Still Life In Soul

It does our heart good to see that one of the awesome photographs that Jacob Blickenstaff took at our Sir Lattimore Brown benefit at the Banks Street Bar in New Orleans last April has been selected by The Soulsville Foundation for use on a poster advertising the upcoming Still Life In Soul exhibit at The Stax Museum. The exhibit, which features thirty nine other stunning Blickenstaff portraits of some of our soul heroes, opens this Friday, November 6th.

The museum will be kicking things off right, with an Opening Reception and Stax Family Reunion (which presumably means that folks like William Bell and Eddie Floyd will be in attendance) beginning at 7pm.

Now, if I could only convince the bride that it was time for another road trip...

road trip: Special Report

Hey everybody, I'd like to thank all of you who tuned in to the YouTube thing to watch those video updates I posted from the road. It's something I never tried before, and was only made possible by borrowing my wife's laptop... baby, you're the greatest! Anyway, I hope you enjoyed them as much as I did and, just in case you missed any of them, they're all still available over on The Red Kelly Channel.

This 'special report' kind of summarizes the whole thing, and will hopefully give you an idea of what I was trying to accomplish.

Thank You one and all for your continued support.

-red

Tommy Tate - We Don't (Juana 1950)

We Don't

If you recall, the Andy Chapman side we had up here last time around turned out to actually be by the truly sublime Tommy Tate. Known in Soul circles for years as something like 'The Greatest Singer You've Never Heard', or 'America's Best Kept Secret', I figured it was time to check things out...

Our story actually begins with a record that was cut on a Jackson, Mississippi label called Trebco in 1961. A young kid named Tim Whitsett had a band called The Imperials that was immensely popular on the local dance scene. They had been featured on the radio (along with Sam Baker's Blue Notes), and were just knocking 'em dead. So much so that the Trebco release of Jive Harp was picked up by Imperial for national distribution. As their reputation spread, the Imperials began playing for a wider audience, spinning their wheels out on the Fraternity Circuit, and continuing to release singles (like Still A Lot Of Love) on a bunch of different labels.

Tommy Lee Tate, meanwhile, had moved to the Jackson area as a kid, and came up singing Gospel in his Great Aunt's congregation. As a teenager, he found work as a drummer and vocalist on the club scene in Canton, just north of town. Bob McRee and brothers Cliff and Ed Thomas had opened up the small MAC studio in an old gas station out on O'Ferrell Avenue in West Jackson in the mid-sixties. They brought Tommy in and cut a single on him that they leased to ABC-Paramount, that didn't do much. On Soulful Kinda Music, Tim Whitsett is quoted as saying, "...my band was the backing band on nearly every release produced by Thomas-McRee-Thomas between 1964 and 1967." Which would seem to indicate that they were playing behind Tate on that release as well as on his subsequent Okeh 45.

By 1966, Whitsett would make Tommy a full-fledged member (and lead vocalist) of his group, now known as The Imperial Show Band.


As the only integrated act out there on the circuit (and with Tim's younger brother Carson now playing the Hammond B3), the Show Band became more popular than ever, traveling as far afield as Nashville, and even New York. They would release a single on Bob McRee's local Big Ten label (as 'The Imperial Show Band featuring Tommy Tate'), and Okeh would send Tommy to Music City to work with Billy Sherrill for their next release on him in 1967.

Enter the Crazy Cajun. That's right, in late 1967 ( before the whole ATCO Andy Chapman thing), there was a Huey Meaux produced single by 'Tommy Yates and the Imperial Show Band' released on Verve. I'm not sure if the whole pseudonym thing was due to contractual reasons, or what, but here's another great 45 by Tate that he never got credit for. This must have been during the period when The Hombres hit was riding high on Verve, and Huey was able to use that leverage to place the 'Yates' record with them. In any event, it would appear to be Meaux's first collaboration with Thomas-McRee-Thomas, possibly even before the move to Grits n' Gravy.

