Texas musician Doug Sahm (1941–1999)—who would later come to Gold Star Studios to record (for another label) with his band, the Sir Douglas Quintet.