One more 'Imperial Show Band featuring Tommy Tate' single would follow (Musicor 1340) in 1968. Tim Whitsett, who by then was also the head of his own publishing company, had an office in the same building as a new studio that had opened up on Northside Drive in Jackson named Malaco. Tommy had begun writing songs as well, and the two of them hung around the studio, recording an occasional demo, and showcasing their music. In early 1970, Tommy released a single on the small Jackson Sound label, but not much else seemed to be happening.

Meanwhile, up in Memphis, Booker T had walked away from East McLemore Avenue in the wake of the whole Don Davis thing. As Tim Whitsett told Rob Bowman in Soulsville U.S.A.; "Don Davis called me up and said '...I'm working at STAX now. I'm the new vice president there, and I want to build a new studio house band. I want you to put it together I want you to come up here and bring all your guys.'" Only by then, for one reason or another, The Imperial Show Band had ceased to exist, and everyone had gone their separate ways. "Come up here anyway, and we'll figure out what to do," Davis told him.

And so, in April of 1970, old friends Tim Whitsett and Tommy Tate made the drive to Memphis to see Davis. Within the first week, Whitsett had been put in charge of East Memphis Music, the publishing division at Stax, and Tommy was signed as a songwriter. When Ollie Hoskins left The Nightingales to pursue his solo career that Summer, Mack Rice chose Tate as his replacement, an arrangement which resulted in two excellent singles over the next year. When those records failed to chart, he left the group to try and cut something on his own.

With Don Davis out the door, Stax' other mover and shaker from up north, Johnny Baylor, had begun to insert himself into the mix. He had brought Luther Ingram down to Memphis from New York, and worked out a distribution agreement with Al Bell for his Ko Ko label in 1969. For some reason or other, after his stint with The Nightingales, it was decided that Tommy Tate would be signed to Ko Ko rather than Stax, an arrangement which Tommy would come to regret.

Luther Ingram was Baylor's first priority, and he had charted eight times for Ko Ko by early 1972. When the mighty, mighty (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want To Be Right busted things wide open that Summer (spending a month at #1 R&B in the process), it solidified Baylor's position at Stax, and made Ingram even more the center of his attention. Tommy Tate's second Ko Ko single, School Of Life (which he had written with Mickey Gregory), would cruise to #22 R&B while Luther's record was still holding down the top slot, but it just couldn't compete with something like that. He appeared at Wattstax that August, but his performance didn't make the film.

Baylor's strong armed, gun-waving tactics are the stuff of legend and, some say, had him 'running things' at Stax by then. Tommy told Rob Bowman that he 'felt like a prisoner' during his time with Baylor; "When I discovered what I hooked up in, it scared the Hell out of me," he said. Although he did chart twice more for the label in 1976, "I finally decided to cut it off," he told Bowman, "He [Baylor] told me that he would come to Mississippi and bury me... he was saying 'I will come there and off you.'" Imagine?

With Stax (and finally Ko Ko) going belly up, by the late seventies, Tommy was back in Jackson concentrating on his songwriting. Malaco by then had become a force to be reckoned with, on the heels of Dorothy Moore's Misty Blue. Dorothy had also sung with The Imperials and worked with Tommy at both MAC and Grits n' Gravy, so he felt right at home. He continued to record demos of his songs, which would later be picked up by Malaco signings like Bobby Bland and Johnnie Taylor but, for whatever reason, they never cut him as an artist in his own right.

He signed instead with a small local label named Sundance, which was run by a friend of his named Sam Kazery. This arrangement would produce four singles beginning in 1979, and also create 'enough material for thirty albums', as he told Heikki Suosalo in Soul Express a few years ago. That material remains unheard. Tommy had begun writing with Joe Shamwell while he was still at Stax, and when Shamwell made the move to Malaco, the two began collaborating again.

Enter another Stax alumni, Frederick Knight. Knight had been working with Neal Hemphill at his fabled Sounds of Birmingham studio in Alabama, and sending demo tapes on a regular basis to Tim Whitsett over at Stax. "Every time I sent him a tape," Knight told Rob Bowman, "he said 'Man, you're real close, but I don't hear that out-of-the-park smash... if you're gonna be an artist, you've got to be different.'" Frederick found that something different in a riff that Hemphill guitarist Jerry Weaver had come up with and, along with Aaron Varnell and Glen Wood, cut I've Been Lonely For So Long in one night, and sent the tape up to Tim at Stax. He flipped, and when the label released it in early 1972, it went straight to the R&B top ten.

Knight's follow-up singles on Stax didn't do much, and he felt himself drawn back into the songwriting and production side of things. After the demise of the big company, he was approached by Henry Stone down in Miami, who wanted him to come and record for his T.K. imprint. He worked out a deal instead in which Henry would distribute Frederick's Knight Productions on his own Juana label. Stone was also distributing Malaco, and he suggested that Knight go to Jackson and check it out. Over the next few years he 'found a home' at the studio, and it became his base of operations. A record he produced there on a singer named Anita Ward would dominate both the R&B and Pop charts in the Summer of 1979, as Ring My Bell helped defined the 'disco' sound that was sweeping the nation at the time.

In 1981, Knight would produce an album called simply Tommy Tate, that would bring Tommy back into the spotlight where he belonged. This absolutely incredible selection we have here today (written with Joe Shamwell) was the flip of the first single released from the LP, For The Dollar Bill. While it may be a little too 'uptown' for a lot of you out there, it just kills me. Check out this man's voice, brothers and sisters... whoa! Soul personified, man. With T.K. out of business, however, Juana had no distribution to speak of, and excellent records like this one just died on the vine.

Although Tommy soldiered on at Malaco, writing great music for the label's roster of R&B veterans, the label didn't seem to realize what it had. In 1990, old friend Tim Whitsett produced an album on him called Love Me Now, that would appear on his own Urgent! label. Predictably, nothing much came of it. Tommy, meanwhile, was 'big in Japan', and another LP, All Or Nothing, only saw release in that country. At this late date, all of this seems inconceivable to me. I mean, how is it that so great a talent as Tommy Tate was unable to get the recognition he deserved?

No man is a prophet in his own home, I guess.

In the U.K., however, Tommy has been appreciated for years, and is the subject of several recent releases. Ace has put together a great package called I'm So Satisfied that collects all of his Ko Ko and Stax era recordings for the first time ever on CD. With 15 pages of liner notes written by Tony Rounce, it's well worth the price of admission. In those notes, Rounce says "Tommy turns 62 in September of 2007, which is still relatively young for a veteran soul man. There can be no doubt that everyone who buys this CD would love to see and hear from him again." No doubt.

Soulscape, meanwhile, has issued two volumes of Tommy's rare and unreleased material. Hold On is a collection of his more obscure Jackson based 45s, along with some unissued material, that was put together and annotated by none other than Tim Whitsett himself. The label's most recent release, When Hearts Grow Cold, presents Tommy's highly regarded Malaco and Muscle Shoals recorded demos for the first time ever. No less an authority than John Ridley has said, "...his songs cut by Otis Clay, Johnnie Taylor and Bobby Bland are simply magnificent. And if you think they're good I can assure you they're not a patch on Tate's own Muscle Shoals demos. I would say that he's the best true soul singer still plying his trade - and my first choice for a recording deal when I win the lottery."

Sadly, however, whether or not Sir Shambling hits the Lotto, Tommy's singing days now appear to be over. After a series of strokes left him confined to a wheelchair, he is now living in a nursing home down in Jackson.


In February of this year, there was a message in the Southern Soul Group that urged all of his fans to write to him at this address:

Tommy Tate c/o Freddie Prouty
Forest Hill Nursing Center, Inc.
927 Cooper Road
Jackson, MS 39212

We Remember.

Andy Chapman - Happy Is The Man (ATCO 6558)

Happy Is The Man

Hey, folks, how's everything? You know after I spoke with Huey P. Meaux on the YouTube thing last month, I took a little heat.

Oh well.

In my opinion, no discussion of Southern Soul can be complete without including Huey Meaux. When the opportunity to speak with him presented itself, I took it in the interest of preserving this rich history while we still can. Keep in mind that the person who brought Huey down in the first place was none other than Tom "The Hammer" Delay, who came up out of the same East Texas neighborhood Huey did. DeLay is now out of Congress and on Dancing With The Stars.

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone..."

Meaux had cemented his reputation as a hitmaker when, on the heels of his success with Sir Douglas, he brought a song he had produced back in Houston to a NATRA convention in Atlanta in 1965. WQXI deejay Pat Hughes took it and played it on the air, and the phones lit up. "You've got another hit on your hands," he told Huey. Don Robey, who was at the convention, heard about all of this, and picked the song up for distribution on his Back Beat label. Treat Her Right would propel Roy Head and The Traits all the way to #2 pop for Robey that Fall. Huey had done it again.


Huey sent me this awesome picture of him in the studio with Roy working on the record. He said that when it came time for Robey to pay him the money he owed him, Don put his gun up there on the desk the way he usually did. When Huey calmly put his own pistol right up there alongside it, he wrote him a check right then and there...

Shelby Singleton brought Huey a Memphis group called The Hombres, and he agreed to produce them there in Houston. The resulting Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out) would cruise to #12 Pop in 1967, this time on Verve/Forecast. "After that." Huey said, "they got crazy on me and I had to cut 'em loose. Some of 'em, when they hear themselves on the radio for the first time, they get to thinking why the hell they ever needed you in the first place..." They never charted again.

Later that year, Meaux took a record that was making some local noise on Houston deejay Skipper Lee Frazier's Ovide label and brought it to the attention of Jerry Wexler at Atlantic. Frazier had taken a popular vamp that the T.S.U. Toronados had been laying down at their live shows and had Archie Bell ad-lib some vocals over the top. Skyrocketing to the number one slot on the Billboard Hot 100 for Atlantic in the Spring of 1968, Tighten Up would become the absolute sensation it remains to this day (it's just recently been named as Houston's Very Best Song Ever).


Wexler was ecstatic, and from that point on, he and Huey became "like brothers," Meaux said. Atlantic had signed Barbara Lynn, and when Huey made the move to Clinton, Mississippi and opened up Grits n' Gravy, they released great 45s like This Is The Thanks I Get and You're Losing Me that he produced on her there.


Shown here at the studio with Peggy Scott and Jo-Jo Benson, the records Meaux cut during this period are among his best.

He had been using Dorothy Moore's group The Poppies as background singers on those records, and he would produce the first two solo 45s on her there at Grits, leasing them to MGM through some deal or other with Shelby Singleton and Alan Lorber. Covering Sir Doug''s big hit (as He's About A Mover) around the same time that Otis Clay was cutting it at Fame for Wexler's Cotillion subsidiary, it was Clay's version that made the charts (as the publisher, I'm sure it was just fine by Huey either way). Released under the name Dottie Cambridge, these singles remain undiscovered gems from a time years before Malaco and Misty Blue. Which kind of brings us to our current selection...

When I asked Huey about Andy Chapman, he had no idea who the hell I was talking about. I told him I had an ATCO 45 on him that was obviously produced there at Grits n' Gravy. "I don't remember nothin' 'bout him," he said, "which is kinda funny, cause I usually remember them all..." So I started googling. Other than the fact that someone named Andy Chapman was apparently quite the soccer player, I couldn't find anything. So I figured I'd search 'ATCO 6558' instead. What I found out kind of blew my mind (you can read the equally amazing story about the flip side of the record over on The A Side).

According to Soulful Kinda Music, the vocalist on this side is actually Tommy Tate; "...apparently he remembers doing it as a demo only and was unaware of it's release," they said. Wow! So, I asked Huey about that. Tommy, he told me, was the regular session drummer at the studio during its brief existence (!), and he recalls cutting some demos on him. Check out Tommy's drum work on here, man! I asked him about the rest of the 'house band' at the studio, and he could only remember the name of the bass player - Jimmy Jones. That ring any bells with anybody? "That record was probably something that Jerry Wexler was willing to take a gamble on," he said. I don't blame him, I think it's excellent, and yet another great song from Thomas, Mcree and Thomas...


Wexler was one of the few people who stayed in Huey Meaux's corner when he went away to jail and the whole Grits n' Gravy thing fell apart. It was Meaux, after all, who introduced Wexler to people like Mac Rebbenack, Doug Sahm, and Willie Nelson. People Jerry would produce some of his favorite albums on in the 1970s. "I talked to him the day before he died," Huey told me, "and he said I was the number one producer. 'What about you?' I asked him. 'I had all that Atlantic money behind me... you did it out of your back pocket, and with feeling.'"

Yes he did.

Willie Mitchell - Bum Daddy (Hi 2147)

Bum Daddy

The Memphis Blues Again

Our friend Willie Mitchell isn't doing so hot. In what he described to me as a 'string of bad luck', he's been dealing with some major issues this summer. His house 'burned up', he said, and he's been unable to live there. After a nasty fall in which he broke his hip, he's been confined to a wheelchair. He didn't even know the hip was broken, he said, for a couple of months. Willie's also been struggling with complications from the ankle he broke last year, which hasn't healed properly because of his diabetes. He entered the hospital in Memphis yesterday for an operation on his hip that will, hopefully, help with the pain. Willie Mitchell has been, through it all, his usual stoic self, answering the phone at Royal just as he has for the past forty years. He is 81 years old. I told him we'd be praying for him.

Ironically, Fat Possum just released Ooh Baby You Turn Me On, Willie's 1967 album that contained top ten R&B hit Soul Serenade, and earned him and the band the Cashbox award for Best Instrumental Group the following year. This rollicking B side we have here (the flip of Willie's top 40 cover of Jimmy Smith's Prayer Meetin') is from Willie Mitchell Live, the follow-up Lp they recorded with that 'live in the studio' feel to it. I'm not sure what the title is all about, but that's OK... it cooks.

You already know how I feel. I can't say enough about Willie's importance in the development of Memphis Soul. Get well soon, Pop!

Betty LaVette - Nearer To You (Silver Fox 17)

Nearer To You

James Luther Dickinson
1941-2009

"The river flows on like a breath
In between our life and death..."

Yes, Memphis music legend (and one of the absolute coolest guys on the planet) Jim Dickinson crossed that borderline this past weekend.

One of the central protagonists in Robert Gordon's superb It Came From Memphis, Dickinson represented so much. Coming up out of the folk scene and the neo-biblical Overton Park Blues Festivals in the early sixties, he went on to carve out his own unique place in the rich history of Bluff City music. After being 'discovered' by Bill Justis, Jim went on to record with Sam Phillips at Sun, then got his first real job as a studio musician at American Sound with Chips Moman. He had found his calling. "A lot of people will talk bad about Chips but I never will. He Gave me my break...", he told Swampland.

Dickinson cut his teeth with John Fry at Ardent, helping him move the studio out of his parents' garage in 1966, and working with him on creating 'that sound'. Along with fellow alchemist Terry Manning, Dickinson dove head first into the concept of sound engineering, and kind of re-invented it from the ground up. By 1968, Al Bell was 'sweetening' Stax product over there, and became one of Ardent's best customers. "I considered Fry, Dickinson, and Manning to be unique creative geniuses. I had tremendous respect for them, and I felt the same way about them that I did about Steve Cropper and Jim Stewart," he told Andria Lisle.

When Shelby Singleton created a subsidiary label for Lelan Rogers (aka The Silver Fox) as a part of his SSS International empire in 1968, he let him run it his own way. Rogers had been around the block a couple of times, and when he signed the young Betty Lavette in 1969, he took her to Memphis to record. Dickinson was by then a part of the rhythm section at Stan Kesler's Sounds of Memphis studio, cutting whatever came through the door. That's Jim playing piano on this incredible version of the tune that Betty Harris had taken into the top twenty for Allen Toussaint a couple of years before (the flip, the red hot He Made A Woman Out Of Me, would make it to #25). After moonlighting at Muscle Shoals (and working with the Stones on Wild Horses in the process), Jerry Wexler talked Dickinson and the rest of the Sounds of Memphis crew into becoming the house band down at 'Atlantic South', Criteria Studios in Miami. "Lelan Rogers told us literally the night before we went to Miami, he said, ‘Boys I’m sorry, but I think you already played your best music’. And he was right," Dickinson said.

Be that as it may, The Dixie Flyers, as they now called themselves, made some truly astonishing music. Wexler had big plans for them (as evidenced by the fact that he gave them label credit alongside Aretha on the singles lifted from her Spirit In The Dark Lp). They would cut something like 14 albums in six months (including Dickinson's own cult classic Dixie Fried), before it all went to hell. "It never crossed my mind that I would get away from Memphis and go crazy, but I certainly did," he said, "...It was not easy, but for me it was like a Master’s Degree. It was beyond a normal education in record making... six months with Tom Dowd, believe me, was a crash course."

Dickinson took that wisdom back to Memphis and became one of the great producers of our time. His work with Alex Chilton on Big Star's Third at Ardent was so ahead of its time that it wasn't even released until four years after it was recorded. It is still influencing people to this day. He lent his unique vision to albums by Ry Cooder, Bob Dylan, Toots & the Maytals, The Radiators, Los Lobos, The Replacements, and many, many more. Whether with his own 'supergroup' Mud Boy and the Neutrons or, in more recent years, with his sons' North Mississippi All Stars out at the fabled Zebra Ranch, Jim Dickinson remained true to his Production Manifesto:

"The unretainable nature of the present creates in Man a desire to capture the moment. Our fears of extinction compel us to record - to re-create - the ritual ceremony. From the first hand-print cave painting to the most modern computer art, it is the human condition to seek immortality. Life is fleeting. Art is long. A record is a 'totem', a document of a unique, unrepeatable event worthy of preservation and able to sustain historic life. The essence of the event is its soul. Record production is a subtle, covert activity. The producer is an invisible man. His role remains a mystery. During the recording process there is an energy field present in the studio - to manipulate and to maximize that presence - to focus on the peculiar 'harmony of the moment' is the job of the producer. Music has a spirit beyond the notes and rhythm. To foster that spirit and to cause it to flourish - to capture it at its peak is the producer's task."

You have caused it to flourish, my brother, may you rest in peace.

Peggy Scott & Jo Jo Benson - Here With Me (SSS 736)

Here With Me

Hailing from one of the most soulful areas on the planet, Jo Jo Benson came up singing, along with his brother Fletcher Flowers and his cousin Ralph 'Soul' Jackson, in Phenix City, Alabama. Just across the river from Columbus, Georgia (Oscar Toney Jr's hometown), Jo Jo got himself noticed by local dee-jay and record store maven Ed 'Dr. Jive' Mendel. Benson's 'Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye' would become one of only two releases on the Doctor's tiny Men-Del label in 1967.

The single made some local noise, and Benson soon hooked up with a throaty 17 year old he heard singing at the C'estbon Club, one Peggy Scott. Mendel, meanwhile, had started up another label called Peggy-Sue and managed to get a release by local group The Men from S.O.U.L. picked up by Shelby Singleton's nascent SSS International. The Doctor also managed to get Singleton, who was on the lookout for R&B talent, interested in Jo Jo and Peggy. Shelby signed them to the new label he had just recently created after walking away from his high level position at Mercury.

Singleton had come up out of the Louisiana Hayride scene in Shreveport and started out with Pappy Daily and Don Pierce at Starday, before making the move to Mercury as part of the George Jones deal in 1957. As he told our friend John Broven in the excellent Record Makers and Breakers; "After the first couple of years, they gave me a completely free rein... Huey Meaux and I became friends back during those years... he's the one that I got the master of Jivin' Gene from, Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, and he used to get things like I'm A Fool To Care by Joe Barry... He was a unique talent, he was a master promotion man, and he could get records played... he could discover talent, for some reason."

Small wonder, then, that he turned to his old pal Meaux when he started up SSS International in early 1968.

As we've discussed in the past, Huey got in trouble with the Feds for supposedly bringing an underaged prostitute to the NATRA convention in Nashville in 1966. He fought the indictment in court for over a year, and moved to Clinton, Mississippi to try and avoid the spotlight. Along with a local character named Bob McRee (and songwriting brothers Cliff and Ed Thomas) Meaux set up shop in an old movie theater in town and the 'Grits and Gravy' Studio was born. He would continue his superb production work there with Barbara Lynn and others, and when Singleton sent Jo Jo and Peggy down there to record, Huey was ready.

Today's cool selection was the flip of their first 45 (and biggest hit) for SSS, Lover's Holiday. Produced by Meaux, it's just drippin' with soul. The record would enter the charts on April 20, 1968. According to the Billboard article above, however, by the time it had climbed into the R&B top ten that May, Huey was already in jail. He had also produced their follow-up single, Pickin' Wild Mountain Berries (which would go top ten that Fall), before they put him away...

Singleton then brought Peggy and Jo Jo to Nashville, where they would record the mighty Soulshake (#13 R&B) with his main man Jerry Kennedy and a host of other Music City session men (including our own Bob Wilson) in early 1969. After one more R&B top forty hit for SSS, they made the move to ATCO, but their charting days as a duo were over. Both Peggy (Scott-Adams, now) and Jo Jo have remained active, and both have current releases.

Shelby Singleton, of course, hit the jackpot when a release on his country Plantation label crossed over and took Jeanie C. Riley to the top of the pop charts with Harper Valley P.T.A. in the fall of 1968. The resulting influx of cash had enabled him to, among other things, build the Playground Studio down in Florida with Finley Duncan and buy Sun Records lock, stock & barrel from Sam Phillips in September of 1969. "We kinda dropped the ball on the Black market when we got involved in Sun..." Shelby told John Broven. By 1971, SSS International had ceased to exist. Singleton still presides over the Sun Entertainment Corporation down in Nashville to this day.

It took Huey Meaux a little while to regroup after he got out of the slammer but, by the early seventies, he had bought the former Gold Star Studio in Houston, where so many East Texas hits had been recorded. After completely retooling the place, he rechristened it 'Sugar Hill' and set about doing what he did best, cutting hit records. After finding old pal Freddy Fender working in a car wash down in Corpus Christi, he brought him in and cut what may be the most unlikely #1 pop hit ever, Before The Next Teardrop Falls. A remake of Freddy's 1959 swamp pop classic, Wasted Days and Wasted Nights, would break into the top ten as well that summer of '75. Huey was back in the game, big time.

In the mid eighties (just as he had done twenty five years before with This Should Go On Forever), Meaux was back helping old friend Floyd Soileau take regional Louisiana music into the national spotlight. According to Wikipedia: "Huey Meaux got the original leased to Epic Records (a division of Columbia Records), who released it nationally, and for a brief moment Rockin’ Sidney made musical history. Epic managed to get Rockin’ Sidney into the country Top 40 where he stayed for 18 weeks. It charted in the UK Top 100. Rockin’ Sidney even spent one week at #98 in the pop charts. Later that year My Toot Toot was certified platinum and won a Grammy Award. "My Toot Toot" became a national and international million-selling phenomenon. It was the first Zydeco record to get major airplay on pop, rock and country radio stations..." Huey was still making things happen.

But History has not been kind to Huey P. Meaux. After being arrested at Sugar Hill in 1996 on drug and pornography charges, he spent the past twelve years in jail. He is now eighty years old and out on parole, forced to wear one of those 'ankle monitor' things. "I took them to court and I beat them. They had to release me. They fabricated a case against me and I beat 'em, and they've been pissed ever since..."

Thanks to our friend Chuck Chellman, I was able to speak with this American legend last week:

Living History, boys and girls.